Posts tagged with 'conference'
Based on the feedback I received on the fabulous panel I moderated at Netroots Nation 2010 (“So You Wanna Change the World: How to Rock on Social Networks“), I decided to share my process for putting together a panel that will knock participants’ socks off. I’ve been the victim of too many snoozy, self-aggrandizing panels to let that happen on anything I put together, and I’d love to see no one ever have that kind of conference experience ever again.
June is a wild rollercoaster ride of talks and workshops that I’m giving, and I wanted to make sure folks know about the wonderful conferences I’m heading to — hopefully I’ll see you there!
June 3-4: Personal Democracy Forum, New York City. This is one of my favorite conferences all year because it’s one of the few that blend many worlds well together: Technology, electoral politics, advocacy politics and cultural analysis. I’m giving a 10-minute talk on Thursday, June 3, that will (definitively!) answer the question: “Can the Internet fix politics?” Muwahaha. Other luminaries on the speaking roster include Howard Rheingold, Clay Shirky, Cheryl Contee, Jane Hamsher, Arianna Huffington, Esther Dyson, Anil Dash and many, many more. Register today — I’ve got a code to give you $100 off the registration; just email me and ask for it.
June 7-9: America’s Future Now, Washington DC. A yearly pilgramage to DC for progressives, where we talk strategy and tactics for challenging the right-wing agenda. I’ll be moderating a workshop on Tuesday morning, June 8, on social networking with Toby Chaudhuri, and we’ve actually turned it into a gameshow format: Social Media Jeopardy! Contestants will be Lizz Winstead, Garlin Gilchrist II, Scott Goodstein and Heather Holdridge. Also, Monday night, June 7, will see the DC launch of my book, thanks to Toby and Scott of Revolution Messaging, who are throwing me a killer party. Wooooo! Register today for all the goods.
June 9-11: Making Media Connections, Chicago, IL. I’m thrilled to be keynoting this gathering of non-profit communicators, put together by the Community Media Workshop. This year’s theme is “Storytelling and Strategy in the Digital Age,” which hits home strong for me– it’s through our stories that we have always made change, and our shiny new digital tools give us unprecedented capabilities to tell them. Register today for this amazing conference. (PS — That Friday night, June 11, I’ll be reading at Women & Children First, and having a party afterwards nearby.)
I’m pleased as punch to be speaking at this conference/show next week — should be a rollicking good time, with a stellar lineup of really interesting speakers. I’ll be talking about what dissent, muckraking and diversity really mean for the businesses of the future, which has been a nice challenge for me to write. Video clips will be posted once I have them!
As I mentioned on Twitter, it’s just getting too hard for many of us to keep track of all the awesome conferences that happen every year. I’ve missed so many this fall, even ones happening in NYC, just because I hadn’t done any curation. Conferences can be a drag, but as a freelancer/consultant/author without a formal organizational structure, they’re often where I make the best connections and have the most fun with my colleagues.
So! An early New Year’s resolution: I’m gonna try to get on the ball for next year. Already thinking of SXSW, Allied Media Conference, US Social Forum, Personal Democracy Forum, Women Who Tech, America’s Future Now, NonProfit 2.0, NTEN and more; what do you recommend in the social tech, media, politics, activism, and social justice fields? Conferences & unconferences, big ‘n’ small. Leave ‘em in the comments (links to conferences would be helpful), and I’ll publish a big list in the next few days.
Friends, Tube-izens, citizens, lend me your ears!
It’s that time of the year where SXSW asks us to garner mega amounts of attention for the panels we’re proposing for next year’s Interactive conference. This is a Big Deal, and I’m joining forces with all the other fabulous people around me to co-promote everyone’s hard work. So, take 3 minutes to register and vote for us!
My panels:
My friends’ gigs:
UPDATE: I was in the social justice frame o’ mind when I first wrote this, and forgot other Good People:
(Am I missing you? Let me know!)
Thanks in advance for helping to keep social cause stuff on the plate at such an influential conference. It means a lot to us out here on the front lines!
http://pandagon.net
I wanted to share with you an amazing worldwide conference that I’m participating in next week. It’s called “Women Who Tech,” and it brings together hundreds of women who leverage their technology savvy to inspire change and transform the world. And it takes place all online and on the phone!
Women Who Tech
When: May 12, 2009. Panels are 50 min long and run from 11AM EDT to 6PM EDT.
Where: Everywhere via phone and web
http://womenwhotech.com/
A mere $10 for a whole day of goodness
I participated last year, and at first I thought the distance thing was going to be strange– but it’s absolutely incredible, and I highly recommend joining in the fun. What’s great is that this is really not just for women who currently tech– if you’re interested social media, launching a startup, learning about new tools… this is *the* place to be.
I’ll be moderating this panel:
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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.)
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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:
Also, here’s the link to the resource list: http://del.icio.us/tag/wamweb2.0
