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Bloghercon pre-meeting thoughts

So I’ve been talking with Elisa for a few weeks about Bloghercon, an idea she and Surfette (Lisa Stone) came up with (back in Novemeber). It was sort of hush-hush until I prompted Elisa to share her new idea with Sylvia at the SF Blogger first Tuesdays dinner a couple weeks ago. From there Sylvia took it viral and it’s out in the blogosphere.

I haven’t blogged on it, because most of my thought has gone into it during IM conversations with Elisa. We’re having a meeting today to discuss, and I thought I’d get my ideas down first.

Let me say first that my take is that it’s not an issue of why boys aren’t linking to girls. The absence of women from the Technorati100 is absolutely not, in my view, a problem that we can address by drawing attention to sexuality overtly. The issue isn’t causing boy bloggers to say “Have I linked to a chick in my post?”, but rather how women need to tool up to play better in the blogosphere. How we need to adapt our participation to penetrate the media, and once we have our foothold, we can start to impact its evolution more directly.

I’ll probably be one of the more “conservative” voices on the team, believing that our issue is skills-based rather than a matter of social justice. Above all I want to keep it positive and practically based, so that we all can come out of this more unified, not just as a band of blogger girls, but to unify the blogosphere itself.

All-girl or co-ed??

So in building out this thing, my favorite bug-bear is the “do we invite the boys?” issue. On that one I’m solidly convinced that we need the larger chunk of the conference as chick only. Why? It’s the classic girls–school argument. If this is going to be a chick blogging conference, it’d be great to have only women in the rooms. I’d like to focus on meeting and hearing from the women, and not just hobnob with the blogger boys I know. Personal failing, but it’s a fragmentation of attention and purpose. I have tremendous dread of panels where questions come up and the moderators face the choice, in the limited time available, of giving voice to the (inevitiably) outnumbered boys in the room or giving preference to the women. And those boys in the room, as chick-empowerment-minded as they might be, will still be interested in their own issues.

As an example, when I told MikeR of this question (sea also his take on Bloghercon), he said “I want to come, I want to learn better how I can source female speakers for MobileMonday. Right now that’s too hard, I want to make it easier.” Now, noble as that is, that’s still addressing a boy problem, from a boy perspective. The chick perspective is “How can I get empowered so that I’m comfortable speaking, comfortable putting myself forward, so that others end up wanting me to speak.?”

Surely we can see the differences in focus there, and how much the focus would drive what happens at the conference.

Let’s let the boys in around cocktail hour

But both sides of the coin are important, so the idea that I’m going to push for is a split session. The bulk of the day content should be by women and for women. And then later, maybe after 4 pm, we could bring in the guys for a joint session, to workshop issues after our ladies are all empowered. That would be my ideal, with a group dinner afterwards.

What would we talk about with just girls?

We can discuss topics that might be deemed irrelevant by guys (”Whuffie Whoring for Women” would be a great one) and do so with careful attention to how we need to change out tactics. I’m totally with Elisa in that we need to keep away from the conventional smarmy chick conference topic of work-life-balance, but I would like to see a session on tools that will increase efficiency and effectiveness of blogging: how can you effectively follow a thread and participate in a conversation. How do you determine what voices you need to listen to. How do you build a tight linked blog roll, so that you get references. I know those are all “core values” of the blogosphere that I tend to dismiss, but am currently exploring a tools-based approach to match my attention span better to what’s going on out in the wild.

Someone should also have a session on succinct posts, for meanderers like me. Yesterday Russ Beattie commented that the articles in O’Reilly’s Make were “blog length”, to which I laughed and said “Oh really?’ (thinking of my own) and he said, “Yeah, all 4-5 paragraphs.” Pretty funny, and there’s a lesson to be learned: short is good. I’d love a discussion there.

What’s the point again?

Chicks are different than guys. We tend to think differently, and bring our own group norms and sense of proper interaction. Some of that is, from my view, hampering to success in the very public, competitive and continuous grind that is the blogosphere. As chicks, we have things to teach each other. I, for one, would love to meet many of these chicks. Bay area events and conferences are so predominantly boy, that I’d be thrilled to see the opposite.

And we do need to get the guys to help out in building a more inclusive community. But that’s something I don’t think they can be guilted or harrassed into doing. The responsibility remains for women to get into the game. Now let’s think about how to make a playbook, start swapping techniques, and build connections among ourselves.

Oh, and here’s the tag: bloghercon