lux – Page 7 – Fiat Lux

Why I Am (still) Not Going To BlogHer

Back in 2005, the year BlogHer got off the ground, I wrote a post explaining why, despite some mixed feelings, I would not be attending the inaugural event.

In the ensuing years, BlogHer has become hugely successful and grown into a massive 4,000+ person juggernaut.

I still have mixed feelings about it, and I’m still not going. I wrote this in 2005:

I think it is because I resist being labeled as a “woman blogger”. I am a woman, and I have a blog. But Fiat Lux is not a “woman’s blog” any more than it is a “Jewish blog” or even a “political blog”. It’s just MY blog.

I write about politics a lot less these days, and business a lot more, but I still feel that way.

You can add to that the rise of the “Mommy Bloggers”. The average female blogger today is far more likely to be chronicling the life and times of her family than anything else. And that’s great, don’t get me wrong, but as a woman without children, I just don’t think I’d fit in too well.

Plus there’s that whole “I work for a Big Brand” thing – even moreso now that things like influencer and advocate relations are a big part of my focus. I wouldn’t want to have to hide who I worked for, but on the other hand, I don’t want to have to spend the entire conference fending off requests for free stuff.

All in all, between the no kids thing and the brand thing, it just doesn’t sound like it would be fun.

Which is too bad.

Community Leadership Summit 2012: My Take

After three visits to the Community Leadership Summit, it’s quite clear that the world of community management is maturing.

A few years ago, CLS struggled to get 100 people in the room, especially the second day of the event. This year, there were well over 200 people at CLS, and Day 2 was just as busy as Day 1. Attendance is growing more international as well; not just the US and Europe, but also community managers from China and India were on site (and probably more countries I missed).

The most important thing about CLS, and what keeps me coming back every year, is the quality of the content and the fantastic conversations that take place there. The CLS wiki has crowdsourced notes from many of the sessions, but it’s a pale shadow of the value you get from actually being there.

Each year, new community managers come in, but there’s also a growing base of practitioners who’ve been in the field for some time now and are taking a more in-depth approach to the discipline. That cross-pollination of ideas is great for everyone.

This year I facilitated a session on tools for community management on Saturday as well as gave a plenary talk on Sunday. The Sunday talk was something I haven’t done before – I talked about crisis communities and used the recent events at Horace Mann as an example of community formation in a crisis. It was hard to talk about something so personal at a professional event but judging from the feedback I got, it went over well.

Each year, I come home more convinced that it doesn’t matter if you’re a manager of an open source community or a corporate one, a huge community or a tiny one, community programs and community managers have far more in common that not.

We all struggle with issues around tooling and support, and managing difficult personalities. We’re all trying to find more and better metrics for judging the success and health of our communities. We all deal with burnout and stress. And we’re all looking for ways to bring in new community members while trying to keep longtime contributors active and engaged.

If we all keep talking to each other, we can leverage all that intelligence and passion we have for our work to make all of our lives easier and our communities stronger.

TL; DR: the Community Leadership Summit is a great event, and if you’re a community manager, you should put it onto your calendar for next year.

Versions of this post are cross-posted here and on my work blog.

Bad Facebook, No Cookie For You

As was widely reported, Facebook pro-actively made some changes to users’ email preferences recently: forcing the default email address for every user to switch to an @facebook.com address and displaying it to all their friends, regardless of what the user had previously chosen.

News quickly spread and most people (myself included) quickly changed their e-mail setting back to what it had been before Facebook forced the change. Annoying, but a minor inconvenience, right?

Maybe not. Today, a co-worker discovered that his contact info for me had been silently updated to overwrite my work email address with my Facebook email address. He discovered this only after sending work emails to the wrong address.

And even worse, the emails are not actually in my Facebook messages. I checked. They’ve vanished into the ether.

For all I know, I could be missing a lot more emails from friends, colleagues, or family members, and never even know it.

F*** you very much Facebook.

If you’ve got my contact information in your phone or address book, please check to make sure you’ve got the right email listed?

UPDATE 7/1: Greetings, CNET readers. Thanks for stopping by.

DIY Planter Box

More plants in the garden! This was originally a fancy gift box for wine, now it’s a planter holding Spanish lavender. Converting it was really easy. Take off the top, drill some drainage holes in the bottom, fill with dirt, and you’re good to go.

Great Is The Truth

I’ve written on this blog before about how much Johannes Somary meant to me growing up. It’s hard to put words to how strongly I felt about the New York Times piece today calling him a serial sexual predator.

As much as I hate to say it, I don’t doubt the article’s truth. I remember the occasional whispers that “Johannes had a bit of a thing for boys”. I’m ashamed to say that I never took them seriously. His wife was right there by his side every day. His kids were our classmates. The cycle of classes and rehearsals rolled on. Everything seemed so normal. The idea that beneath the surface was something else entirely didn’t fit into reality as I knew it, and it certainly never crossed my mind that anybody was being raped.

How could it? We were just kids, in a time when nobody was talking about things like sexual abuse or inappropriate touching. It wasn’t a part of that reality to think that it could be true.

I can hardly wrap my head around the idea that two very different realities existed side by side – the black and the white of one person’s life. Does knowing more about the dark side of a man erase the good he did? Should I throw all out the recordings I own that he conducted? The music is still as glorious now as it was yesterday. It’s just my perception that has changed.

The hell of it is, that both are true. The beauty and the despicable acts both came from the same person. I got a great education from the same institution that was blind to or possibly even condoned despicable behavior. That complexity is what makes it so hard to understand or explain. Another HM-er described his experiences like this:

[The teacher] signed my yearbook as “Your teacher, advisor and friend.” He was all of those things. He just took advantage of the relationship.

I feel great sadness that so many people were hurt who didn’t have to be. I feel ashamed that none of us ever said anything, never questioned whether the status quo was right. Never helped the ones who were being hurt.

Horace Mann’s motto is: “Great is the truth and it prevails”. This is a time to let that truth, however painful, prevail.

UPDATE June 7

Driving home tonight, the first track from “Israel in Egypt” came up on the iPod. I’ve loved that piece ever since I sang it, in my first year of Glee Club.

But tonight I flashed on Johannes conducting that concert, and instead of it being a happy memory, I felt revolted. Ill. Angry.

Pretty much every piece of choral music that I love, I learned in his choir. And I feel sick thinking about any of them now.

I’m so angry. Why did nobody do anything? Why did the adults who were there to protect students instead chose to protect the abuser and the institution, even when presented with a direct accusation that a child had been raped? Where were they?