So I’m sitting in this conference–Christina Pikas and I appear to be the two dames; I seem to know this whole group–and it’s a great discussion and I’ve pitched in but if you are not Rumpelstiltskin and you have been paying just the least attention, you too could have held your own with this group.
I bring this up not to disrespect a fascinating teleconference series, but because women too often downplay their skills and miss out on fun things.
Go Christina! I’m a tourist in this discussion, really, even though we are a hair’s breadth away from implementing tags in MPOW. Well, two hairs (only because we felt we should resolve the uber-design issues first and then delicately and carefully implement it in a usability-friendly way, given that during testing the evaluators repeatedly tagged when they thought they were searching… at one point I added the tag “cheese” to 18,000 items). But Christina is really rockin’ this discussion.
I look forward to seeing future topics and suggesting women whose voices belong in these discussions.
Posted on this day, other years:
- It was a dark and stormy neocortex... - 2007
- Eight Tips for Healthy Meetings - 2007
- I Invented Skype - 2005
- Moldy Old Global Data - 2005
- No Internet Librarian for Me This Year - 2004
“I’m a tourist in this discussion, really” Oy! Don’t go downplaying your own skills right after telling us not to.
But I did very well for a tourist. That’s because like most of us I do just fine in any intelligent discussion, which is all this was. I would say Casey, Christine, and Tim were rooted in the discussion, and the rest of us held our own and had fun. (I’ve also heard from several folks who participated, which brings me to another point: these fancy events are also networking opportunities–the virtual equivalent of the golf date.)
My point is you don’t need to be an expert to be an expert. Really. If it were “how to design killer search” or “LAMP CMS’s” or “Lucene, you are kewl” or “Managing a virtual team” or “why OPACs suck” or a whole lot of topics, I would consider myself an expert, and would be all over that discussion. But I don’t know a helluva lot about tagging, and I was able to wag my huevos just fine.
My one observation is that we never really addressed Is LC Necessary in any real way. A good topic for a future discussion.
*blush* Thank you! I’ve got an opinion about ‘most everything. We need the conversations to be between and among the coders, the people who care about the culture and building communities, and the users. All of these groups need to be represented. I put myself in the building the community/caring about the culture category.