Conceptually, encouraging dominant cultures to divesify is fabulous –I subscribe to the DNA model of ecosystems and social spaces, so I support it wholeheartedly. As I’ve said in my book and recent talks:
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!
I was lucky enough to present at Personal Democracy Forum 2009 with Tanya Tarr and Rasmus Nielsen on challenges we face in the brave new world of “on-the-fly organizing.” (Thanks to Judith Freeman for moderating, and to Kristen Psaki for recording, too!) Here’s the video from our talk, and below that are my slides if you wanna follow along.
Incredibly exciting news came across the transom last night while I was at the Women Who Tech after-party in NYC: I’ve been offered a book deal with the stellar Berrett-Koehler publishing group in San Francisco. I’m absolutely thrilled to be working with Johanna Vondeling, their vice president of editorial and digital, and the rest of the staff there. Their commitment to social change as well as digital innovation for publishing makes them the perfect fit for what I want to do.
What do I want to do, I hear you asking yourself? In short — I do want you to buy the book, after all — I’m going to be describing the social media moment as a huge opportunity for social change and action. If you’ve read some of what I’ve written about Twitter and other services, and my ideas about the giant gene pool and the desperate need for diversity, you have an idea of where the book will go. Plus, it’ll be stunningly entertaining to boot!
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?
Incredibly exciting news came across the transom last night while I was at the 
Another week, another conference. This week I was over at the 
