Conferences

In a few minutes I will be at Chelsea Piers here in New York City convening with 400 other women for the Second Annual "Reinvention Convention" organized by MORE Magazine. The kind people at MORE have invited me to witness this all day event for women over the age of 40 on such things as work, finances, health, beauty and fashion.

I can't wait.

Today I'll get to meet the likes of Isaac Mizrahi, Vanessa Williams, Cybill Shepherd, and, oh my blog, the always mind-blowing Carly Fiorina. I can't wait to see close-up one of the women who could have been the VP to John McCain, if only he had a clue.

It's September 11, 2008.

We're seven years away from the attack on the Twin Towers. We're also 7 days away from the closing of the Republican National Convention.

The same convention in which Rudy Giuliani, Sarah Palin and even John McCain himself spent their time deriding community organizers and community service all the while claiming to be the party of people "who put service before self" in their quest to keep "America First".

So what am I going to do in a couple of hours? Thanks to the fine people of Kenneth Cole's Awearness blog, am going to the Service Nation Presidential Forum, to cover Barack Obama and John McCain and see them discuss their thoughts on community service and ... ahem ... community organizers.

3rd Annual Conference on the Health of the African Diaspora: Mental Health

Saturday, February, 9, 2008
9:00Am to 6:00PM
NYU Medical Center
550 First Avenue
New York, NY 10016

To Register: http://www.med.nyu.edu/ichr/chad/events/events.html

Conference Fee: $50 General, $20 Students

The 3rd Annual Conference on the Health of the African Diaspora: Mental Health is an interdisciplinary meeting that brings together physicians, social workers, psychologists, public health professionals and policy makers to discuss the status of mental health among peoples of the African Diaspora. The one-day conference will provide an opportunity for a better understanding of mental health issues across the demographic cross-section of peoples of African descent through a comprehensive discourse of the social, medical and demographic framework that shapes mental health policy, diagnosis and treatment. Over 250 participants are expected and confirmed speakers include: Hugh Hendrie, MD, Indiana University School of Medicine; Hugh Butts, MD, Author, Racism & Posttraumatic Stress Disorder; David Henderson, MD, Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School; Jacqueline Mattis, PhD, New York University; Kirby Randolph, PhD, Kansas Medical School; Ernest Marquez, PhD, National Institute of Mental Health; Alfonso Wyatt, MDiv, Fund for the City of New York; Rosemonde Pierre-Louis, Manhattan Borough Deputy President; Adeyinka Akinsulure-Smith, PhD, CUNY, Bellevue/ NYU Program for Survivors of Torture; and Robert Fullilove, EdD, Columbia University.

Have you ever heard of PCFS? Post-Conference Fatigue Syndrome is what happens to many people after going to a mojor technology or political conference.

At a place like PDF2007 I got hit on every front with both networking and information overload. Too much information, too many personal details to remember to track.

The brain is ready to explode.

Don't get me wrong --I loved every minute of it. But being around so many people and so many ideas can be exhausting. Especially when you come back home to 12 loads of stinky laundry.

I have a podcast to put up and a follow up to the panel I was part of and the unconference session I facilitated. Good stuff, but apologies for being a bit sluggish.

I leave for JFK to get on a flight to Austin, Texas. No thanks to Continental Airlines, I will have a three hour layover in Houston.

Sigh.

I will check in once I get there. I will also post more about the panel and what we would like to accomplish with the launch of The Digital Ethnorati project.

For the feminists out there, pay attention. This is basically what I have been trying to do with y'all.

Stay tuned.

Every year I have been blogging (that would be since 2002), I've seen the outbreaks of "where are the women in media and technology? posts pop-up around February or March. And every year there has been an avalanch of cries, denials and recriminations.

This year it seems to have all started with Jason Kottke's Gender diversity at web conferences. Oh boy. Read all about it at BlogHer.

Among the quoted is Anil Dash, VP of Business Development at Six Apart and one of the first names to come to my mind when I coined the expression "digital ethnorati". Anil is the quintessential digital ethnorati : colored, hip,, wired to the tees but more importantly, an influential in his networks who leverages that influence to give back to his minority community.

So when the man lumped me in with an amazing group of women technologists who he believes are The Essentials of Web 2.0 Your Event Doesn't Cover, well, what can I say, I was immensely flattered :

One more before I leave for Puerto Rico:

Hugh forrest from South by Southwest has decided to go all wisdom of crowds on us and has put up the panels for next year's SXSW Interactive for voting

From his email :

I wanted to alert you that the online interface for panel proposals for the 2007 SXSW Interactive Festival is now live. This page allows users to give us their feedback on which of the many outstanding panel proposals they feel are most appropriate for next year's event. The panel idea and description that you sent me earlier this summer is listed on this page.

See http://2007.sxsw.com/interactive/panel_picker/

Complete directions for the voting process are listed on the site. I definitely encourage you to vote for the idea(s) that you submitted. As well, I encourage you to send this link to friends and associates to encourage them to vote for your idea. As noted on the site, please remember that votes submitted by past speakers and past attendees will be given slightly more weight than the votes of users who have not yet attended SXSW Interactive.

Deadline for voting is September 8.

My request is for you to not only to vote for the panels I have proposed but, if possible, to please forward this information to any past SXSW participants you may know. Posting on your blogs will be most appreciated for faster diffusion.

My proposed panels are :

Photo Courtesy of George Kelly

Notwithstanding the flight from hell, the two days of gastrointestinal upheaval, the virtual dehydration due to the lack of readily available fresh water, a broken carry-on bag, lack of non-allergenic foods and the ensuing sixteen hours of allergy, dehydration and hangover induced headache; I can comfortably say it was good for me to go to BlogHer.

As y'all know I was stranded in the Mineappolis Thursday night. Friday morning, my flight to San Jose was delayed two more times; but maybe for a reason. Nancy Scola ended up in my flight! She and I had roomed in Austin during SXSW and keep on bumping into each other in a lot of tech and media conferences. So, knowing she's going to kill me for publishing this, I have officially declared us conference wives. I claim tops!

Imatellya ... the women who go to BlogHer are my peeps, my tribe, my community.

It was actually healing to have so many mommas looking after me. I was not on any panel this year and since a lot of BlogHers knew of Lydia's passing, the love was overflowing. I had women come to me with tears in the eyes to share their stories of loss. It was increadible and really overwhelming but this is why we build communities. We need this love, we need this sharing. I can't express how much I needed to be around people who understood why even though I am grieving I chose to be there.

Which is why I was in such a tribal and community building frame of mind.

I am not sorry to acknowledge my tribalism here at the moment, but outside of the fact that BlogHer is an estroswarm (the estrogen version of a blogswarm) of huge proportions, it shares with South by Southwest the distinction of being one of the few tech and media conferences I have gone to that strive to have a good dose of melanin-enriched and ethnic diversity.

The BlogHer triumvirate with the aid and abbetting of their lovely advisory board (which, btw, is unexplicably non-existent on the BlogHer site) has worked to make diversity not just a panel but an intrinsic part of what the conference is all about. They're efforts are moving in the right direction (although there is more to be done).

Which is why I called for a birds of a feather meeting of the digital ethnorati. At BlogHer and SXSW I've had the delight of hanging with my peeps Lynn and Tiffany as well as the fabulous George Kelly --one of the two or three token brothers at the conference ... HA! But I am totally excited because I got to finally meet Professor Kim Pearson, Kety Esquivel, Melanie Morgan or The New Media Collective, Kim Wickham of Mocha Momma, and Karen Walrond of Chookooloonks and Zadi Díaz of the Jet Show.

I also met Lakshmi Pratury, a former venture capitalist and digifeminist extraordinaire who created the Digital Equalizer project, an initiative to bring computers to the have-nots of India. I also met Annette John-Hall of Philly.com; Tarita Thomas, who is working to get her Bay Area famous "Pussy the Seminar" to a podcast near you. Last but not least, I was happy to reconnect with Mini Kahlon, Director of innovation for Level Playing Field, an NGO focused on promoting "innovative approaches to fairness in higher education and workplaces by removing barriers to full participation." She was there with Sean Aquino, a Creative and Technical Associate with the institute.

What an amazing slice of the digital ethnorati. I mean, let me show you how colored and ethnic technologists and early adopters are uber-connected.

The encounter with Karen was hysterical. I was introduced to her partly because she's a trini and ... you know ... carib people always stick together --and I am not being sarcastic. I swear, all the Trinidadians I have met --separately and independently from one another-- end up being from the same circle of friends. What's scarier is that Barbara, my soul sister, ends of being be connector. I am talking about one woman being the network of dozens of trinidadians I've met in politics, media, technology, entertainment and 'just because' social settings.

So I had to ask. "Do you know Barbara Prevatt?" No she said. "Well, that's because she doesn't blog. Then who have to know Georgia Popplewell, who runs Caribbean Free Radio. Bingo! Georgia is a very good friend of Barbara and she's been my acquaintance for ... ahem ... 20 years (Georgia, you're the one getting old, not me). Georgia knew I was going to BlogHer and told Karen she'd be meeting me there. Instanetworking. I'm telling, those trinis ... it's a mafia.

Speaking of mafias ...