The last time I brought up the conference diversity issue, in my rather broken-record fashion, I mentioned that we have to address both the supply and demand side of the equation:
"Bottom line: more and more of these women are calling for us to keep talking about it but to also start taking action.There's supply-side action...like listing yourself on the Speaker's Wiki and submitting your proposals.
And there's demand-side action...like not attending homogeneous events, or subscribing to homogeneous publications and blogging about why.
"
Well, here's a chance to take some supply-side action:
zdnet is looking for a few good tech and business bloggers, and yes, they'll pay.
Let's make sure they can't say "no women applied."
I applied for that gig a couple of days ago (Thursday) and I haven't heard anything back yet. And if I don't count as a tech-savvy blogger, I don't know who/what they're looking for.
I'm not signed up on the speaker's wiki because every time I check it out, it appears to have been left to the spammers. Is it actually useful for someone in finding women speakers? Or is it mainly used to harvest email addresses? And if it's useful for finding women speakers, how do you know which ones are women and which ones are men -- just guess?
I'm not trying to be rude; I'm actually curious about the answer to this question.
Posted by: Dori | January 07, 2006 at 04:29 PM
Hey Dori: could you maybe email me offline and let me know what problems you see on the Wiki. I confess it's a public wiki, so no one owns controlling it, but I just spent some time surfing around it, checking out the profiles of the names of people I didn't recognize, and they all look legitimate to me.
As to gender: yes, if there are people with gender-vague names and no photo in their profile then I guess you'd have to guess.
We have discussed the value of adding a gender tag or a geographical tag or an ethnicity tag, so people could slice and dice by those factors too if they so chose.
But people are kind of taking care of that on their own by adding categories...I see such categories as 'African American Bloggers' 'UK' and 'Africa" for example.
I point people to the Wiki when they ask me about finding speakers, and I know at least a couple of organizers who have used it, so if you think there's a lot of illegitimate usage going on, I'd personally like to know.
Thanks!
Posted by: Elisa Camahort | January 07, 2006 at 05:05 PM
Elisa, I couldn't find your contact info here, so I dug around a little but I'm not sure that I got it right. Should I use your mac.com address?
I can be reached at dori (at) dori.com.
Posted by: Dori | January 07, 2006 at 06:16 PM
Socialtext has a history of publishing email addresses of the people writing there by default.
I did mail them because of the Lesblogs wiki because I was horrified to see mine suddently there in the last changes section.
They have changed it to 'non displayd' but I am angry why this is not a default setting.
I have mailed them about that for the speaker wiki but unless that is fixed, I will not sign up there.
As for the speaker wiki - it should be enough to have one extra page not for all speakers but for the female ones on their different topics.
Posted by: Nicole Simon | January 09, 2006 at 06:35 AM
I emailed them when this first came out. Haven't heard a peep either.
Posted by: jeneane sessum | January 12, 2006 at 04:21 PM