A conference that attracts thousands of women content creators and thousands more individuals employed by vendors and publishers that work with, or in support of, those women creates a massive vortex, for lack of a better word, of women’s energy. This exists beyond the corporate entities that control, coordinate, and sponsor the media sites and conference.
This is akin to what I think of as the difference between 1) the thing and 2) the concept of the thing. As an anthropologist I am interested in culture. Women’s culture is, obviously, an aspect of human culture. I like to think of this as a distinct level of information that exists as part of our living system.
All the relationships that are initiated at a conference, the knowledge that is created and shared, and the way these are incorporated into people interacting at the talks, and on the show floor, and at the coffee shops and bistros, meals, and parties can have a huge influence far beyond the time and place of the conference.
At the Bloggers at Midlife Conference, which I attended this April, in many ways is progeny of BlogHer. Over the years at BlogHer there were “birds of a feather” luncheons with tables for mid-lifers and baby-boomers, and “rooms of one’s own” for those same groups. Virginia Debolt facilitated the first of these sessions I can remember attending. Judi K. Freeman coordinated a second. Patricia A. Patton was a coordinator in the last one of these type of sessions I attended in 2014. Then Bloggers at Midlife, a conference with no commercial or corporate connections to BlogHer, began in 2015.
I will soon see how BlogHer has settled into its new role as a brand within another corporate entity. Will there will still be a place for all women of all ages and reproductive statuses at the conference? This is one of the aspects of the conference about which I will report back. It is a big conference and I will not be able to evaluate every track, as I have my own agenda and tasks for the conference, but I will do my best to provide an overview from the over 50 perspective.
From what I have seen thus far the vendors and sponsors contain corporations and partnering organizations who work with our demographic although not solely with us. There are no tracks that speak directly and only to us, but there are as many divergent interests and approaches to bloggers of a certain age as there are in younger and more child-centered groups.
Lifestyle bloggers, business bloggers, and bloggers with a cause have much in common across age ranges. This cross-section of ages is one of the most promising and perhaps least utilized offerings of BlogHer. Elder experience combined with youthful energy and excitement could change the world. Women working together toward shared vision can change everything.
In the next post I will get down to the brass tacks about how the BlogHer of today is distinct from the BlogHer of yesterday.
What A Freakin' Amazing Week!
After several weeks of living in a funk I have re-emerged with energy and ideas. Watch out world!
TED Women – TEDx Tucson Women
I was lucky to be invited, or have an invitation wrangled for me by my friend Pam Vaner of My Sassy Notions, to a gathering organized by Mary Reed, TEDxTucson Leader extraordinaire, to catch a livestream of a session of TED Women 2015 with around 15 other Tucson women at Connect Co-working. These local women are so inspiring and I feel privileged to have been included. I hope to feature some of their doings on the Women’s Legacy Project. Tucson is such a cool place, filled with radically creative people!
I encourage all readers to check out the videos of sessions at TED Women 2015 in general and A Question Worth Asking: Babies at TED Events? in particular. Why? This is a key segregation issue that has held women back in innumerable situations throughout history.
TED has been around for over two decades I think, and I am so not buying that this is the first time that a woman was asked to leave because she had an infant with her.
Now do not get your panties in a bunch as the TED honchos got wind of this and must have realized that a potential bad media disaster could be in the offing, or maybe they really cared that an attendee was being booted because she was a mother with an infant. We will never know for sure, but the outcome was positive if not perfect. The primary livestream viewing area on site was made available to her, and another special “screaming baby” livestream room was set up so mothers with fussy offspring could still participate.
I have to commend BlogHer for being the first major conference I ever attended that provided childcare for attendees and allowed them to plan it into their regular old planning to attend the conference in a way that feels inclusive and non-segregationist. Babies regularly come into sessions with mothers at BlogHer Conferences too. Making women feel set apart or like second class citizens via segregation is something that should have disappeared from places of innovation and sharing by our best and brightest long, long ago. Better late than never, I guess.
The Container Store
The second rather nice warm and fuzzy happening this week was connecting with other Tucson bloggers via a blogging luncheon and tour at The Container Store before the Grand Opening weekend that is going on right now. The Container Store, by the way, is not an evil place. Becca Ludlum of My Crazy Good Life, garnered an invite for me. And I was pleasantly surprised to find Martha Bishop and Suzi Hileman there. And I met Desert Chica‘s Karen Heffren and the woman behind Tucsontopia but I cannot for the life of me remember her name. And others whose names/blogs my leaky brain has neurally mis-shelved.
I like it when people are cooperative rather than competitive, we all rise in collaborative effort. In a way I wrote about this sort of positive interaction in the Women’s Legacy Project article too.
Find of the Week
Instant Articles on Facebook looks like it could be great per mobile viewing if the people featured in this video are to be believed as they talk about what is being promoted as a “new tool for publishers to create fast, interactive articles on Facebook.”
I am not one of the people who can use this feature so I have no idea how much it will cost or if it will be useful for small publishers like myself, but it bodes well for the future of publishing. Facebook will not be able to corner the market on this kind of layering will it?
Anyway, it was a good week.
Co-working, Networking, Achieving
Co-working groups are a variation on co-working spaces. I highly recommend employing this model and developing it as a women-centric variant of co-working spaces in order to achieve women’s business and life goals which exist outside of traditional business goals and operations.
Please note that many, if not most, women’s business aspirations do fit within traditional models. With the development of other models, that could change.
If the day is a Monday, it means I go to the Computer Lab at the YWCA and facilitate a co-working session for women bloggers. This is under the auspice of a Meetup.com group, Tucson Women Bloggers. I coordinate the group and have watched and nurtured as it has evolved into three branches that include training, co-working, and social gatherings.
Living your legacy, making your dreams and goals real when you are mature, is supported when you draw upon an encouraging network of women working toward similar goals on similar trajectories.
The Tucson Take On Co-Working Groups
In the our writing co-working group, one woman is simply writing her memoirs on a lab computer, saving the reports to a thumb drive, and printing the results, as well as saving them on a thumb drive. Putting them online is not her highest priority at this time, although she has done so in the past and may do so again.
Laptops, tablets and paper journals open. Some work on blog posts, entries in journals are made, and we collectively help women overcome snafus as they set up their blogs for the first time. Stories flow. Laughter breaks out. A very positive sense of achievement fills the room.
Co-working spaces evolve as niche-based solutions to contemporary, often urban, entrepreneurial and business needs.
In Tucson, where I am based, and which has a knack for creation of human-centered innovative solutions to urban needs.
Whether it is the rare bird of a community-based radio station, KXCI, or the community-based re-use network, FreeCyle, that started out in the Old Pueblo, Tucson nurtures community-innovation and solutions. And our old school establishments are very deeply rooted in ancient practice, our churches are often sanctuaries, real sanctuaries.
Co-working as an adaptive strategy in a new economy fits the way Tucson works. We are well into the fine-tuning process of this venture cycle. Early trials of the concept have closed their doors, as did Maker House in April of 2015.
Tucson Co-working Spaces
Gangplank broke away and reconfigured itself into Co-Lab that seems to be subsumed by Startup Tucson. The the focus is on venture and tech development. It does allow free drop-ins.
Spoke6, the first coworking space in Tucson, is still in business although its website is woefully out of date which never bodes well for a business.
Connect Coworking, like some other spaces, offers tiers of workspace/membership with rates available for limited daily access too.
Rail Yard is a newer entry into the co-working space market with two art and design community members operating the space.
Most of these spaces will gladly arrange tours and/offer free working days to present their spaces to you. Distinctly different atmospheres grace each establishment.
If living your legacy includes starting a business or nonprofit venture, check out local facilities where you
share overhead and support services and allow for synergistic interaction.
Groups and Spaces
One take that is unsupported by research, as far as I know, but makes for a reasonable hypothesis, is that traditional technology heavy co-working spaces are usually more male supported structures. Women have co-worked forever through the multitasking that is necessary for family and home maintenance, and networks for community support activities. I suspect that women focus on the processes in coworking spaces and men focus on the physical territory of the coworking space. Like all generalizations this is probably overstepping the bounds of credulity with snippets of wisdom and truth within it.
Cool Collaborators: Generation Fabulous
Women, as Apple used to say, “Think Different.” Thank heavens for that difference. I think it might save the world.
As I say in an article which I am honored to say was selected to be live during the inaugural launch of the Generation Fabulous site,
Women’s culture, which had been desperately filling every small crevice not already claimed by male culture, was bursting at the seams – and when the electronic niche of a globally interconnected world wide web opened, we flooded in with blogs and e-books, and all the knowledge, skills and strategies that we as women have been trying to keep alive in a world where ubiquitous limiting constraints worked against us.
This quote is wordy, and a bit intellectual, but what do you expect when we are describing one of the most significant spin-offs of the early electronic age?
Women’s empowerment and equalization of women in history were not among the intentions voiced in the planning of ARPAnet, Mosaic, and other defense and education communication technologies that led to what we now know as the internet, inter-webs, web, net, cloud and/or information highway. Cultural evolution is tricky that way. If you try to constrain, control, channel or “pipe” it, it will spring a leak, wriggle away, or morph into something completely different. Go with the flow.
Women flow, women think different, women persist. There is a flow or an energy among women of a certain age. I’ve written about it before.
No matter how troubled, unappreciated, stressed, overworked, or underpaid we women writers of a certain age may be, we are creating the structure of future with the paths we walk, the words we write, and the myths we disintegrate with our raging ray-guns powered by the energy released during hormonal fluctuations.
Zeitgeist is the word that comes to mind. The “spirit of the times” is real and perceptible to people who are aware of trajectories and trends as they emerge. I became aware of a group of women acting on Zeitgeist at the BlogHer conference last year who formed a critical mass. I was planning to launch a site, Done Nesting at that time, and found a group of women of a similar age to me, women who are of a certain age, and who were all, each and every one of them, ready to act or acting on the need for a non-Mommy-Blogger community, alliance, group, recognition… I spoke to many folks about how we, women of a certain age, felt about the how some of feeling that the unofficial but widely known target audience of BlogHer being Mommy Bloggers. I talked to Lesbian Dad, aka Polly, who is of a certain age, about this; but she is a mommy blogger even though she calls herself a dad. Even though Polly understood what I was talking about, and she was the only one besides Denise who understood what I, and other women who do not have children living in their household at the moment, were talking about when we said we felt excluded and ignored.
I do have to say as a disclaimer that there was one session at this conference last year, that addressed an older mommy blogging constituency, “Blogging into Midlife.” I missed it. Duh. I thought it was for 30 or 40-somethings. Yes, I am 50 something. I am still 24 in my head but time passes. So, I attended “Strength in Numbers” because of my interest in online organizing.
I met several other women, of a certain age, I had followed, read, admired, or just discovered at the conference at the Birds of a Feather Breakfast, and at another event that had nothing to do with BlogHer that was in NYC at the same time: a “Bloomer” gathering put on by the Boom Box Network.
There was change in the wind. Soon after the conference a group, GenFab, popped up on Facebook and I had found my Homies/Tribe/Peer Group.
I ruthlessly read and share with this group. Competition be damned! We are all Fabulous women writers who are for the most part of a certain age. Knowing what other women who were similarly motivated were doing helped me hone my ideas for a site. Done Nesting is on hold and I am moving forward with BoomHer.net. No writer creates for exactly the same audience, we all fill different niches. Few people, or marketing agencies, are skilled enough to even know how to determine real market share or audience and then create something that would target exactly the same group. If you know of anyone who can do this, please let me know! I want to work with them.
I choose to move forward together, create synergy, and increase the momentum of the trajectory of women creating their own legacy, in searchable form, on the internet. I am absolutely pleased as punch that Generation Fabulous, the site, (apart from the Facebook group) launched today. Women know how to coöperate, if we didn’t the species would have died out ages ago. So when asked about how I feel about great sites that might be viewed as competitors, I respond that we are not competitors, but rather, are smooth operators and cool collaborators . (Cue Sade here.)