TEDxWomen: Learning & Instilling Resilience at an Early Age

At TEDxWomen at the Paley Center in LA this morning I was wowed–no easy feat for a presenter following a very early AM flight–by a presentation between 13-year-old Claire Sannini and Rachel Simmons about encouraging confidence in girls. (An audacious and important concept with cyberbullying, suicides, and teen pregnancy as rampant as they are.) The two talked about the Girls Leadership Institute, an organization Simmons co-founded to help girls discover their true and strong selves.

“[Our society] tells girls that they can be intelligent, but shouldn’t make others feel intimidated by their smarts,” Simmons said. “Yes, you can be active, but you better be sexy and skinny while you do it.” These messages don’t just impact girls social lives–they affect assertion and earnings in the workplace later in life.

Simmons stresses the importance of women helping girls strengthen their “inner resumes,” and Claire’s eloquence after participating in the teen leadership work is captivating. You can see their great collaborative talk in its entirety here. And while you’re at it, don’t dare miss V-Girl Busisiwe Mkhumbuzi’s reflections on raising girl consciousness and activism in South Africa.

KQED Mind Shift Story >> Mobile Payment Plans for Classrooms

Over the past two weeks I’ve enjoyed working with education expert Tina Barseghian to consider the question of whether parents would pay for mobile data plans their kids use for classroom purposes. This was in response to a Speak Up report released earlier this month that suggests 67 percent of families would pay so that their children could use phones as learning tools. You can read the full story Parents Weigh In On Paying for Mobile Access in Schools, and thanks to Baat Enosh (National Center for Women & IT), Rashmi Sinha (SlideShare), Stacey Foreman (FM), and Jean Hagen (Institute for the Future) for sharing their thoughts on the topic.

Digital Media & What Gendered Advertising Has to do With It

I so enjoyed the second Digital Media & Learning Conference last weekend in Long Beach that I’m still playing notes catch up. Between researcher danah boyd hosting Ignite talks and talking about everything I never knew I always wanted to know about 4Chan, I was a happy camper (and one without a computer, as part of my Wisdom 2.0 resolution to pay better attention when people are presenting their work).

And some of that work that I most enjoyed came from Jonathan McIntosh, an open video advocate who created a “Gendered Advertising Remixer.” Forty toy commercials and their pink vs. blue/black approach are yours to rearrange with the free online tool; I’m hard pressed to think of a better environment to mash up The Eye of Judgment and Barbie Island Princess in celebration of International Women’s Day.

Heading South for Mobile Musings

On Tuesday the first event in Nokia’s Mobile Musings series will focus on the intersection of technology and humanity with “mobile technologists”–a catch-all term for researchers including Stanford computer science professor Terry Winograd and UC Berkeley bioengineering and biophysics educator Daniel Fletcher. I’m headed to Sunnyvale with a few SF friends in the space to hear about current projects in Haiti, Kenya and other emerging markets. Of most interest is hearing from Fletcher about CellScope, a microscope and camera combination that is intended to help with medical diagnoses in remote places. (Despite extensive camera school instructions from the maker of the N95 camera that was used, I’ve still got a lot to learn.) The event is open to the public. You will them that you’ll be in attendance, won’t you?

Local Film Connected Utah-Bound

While thinking about January brings slight sadness for many (post-holiday glum, not to mention keeping resolutions), the first month of the year has me excited for all that Utah offers, mainly the Altitude Design Summit and Sundance. I tend to talk about both throughout the year–the people! the projects!–and am especially excited for the premiere of Connected at this year’s film festival.

The feature-length “Autoblogography about Love, Death & Technology” was just announced as part of this year’s documentary competition. Filmmaker and Webby Awards founder Tiffany Shlain talked about the project at Ignite Bay Area a year ago when it was still in production, and I hope her five-minute talk gets you thinking about “surprising links between right brain and left; alphabets and power; honey bees and stress; hormones and happiness; technology and nature” and the like.

TEDWomen, The Day After

As a producer of events that are partly intended to bring more women technologists to the stage, I was glad to hear that TED conference curators planned to get 70 women speaking in December for a new iteration of their series.

The “Technology Entertainment Design” presentations have focused less on tech in recent years to accommodate more diverse topics (think philanthropy and medicine among other topics). While my first reaction is to be disappointed by the move to spend less time on deep and consumer tech innovations, the two days in DC were a welcome change from conferences and workshops with narrower focuses.

Co-host Pat Mitchell, who said she “takes TED like a mind spa,” said that about 500 names were on the table for potential speakers. (“Everyone suddenly realized that they know a woman who should be on stage,” she said in a press briefing. This was a major change from the 85 percent of speaker recommendations that usually come in for prospective male presenters.) Among the women who shared their work were Cynthia Breazeal, who runs the Personal Robots Lab at the MIT Media Lab and demonstrated how distant co-working can be improved by mobile phone docks with arm-like appendages, and Heather Knight, a roboticist and sensor-based artist who shared a standup joke-telling robot that gauges audience reactions and reacts accordingly. (Icelandic financier Halla Tomasdottir’s talk is the first talk by a woman presenter at this week’s conference to be available online, and I strongly suggest watching Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s observations about working motherhood when they’re released.)

I agree with Mitchell’s co-host, June Cohen, that it can be harder for producers to find women speakers, as they’re less likely to accept invitations to present and more likely to cancel to be with their teams and children. This was a sad reality when Carmel Hagen and I planned local Ignite Bay Area events but one that just requires more work to bring women’s contributions to conferences in bigger ways. more

Good News for IMOW, Women 2.0

This post isn’t objective. It doesn’t even try to be.

But I’m a bit giddy over pieces by Ms. and SFGate regarding the work of two local organizations, The International Museum of Women and Women 2.0, respectively. The first, “Global Economics as Feminist Art,” details how examining “gendered economics can be a pleasantly informative experience” thanks to organizations like IMOW that lean in to multimedia to demonstrate the value of women’s work. I first got turned onto the virtual museum’s work last year when covering the Economica exhibit for HuffPo, and you can see the important work firsthand with an upcoming portion of the project that is to focus on Latin America.

The second story, “Women 2.0 gives female-led startups a boost,” provides great insight into the group aimed at increasing the 10 percent of women who currently run tech startups. In detailing the team’s efforts to get more women to try their hand at starting endeavors, there’s a preview to Thursday’s Pitch Night:

“The event, the fourth annual one of which will be held tonight in San Francisco, features nine finalists that have been whittled down from nearly 130 submissions. They make their pitch, American Idol-style, to a panel of judges, including Maritza Liaw, a partner at venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and Julia Hartz, co-founder and president of Eventbrite. The winner receives a startup package that includes meetings with high-level investors and marketing, business, Web and legal services.”

I couldn’t have said it better myself.


I’m Here Now at Gallery Hijinks

Storenvy co-founder Janette Crawford turned me onto a show at Bryant Street studio Galley Hijinks that promises bold geometry through November 15, and it’s likely to lure me in the next time I’m in the neighborhood or working at Stable Cafe. Mark Warren Jacques’ I’m Here Now couples ink, graphite and acrylic with unexpected names, including “Work is love made visible” and “Love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation.”

PLAY: Digital Media across the Bay

I’m bummed to miss this year’s Berkeley Digital Media Conference, but travel calls. Past play events created with the university’s Center for New Media have been chock full of smart people in business and media (example: it’s where I first started hearing about location as a future theme, and that was four years ago). The completely student-organized conference on Saturday will feature Wired‘s Chris Anderson on whether tablets are the future of media, VCs on investing in an increasingly mobile world, and observations from the head of Pixar’s moving pictures group, Dr. Michael Johnson, about the company’s processes for telling compelling stories. Oh, and there will be a “location, location, location” session on changes in social gaming, of course.


YBCA Unpacks Audiences

Should you be looking for a low-key Friday to compliment Saturday’s costume craziness, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts will be introducing two major exhibits (and a mask may actually be fitting). Audience as Subject, Part 1: Medium includes event-focused works (think audiences in medium-sized venues including a theater, TV studio, and city bus) selected by director of visual arts Betti-Sue Hertz. Visitors who come to an opening party to meet the artists will also see select films from Yoshua Okón: 2007-2010 (including Danica Daki!, Isola Bella, right, above, Adrian Paci’s Turn On). Based on the description, there may be a lot to see:

“Yoshua Okón’s video installations are built on improvisational narratives created by the artist and his collaborating performers, mostly non-actors willing to participate in a game of social chance that may easily spiral out of control.  Centered around emotionally charged expressions of power and contemplations of fear, death, sex, and nationhood, these works provoke viewers to consider questions of social conduct and the behavior of individuals within systems of social restraint.  Okón further challenges viewers to question their own attitudes towards power, ethics, and prejudice, particularly as they relate to class and race. Maintaining a belief that humanity holds within its grasp a complex web of fears and desires, Okón enacts psychological violence charged with absurdity and humor.”