This coverage, from the Women's Media Center on the recent conference in D.C. to bring together bloggers and mainstream feminist groups is really interesting. Shireen Mitchell, of Digital Sistas is quoted in the article as one the primary organizers of the gathering. Women like Eleanor Smeal and Kim Gandy spoke at the conference as well, joking about themselves as "older" and more like the "1.0 version" when it comes to online presence. Bloggers could comment while speakers presented, and asked questions like, "Why haven't you reached out to us?"
From my own experience in some maintstream feminist orgs, state and national, I think that one of the main issues these groups have to tackle in order for a good relationship to develop with bloggers is that of control . Blogosphere is a free, somewhat ugly place at times, with trolls and miscommunicated messages, and for some founders of movements, there is simply too much risk that a message to promote something would get co-opted, changed, altered or taken away from them. But as Peggy Simpson points out in this article, bloggers are not constrained by office rental space, super-funding sources, or in most cases adhering to a grant/funders requirements for work. This makes me think of many of the issues raised in The Revolution Will Not Be Funded , and the freedom and responsibility that is increasingly falling to feminist bloggers to keep movements and energy alive as other groups struggle with finances. I can do this during my lunch hour of my not-so-revolutionary-job and join voices with all of you. That feels powerful.
What do others think? Any feministing folks go to this conference? Any impressions?
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I went to the conference. I thought it was a great first step in trying to connect traditional women’s organizations with bloggers so that we can become a powerful force both online and offline. At this point, most bloggers don't have the access to Congress that staff at traditional, established women's orgs do. The women's orgs don't have the freedom and flexibility to do all the online activism and be responsive to everything in the news the way bloggers can be -- so there is clearly a great opportunity to have both sides work together. I wish Fem 2.0 had a second day where we could have all meet in small groups to discuss concrete ways to work together. Day one made it painfully clear we need to but there was no time to take it to the next step.
I work at one of the traditional women's organizations in DC that has been around for 127 years and has an active voice in women's policy issues. For example, it has been very instrumental in the Fair Pay legislation. We have an online 2-minute activist tool and other online materials and last Friday we celebrated the one-year anniversary of our organizational blog I helped start (after months of dragging heels by the higher ups to do it). In these ways we are more electronically forward than many women's orgs. However, our average organizational membership (whose $ funds our work) is 70 years and older and many of them could care less about the Internet and don't like e-publications or understand about blogs, etc. This has made our use of the Internet tricky because it's mostly not our members who are reading our blog or coming to our website, yet it is our members vote on all our organizational policies and so we have to cater to them and their opinions.
Several of us younger staff have our own blogs, participate in blogs like feministing.com and are well aware of the power of blogs & online activism. Our Executive Director has not let us have much control in our organizational blog and every entry we post has to be directly related to the organizational mission and go through 3 levels of approval. This means we miss out on talking about a lot of timely issues etc. Those of us who are regular blog contributors are really frustrated by this, but our ED and the organization will be held accountable for any missteps made online and so they have to be really cautious. But our ED attended Fem 2.0 and it was an awakening for her about the direction of activism and we're hopeful we may be able to do more online sometime as an organization. And actually one of the head online advisers for Obama’s campaign will be coming to work here for several months to help our public policy department ... So there may be hope yet. In the meantime, I try to do my own online activism in a way separate from my organization so they aren’t held accountable for anything I say or do.
just a quick note: it's possible to have a lively movement without much money. check out the one million signatures campaign in Iran.