Another week, another conference. This week I was over at the Personal Democracy Forum here in NYC, which focuses mostly on electoral-type of tech and activism. It’s one of the many conferences that’s still heavily dominated by white guys with a whole lotta privilege on their hands. The conference organizers have heard me (and many others) criticize them for this in the past, and it’s gotten a teensy bit better… but overall, I can’t say that having four white men (update: and a white woman) on your closing plenary shows any progress in the overall mindset. [Update: I could go through the conference schedule and bean-count gender, but I swear to you, that’s not what this post is about. Keep reading, and see if what I have to say makes sense.]

Lest I sound like a broken record, I’ve been trying to think of ways to use my own privilege and explain to those who don’t get it why this is important. (I know I said I was giving up bridge-building, but if I’m going to maintain my sanity in conference season, I’ve got to say something.) It’s easy for organizers to brush people like me off: oh, there they go making trouble again, sigh. There are times where I love making trouble (hi, smarmy Newsbusters guy and your T&A video strategy), but this is one of those times where I’m actually trying to help people make their conferences better: not just look better so that people like me will be quiet, but actually have better content. And this is how.

Perhaps others have used this metaphor before, but as I was walking and talking with my friend Dawn in Coney Island the other night, I hit on this idea of genetic diversity. You know how inbreeding is a Bad Idea? When you get too much of the same material in the gene pool, you get crazy mutations and then eventually the species dies off. Dies. Off.

Ahhhhh, but when you mix it up, when you diversify the material you’re messing around with, you get brand new traits and feature sets that would never ever have happened otherwise. You keep going down that road, and eventually you get new species, stronger species, etc. In short: it’s better. Way, way better.

A bunch of the same people from the same backgrounds at a conference are going to spend a lot of time on ideas that are either not that interesting to the larger world around them or congratulating each other on a job well done (as their species slowly dies off). Panels of folks from wildly different backgrounds are going to spark new ideas (good and bad ones, I imagine) and challenge the paradigms within which we all work. Out of new ideas and challenges come change, movement, progress.

Isn’t that what we’re all shooting for, here, when we both organize and attend these things?

A crazy time here in Deannaland. I was in Cambridge this past weekend for the annual Best-Conference-Ever: Women, Action and the Media. I did double-presentation duty once again, sitting on Jenn Pozner’s panel about women, feminism and blogging, and then did my workshop on “Empowering Online Communities.” (See the presentation and the followup materials here.)

[read the rest of this post » ]

It was such an exciting week! First, I was on CNN for about 5 seconds:

Then, I met Jason Alexander!

And then, he mentioned having my business card in his pocket at the beginning of the speech he gave at the gala we were all attending!

Tee hee. All thanks to Take Back America.

Quick hit: for the folks who are looking for PDFs of the presentation I made here at WAM!, here’s links to the files for yas:

• Empowering online communities (full color), 2.3MB
• Empowering online communities (printable black-n-white), 1.1MB

Also, here’s the link to the resource list: http://del.icio.us/tag/wamweb2.0

Thought I’d finally sit down while I have three seconds to breathe and jot dot a couple of things I wanted to let folks know about:

• I went to SWSXi, and was largely unimpressed. There wasn’t a the sense of forward-thinking that I expected, nor the ground-breaking innovations. The parties were so-so. I had the best time hanging out with grrls from the feminist blogosphere, and with my Hightower co-worker, Laura. Oh, and note to anyone organizing a conference for thousands of geeks: please make sure the wifi actually works at the convention.
• I’m speaking at two conferences coming up here in the near future: Facing Race, here in NYC on Friday; then Women Action Media up in Boston on March 31 & April 1. Guess what I’ll be talking about? That’s right, politics and technology, focusing on social media. YUM.
• Er, I feel like there was more than this. Hrm. I seem to have lost all eight trains of thought. More when I get them back…

For anyone who was in LA listening to me gab at 9 o’clock in the morning, here’s my presentation, and a little glossary I put together:

• Presentation: Web 2.0 (PDF, 2.2MB)
• Presentation: Web 2.0, printable version (PDF, 2.1MB)
• Glossary: Web 2.0 (PDF, 32kb)

[If you weren’t in LA, you might find it interesting, but my disclaimer is that this isn’t in any way an end-all be-all on “the Web 2.0.” It’s a primer for media folk who wanted to be brought up to speed, and avoids geek-speak as much as possible. :-) ]

I’m here at the Personal Democracy Forum Conference, and just some quick observations… while there’s way more women here that there was last year, the crowd is still overwhelmingly white. I mean… like, REALLY white. Nothin’ against white people or anything (many of my friends are white, HAHA)… it’s just that it’s sort of frustrating to hear people yak about the digital revolution when it’s essentially middle to upper class white people talking to each other.

On the upshot, I finally got to meet Jill from Feministe, who is one of my biggest online heroines. I got all flustered. (Warning, mutual blog-crushing happening.)