CivicActions Sponsoring She's Geeky

CivicActions is proud to sponsor the She's Geeky unconference scheduled to be held for three days in the San Francisco Bay Area starting on January 29th, starting at 9am.  

As an "unConference," She's Geeky creates an open space for women in technology (defined as "science, technology, engineering and mathematics") to get together and discuss the unique issues they face in their respective fields.  If you're a woman and a geek, pick a day or three and attend!  The future of the planet may depend on it!

While I lived in San Francisco, a city renowned for cultural innovation and rich in conversation about gender identity, I learned a lot about masculine and feminine paradigms of social organization and power. Where the masculine paradigm is defined by competition, command and control, the feminine paradigm is one of balance, collaboration and cooperation.  One could easily argue that the dominant mode of social organization in modern history has largely been a patriarchal, masculine paradigm.

I believe the emergence of the Internet is massively disruptive to this paradigm and is now ushering a shift from the masculine to the feminine - from control to collaboration.  I also believe that this shift is critically important to our survival as a species and anything we can do to advance it, especially in technology, the better off we all are. The problems we face together need to be solved together and that can only happen with connection, cooperation and collaboration.  

To me, sponsoring She's Geeky isn't *just* about supporting women in important vocations where they are statistically underrepresented or recruiting a diverse workforce.  It's also very much about supporting this cultural shift away from centralized control to distributed collaboration. It's also about supporting women being anything they want to be (did you know one of the 5 careers up for vote for Barbie's next career is Computer Engineer? w00t!  err... v00t! ).  There's an enormous (actual) opportunity and need for more women to participate in the development of the technology that facilitates the transition to a new paradigm.  Indeed, We have opportunities right now!

Contributing to forums where women can connect and cultivate networks of support and cooperation, in our opinion, advances this shift.  Given our commitment to changing the world through technology, sponsoring She's Geeky seemed a natural and good thing for CivicActions to do.  We hope it's a huge success.