Full Circle Associates

On July 30th I'll be moderating a panel with a quartet of amazing women. I wanted to share a bit in advance about the group. Here are some of our working thoughts, with more to come. Chime in!

Shrink your world; amplify your voice. Nancy White leads a discussion with Anna John, Dina Mehta, Noriko Takiguchi, and Beverly Trayner on blogs and womens voices from around the world.

What will we talk about? We're thinking about how blogging expresses our culture(es), how it represents our place in the world. What are our voices? Our languages? And who is listening to us? Dina, Bev, Anna and Noriko will give us a glimpse into their lives and the lives of women they know and the impact blogging has had on them.

Here is a little warm up from some of the magnificent women on the panel:Dina gets us started:

One of the things i constantly yearn for - living in a country like India, yet also living in a global world through my Blog community - is to balance the polarities - I don't want to become masculine or male just to be able to stand up to or "talk with the boys" - I’d rather retain my femininity, because i think it is beautiful, it makes us better COMMUNICATORS as we listen better, tell better stories and scratch the surface more - and still hope to adopt some 'masculine' behaviour patterns and traits that make the 'boys' stand up and take notice. I was recently at Reboot 7 - where most of the presenters and much of the audience was first-world, white, male and geek - and I am non-white, non-first world, non-male, non-geek - I made a presentation on how I use social tools for research & collaboration (without really understanding how these tools work or what code drives them to work) - and it was rewarding to get feedback that suggested they loved the stories of how I put these tools to work - many used the term ''inspired''. I used the term - technology with heart - that may have sounded 'feminine' - but hey - it worked.

So what is it women do best in the context of blogging (as one means to having a global voice) - how can we leverage that in a - hmmm i wouldn't quite say man's world - but a world that is perhaps gender unequal - how we might build greater influence for our voices - it may be an interesting discussion to have.

What is happening with women today in the US, UK, Japan, India and other countries we represent - to bring in context for the role of blogging ----- in a country like mine, there are such huge disparities and imbalances in gender equality --- some of the brightest and bloggers are women - still, most blog stats show just a handful of women at the forefront of this field - how do we reconcile this? I personally have felt under attack many times by 'male' Indian bloggers - yet I never once got that feeling from my GLOBAL blog community - how do we deal with this ?

Finally, I’d love to take away some issues we agree upon that each of us could build into the tone, philosophy, idiom of our blogs - to suggest we stand together - we understand each other - we can live and work together - never mind that we come from physically different 'planets.' I thought this might stimulate more thought on what we might cover.

Bev chimes in:

“Something that really resonated with me was the first part of your message Dina,
living in a country like India, yet also living in a global world through my Blog community - is to balance the polarities...
I could easily have written "living in a country like Portugal, yet also living in a global world through different media, which includes my Blog - is to dance with polarities - sometimes balancing them, sometimes pushing them, sometimes struggling with them - but rarely at ease with them ..."

This idea of having different worlds in which I engage or create my identity is a significant one for me. The duality of male/female is less significant than, but integrated with, the duality of international/local.

I wonder if that makes sense or resonates with anyone else.

Noriko adds her voice:

My contribution would be more about how women (and mothers) are using blogs and other mobile and internet technologies to be doing things they were not able to do before and doing more efficiently and interestingly what they need to do. I have to admit that I am not a long blogger myself and I will do more observation of what I see in Japan and try to give example cases.

The Panelists:
Anna John, 30, is a quondam bartender, campaign manager and non-profit slave,
a current mutineer, technical writer and insomniac and a future...er...corpse. Her original blog, HERstory, won "Best India blog" in the 2004 Asia blog awards; her group project, Sepia Mutiny, which she was a founding member of, is one bad weblog-- shut your mouth!

Born and raised in California by emigrants from the awesomely anomalous southwestern Indian state of Kerala, she currently blogs from Washington, D.C., where the Wi-Fi in Dupont Circle is free. Speaking of cool places to post from, you can usually find her at Tryst on 18th Street, begging for more animal crackers to go with her cappuccinos. She adores her iBook, the Pixies and the cheese section at Whole Foods, in that order. One glorious day, she will pay off the obscenely high set of student loans which constantly remind her that she graduated from both UC Davis and The George Washington University. She hopes.

Noriko Takiguchi is a journalist and author in the business, technology, architecture and design fields. Contributes to various newspapers and magazines in Japan, including Asahi Shimbun Newspaper, Nikkei Newspaper, President, Diamond Weekly, Nikkei Information Strategy, among others.

Bev Trayner lives in Setbal, 60 kilometers south of Lisbon in Portugal. Most of her life she lived in Mombasa, Kenya and in between times she lived in UK. In between being a lecturer at a Business School in Setbal and trying to write up her doctorate thesis on learning in international online communities she does cross-country cycling and makes conversation with her kids. She has two blogs "em duas linguas" exploring living in two languages.

Dina Mehta is a qualitative researcher, with 15 years experience, based in Mumbai, India. A Master's Degree holder in Sociology, she spent the first 10 years of her career with IMRB, India's largest market research agency. She set up her own consultancy firm,Explore Research & Consultancy, in 1998, offering clients a comprehensive qualitative research consultancy on brands, products and services. Her expertise and interests lie in youth markets, contextual inquiry, longitudinal ethnographic research and user-design studies.

Recently, she's been fascinated by the area of social software in the context of creating and adapting collaborative tools for research. And in getting groups and organisations to adopt some of these tools, with the hope that new cultures of communication would be initiated and nurtured through the intelligent and effective use of community and collaboration technologies.

She is also deeply interested in the area of how ICT can bring about social change in rural areas, and was invited to attend theThird Annual Baramati Initiative on ICT and Development- a meeting ground to explore ways in which information and communication technology is being used as a tool to empower the poor.

Some beliefs that drive her - "abundance", a philosophy that suggests, 'share-learn-grow', optimism about the future, and stretch that is implicit in a philosophy that says Yes And!

Nancy White (moderator) is the founder and chocoqueen of Full Circle Associates where she helps non-profits and businesses connect through online and offline strategies. She has a particular interest in the application of online interaction tools and techniques to virtual teams and international community development. Nancy is recognized for her leadership and expertise in the emerging field of online group facilitation and interaction. She practices what she preaches as a skilled online facilitator and coach for distributed communities of practice, online training and education, distributed teams and online communities. Nancy constantly seeks to understand "what works and why" in this evolving world of online interaction. She is an active presenter, chronicler and was one of the early documentors and writers of online facilitation resources. She has taught the original online workshop, Facilitating Online Interaction, since 1999 and hosts the "Online Facilitation" email list. In 2004 she started blogging again at http://www.fullcirc.com/weblog/onfacblog.htm
Nancy graduated from Duke University and is a confirmed chocoholic. She is proud to learn daily from her two sons and husband in Seattle, Washington.

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