Feminism 2.0 Conference Report

I took the day off today to attend this great conference called Feminism 2.0. The stated purpose of this conference was to "bring together the leadership of major women’s advocacy organizations and online women’s communities to further the connection between today’s issues and women’s voices." The conference served as a further introduction into web 2.0 for me and into ways that we need to think about online strategies for advocacy, network building, and idea generation.

Early in the day, a presentation by Stanislas Magniant from linkfluence blew my mind. He showed a sample of feminist blogs and their position in the greater blogosphere. With his highly advanced tool, he could drill down to the names of and relationships between individual blogs or look at the general placement of these blogs when compared to a sample of conservative and liberal blogs. The main lesson I gained from his presentation was that it is equally important to have links coming in to your blog as it is to have links going out from your blog. Not only does this linking help information travel in 2 directions, but it also helps raise a blog's standing in the internet. Major media outlets and politicians are starting to rely on bloggers to put their finger on the pulse of Americans' thoughts, and if you have lots of links coming in and out, your blog is more likely to be seen, which means your ideas are more likely to be heard.

I enjoyed being in the same room as Ellie Smeal of the Feminist Majority Foundation and Kim Gandy, president of NOW. They both demonstrated their willingness to be at the forefront of technology by Twittering during their presentations.

There was great awareness at the conference that both online and offline outreach are becoming necessary to truly reach everyone that needs to be reached. If we neglect web 2.0 technologies, we miss out on all of the energy and passion of youth. If we rely solely on web 2.0 technologies, we miss out on the experience and opinions of people who don't have computers and people whose idea of being high-tech involves having an email address. The great thing is that online outreach and networking can lead to in-person activism, which is a way to bring online and offline communities together around key issues, which should ultimately lead to greater impact. And isn't that what it's all about?