Difference between revisions of "Weblog/CurrentPosts"

She's Geeky: A Women's Tech (un)Conference

20 September 2007

Creating space for women in male dominated arenas of life is a good trend, especially for geeks. Geeks are different, and the geeky world is sometimes a lonely world. Geeks look around themselves in the world and see lots of people not-like-them. Female geeks often feel this even more acutely. They look around themselves in the workplace and professional events and see lots of people not-like-them. Which is one reason why the upcoming She's Geeky is great. She's Geeky is an opportunity for women across different areas of technology to connect, to present ideas (just show up and present!), exchange skills, swap visions, and build community.

From AboutUs friend Kaliya Hamlin:

She's Geeky (http://www.shesgeeky.org) - A Women's Tech (un)conference on October 22-23 in Mountain View, CA.

This event is designed to bring together women from a range of technology-focused disciplines who self identify as geeky. Our goal is to support skill exchange and learning between women working in diverse fields and to create a space for networking and to talk about issues faced by women in technology. ( more details regarding Kalyia's motivations and hopes.)

As with any unconference (which are solidly based in Open Space Technology), no one has prior knowledge of what topics will actually be proposed by attendees, but here are some topics that may be proposed. This gives unconferences the feel of the coffee break session common at most regular conferences (where often the most interesting discussion and activities are created). Some of the highlights for us are: open source collaboration styles and how that works or doesn't for women, balancing work/life, technology for social-purpose goals, technology usability, hardware hacks, and small-scale projects using software engineering techniques.

We personally know and respect (read: think it's awesome!) Kaliya's work (she co-facilitated the most recent Portland RecentChangesCamp with one of us), and there are many more fantastic people organizing this: Mary Hodder, founder Dabble.com; Julia French, Covered Communication; Susan Mernitt, Yahoo; Sylvia Paull, Berkeley Ventures; heathervescent, Purple Tornado; Danese Cooper, Intel; Laurie Rae; Deb Roby a BlogHer blogger; Melanie Swan, and many more awesome people that have already signed up.

Contibutors: TedErnst, MarkDilley, TakKendrick

AboutUs Stakeholder Meeting wrap up

14 September 2007

Held at the Portland office, the meeting was also broadcast live via a Ustream.tv video feed, with audio provided via a conference call and questions from community members from around the globe being asked via our IRC channel.

Among the topics discussed

• The objectives accomplished over the last quarter, including: building AboutUs staff in two continents; the new Portland office for the main headquarters of AboutUs; and the creation and adoption of the new AboutUsLogo and NewSkin.
• The identification of three primary long-term goals for AboutUs as both a company and a wiki: become a top 10 website; develop a great brand for AboutUs; and encourage a great place to work.
• Additional conversations/reports included: the indentification of user engagement as a priority for AboutUs; discussion of how we plan to engaging participation from visitors to the website and encouraging them to become regular contributors, active community members and volunteers; discussion about our traffic numbers and their ramifications; opportunities and experiments for exploring the SEO impact of WikiPages on AboutUs as they relate to Google and other search engine "hits"; and discussion of the revenue models for the company's long-term plans.

For more complete recap of the meeting's discussion, you can view the Notes from the Meeting, watch the video (the password is "wiki"), or read through the IRC Chat Summary.

Contibutor: TakKendrick

Join us for the AboutUs Stakeholder Meeting

12 September 2007

Update -- We've also added a live video feed of the Stakeholder Meeting at 4:30 p.m. (PDT). The password is "wiki".

AboutUs community members from around the world are warmly invited to join us for our 3rd quarter Stakeholder Meeting which will be held tomorrow at 4:30 p.m. (PDT). Local community members are welcome to join us in the Portland office; for those elsewhere, we'll be setting up an IRC channel on Freenode.net to accommodate questions, answers and running commentary from the meeting. Just point your IRC client to:

• irc.freenode.net
• #AboutUsStakeholder

We hope you'll join us. A complete transcript of the IRC conversation will be posted on AboutUs after the meeting.