Takeaways from the International Women’s Forum

By Telle Whitney, President and CEO

I had the pleasure last week to attend the International Women’s Forum conference in San Francisco.  The conference included a remarkable line up including my colleague Pooja Sankar, the 31 year old founder of Piazza, which is doing this remarkable work with Harvey Mudd college on WitsOn, providing mentors to students.

But what was particularly exciting for me was a panel that talked about experiences in creating a movement.   I am very interested in this tradeoff between generating content that is editorial consistent, versus providing a platform where many voices can speak.

I heard Jimmy Wales speak about some of his experience at Wikipedia, ensuring that many people can contribute content, but that the factual errors are minimal.   He contends that the factual error rate at Wikipedia is consistent with any encyclopedia throughout history.  But there is a skew in content based on gender.  In fact 85% of their contributors are male, and so some topics, such as gaming or versions of Linux have a record number of entries whereas others, such as women historical figures may be underrepresented.    I was interested in this topic because we see an increasing number of people commenting or blogging on topics that are important to us and I want to figure out how to include them in a constructive way to our community.

One of the more interesting decisions  that Wikipedia made was when it went dark in support of privacy policy legislation.    What Wikipedia did provide for its US customers was tools to contact their congress representative.   Feedback to congress through this initiative was significant.   Their impact was profound.

I am interested in the tools and content that would provide useful choices to our larger community, and hearing his story got me thinking about what is possible.