BlogHer05: "The power to fix what's wrong in the world is here....."

Update: I failed to attribute this initial section to the article by Carrie Kirby on sfgate & the Chronicle - my bad.  I linked to KRON and several liveblog aggregations below earlier while posting over several hours (a hospital on-call Saturday & Sunday) and frankly just forgot to add a citation at the beginning as well. 

Thanks to JD and Plagarism Today for alerting me to my oversight - this is inacceptable and I apologize to Carrie Kirby, the Chronicle and to BlogHer, an effort which I admire and adore. 

Note to self: proof posts when you are exhausted.

The July 30 San Francisco Chronicle reported on a conference that gives me great hope that gatherings like this can really make a difference:

Three Bay Area bloggers -- Lisa Stone, Elisa Camahort and Jory DesJardins -- held a conference yesterday in Santa Clara in an effort to raise women's prominence in the blogosphere. The BlogHer conference started with -- what else? -- a blog, where the organizers posted ideas for the event. Feedback from other bloggers quickly materialized.  The resulting event was as much about community building and sharing skills as it is about getting attention.  A local TV channel - KRON - covered it here.

Reading the postings running up to this and through this, I am struck by how bottom-up this event appears.  This is a hopeful reminder that emergence is not just a book or theorey, but is a practical reality.

Kirby goes on to report:

"This is a conference that the community built," said Camahort. For example, two rooms at the event are given over to sessions conceived, organized and run by the participants themselves. Sessions in these rooms include "Feminist Hip-Hop Bloggers," "Blogs in Academia" and "MommyBlogging."

The conference maxed out its capacity with 300 registrants, 85 percent of whom are women, the organizers said. Half of them hail from outside the Bay Area - a few came from as far as Europe.

These women have blogged about feminism, politics, business and technology. They've blogged about their innermost thoughts, their children's antics and -- although this has caused problems for many -- their jobs.   Of course, they liveblogged the conference.

One of my fav bloghers was there and had some great insights about how women network (in her PhD in semantics POV):

Actually, women are traditionally the maintainers of domestic social networks. They tend to network more than men. The gender difference concerns the style of networking. Men are more likely to gather many weak ties; women tend to work hard to maintain strong ties. Each have their value. But when it comes to technology like Technorati, there is a validation of weak ties over strong ties. Or more actually, there's an assumption that all ties are created equal, which inadvertently validates the weak ties over the strong ties.

My argument here is that we need to pay attention to the network structures. If folks are angry about their position in some purported hierarchy, they need to understand how the hierarchy works. And then change it. I'm not interested in having separate networks; i'm interested in making certain that people understand the gender bias they build into the network and that it represents a diversity of perspectives, is flexible to deal with a diversity of social structures.