The West Coast She’s Geeky conference was amazing in so many ways. There is so much I could say…and I will in the next few days.

I wrote this post after someone was tweeting following the conference about wanting to hold a ‘She’s Geeky’ lunch, and realized that I need to share something important about the motivation behind creating She’s Geeky. Our goal was to create a gathering space for existing organizations, and not to create another women-in-technology “organization”. That is, we do not plan to build a She’s Geeky “membership”, or local “chapters”.

The primary reason as an organization, we do not have the capacity to support organizing monthly meetings and this is not why She’s Geeky was created.  That being said, we still want to be able to support all the energy that was created this weekend and move it forward. I believe we can move it forward by moving beyond  traditional organization models to newer models that are more lifelike and network based.

This post articulates the original vision I had for She’s Geeky, what I think She’s Geeky has become, and where I think we could go as a community by empowering and connecting women in technology.

The Original Vision

After participating in several different women conferences –BlogHer and WITI, in particular — and hearing that Grace Hopper was very “computing”, (computer science) focused, I realized that there were already a lot of different groups for women in technology. Groups such as  Systers, SFWOW, LinuxChix, DevChix, and Women2.0, that already had their own mailing lists and conferences and monthly gatherings.  I had the following idea: to bring together all the different women-in-technology groups in a multi-day unconference format.

To build trust and to make sure that it could work, I decided to operate She’s Geeky under the umbrella of a nonprofit with a mandate that would be inclusive of supporting an event like She’s Geeky, even if it is not part of the primary mandate of the organization. Planetwork is an organization at the intersection of IT and social/environmental good. By encouraging more women to participate and increase their skills in a peer-to-peer setting, we hope to help make IT better, and, in turn, hopefully make the planet better.

Where we are now

So how do we balance this trust we have now and also grow and fulfill the need and energy we have tapped into?

This week we will be sending a list of women-in-tech groups to all the women who attended She’s Geeky. The list will describe what they do and how you can get involved. We will also want to support people with new ideas for groups/meetups by helping them share their ideas with the community that gathered at She’s Geeky.

I think it would be cool to have a bunch of groups spring out of She’s Geeky and have a long term affiliation with them. Maybe they could use the tag line “conceived at She’s Geeky” while still having their own “brand” that describes them. I think Girl Geek Dinners is a great local chapter with an established international presence. I’d like to propose using that form for “dinners”. I don’t think their should be any “group” that has She’s Geeky as a primary brand; they need to develop their own identities.

The She’s Geeky brand will be for the name of the conference & some thing that can signify the connections and links between existing (and new groups). We live in the networked age now. We do not need to think of organizations as we used to. We don’t have to do everything. Rather, we can be a piece of an ecology of many groups that each play different roles. I think She’s Geeky needs to stand as a neutral forum and move energy that arises into existing groups and perhaps be a gestation space for new groups.

Moving Forward

Here are some of my thoughts about moving foward as a community:

1) We could build a chaordic alliance of women’s groups. This model provides an innovative form of organization that supports loose affiliation and values alignment while projects, groups and communities maintain autonomy. I am very familiar with this form, having spent 5 years with Identity Commons the “industry/community association” that I have helped form and grow in the identity space (in my technical persona – Identity Woman). The purpose, principles and practices of the Identity Commons are simple. And, I think it would be useful to work with the leaders of women-in-tech groups and with the community to craft a purpose, and principles and practices for She’s Geeky. Until these are clearly defined, I am uneasy about the ‘brand’ being used for anything but the (un)conference.

2) United Religions Initiative (URI) is another example of a successful network/community that uses the chaordic model. I think that, like the URI, we need to consider requiring participation/sponsorship from multiple womens groups for it to be possible to convene an event in a city. They have local chapters around the world and require that each chapter have 7 members from at least 3 religions. I want the brand of She’s Geeky to be for the space of coming together – between women in math, science, engineering and sciences.

3) There were conversations at the conference regarding greater clarity and cooperation amongst women’s groups. Desi from DevChix, BJ from Anita Borg and I had a good hour-long talk talking about various things. It made me so happy to see this kind of conversation about cooperation arise naturally out of the environmen. I had dreamed that this could happen out of the energy/space at the conference when we were first talking about the idea of this event in early 2007.

4) As a community, I want us to find a way to work together to foster a strong culture of collaboration between groups and feed more energy into existing groups.

I know there are “community marks.” I think it is very important to go through the process of talking about the purpose and principles and getting clear agreements about what “She’s Geeky” stands for. For example, unlike BarCamp, I’d like to avoid releasing She’s Geeky into the wild. It is not “enough” to read about the conference and “just do one”. I think there is something profound about the actual experience. By bringing Renee from Boston here after she was at the NYC event and having two of the key organizers in DC attend the NYC event, we can help spread a culture via experience instead of just having organizers read about it. A couple Women flew to this She’s Geeky from Florida and Tennessee, and they both would love to see the conference come to their home towns.

5) We are going to work hard on developing a template along with business process models (at 6 months this happens by 5 months…2 weeks out, 1 week out) and build the online stuff that a local organizer and network of women’s groups need to make it happen. I think there are a few (very few) core staff that form backbone that helps She’s Geeky events go smoothly and help a network of very busy volunteers actually function with a clear system of tracking and accountability. Trust me. At the scale we are operating — multi-day, multi-organization collaboration, multi-sponsorship, multi-hundreds of women, multi-city, professional enough bosses give you the day off to go — a 100% volunteer-based model won’t work when all the volunteers are very busy professionals in a fast-paced industry.

6) I am committed to developing facilitation talent so we can have more and more unconferences. I have been involved in designing and facilitating and producing over sixty unconferences in the last 3.5 years, mostly with professional technical communities. In some ways it all seems easy, but without a deep well of process knowledge and energy flow awareness of large groups, I would not have been able to make she’s geeky “sing” as beautifully as it did. I want to work to train and support other women in the community to be able hold open space and bring a very high quality unconference experience to attendees wherever this conference is held.

7) Lets move energy forward this week. I don’t want to “quash” any energy people have coming out of the conference. I totally want to proactively support it. If you have an idea for something — a meeting, a list, something you want to start — please let me know and I will send it out in e-mail to attendees(one will be this week and one next week). Please, just don’t call it “the she’s geeky _______”, because this name is just for the actual unconference.

All the women I met this weekend were amazing – I can’t wait to continue to build the momentum and bring inspiration, and knowledge to more women who are or could be working in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) with cross pollinating unconferences.

I invite your thoughts, ideas and feedback. You can e-mail info@shesgeeky.org or comment here.