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March 24, 2010 by Patti

Dear Ada


I’m late, but haven’t forgotten my pledge to blog on Ada Lovelace day! I did include, in a talk that I gave this morning on social media, and to wish everyone a merry. I included the image above in my preso.

This year, I’d like to honor my own cohort in technology, and the many women I’ve worked with on the “support and services” side of technology. As many of you may know, I began my career in technology as a technical editor at IBM. IBM sent me to programming school in the 706 building in Poughkeepsie, New York, for a total of 24 weeks one long winter many years ago. On completion of my training in software programming, I was offered a choice of jobs: as a programmer, or as a writer. The programming manager was really up front: the job he had was pretty boring, nuts and bolts stuff. The writing manager offered me the opportunity to develop users’ guides and to put my stamp on how I thought technical writing should be done. Guess you know which path I took. (Well, I did do some engineering later on, but only to advance technologies in support of producing higher-quality documents.)
And I never looked back, even though I continued to work in an industry that valued the “real engineers” over those those who made the engineering products actually usable and useful. I’ve had the good fortune to work with people in the training and information sciences areas as well as in my native “documentation” specialty. These disciplines, like technical writing, were not dominated by women, but women were well represented in these fields, particularly in higher levels of management. They are the ones who have often been the singular woman on an all-male staff in a highly technical company, who have had to stand their ground often in defense of the value that their groups brought to the company, and who have made technology friendly. Curiously (or not) I have seen that these three fields — information sciences, technical writing, and training and development — have (together with consulting practices) provided fertile ground and expertise in the field we now know as knowledge management.
These women have been my role models, my mentors, and my friends. Today, on Ada Lovelace day, I salute them.
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December 28, 2009 by Patti

Women actually say things

Catching up — and trying to get ahead of 2010. Some interest bits from latest reading.

  1. Saba, a company that specializes in enterprise-wide human capital management, has created 8 predictions for how social computing will improve the enterprise value chain. A key thread in the predictions themselves is the importance of supporting the ability of people to learn from and work in informal networks:
    • “Learning connections will matter more than learning transactions.”
    • “Connecting people to expertise will begin to matter more for organizations than traditional learning management programs.”

  2. From Understanding Users of Social Networks (HBS Working Knowledge), research by Mikolaj Jan Piskorski looks at patterns of behavior on Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter. An interesting read as it differentiates how women and men use the sites. Most interesting (to me) in early results of research is in the use of Twitter: “Women actually say things, guys give references to other things.” It must have something to do with relatedness, and women’s needs to establish context and relationships, mustn’t it?

  3. Andrew McAfee (whose work I’ve been following for some time, though most of my blogs on social media and Enterprise 2.0 have been done on theAppGap) provides a nice summation of the current state of Enterprise 2.0 in a Financial Times article, Enterprise 2.0 is vital for business. In addition to citing some early results from McKinsey on the benefits of E2.0, he makes the case that what E2.0 does is to bring technological support for the informal organization, as they can support the emergence of structures and new patterns of coordination. This is grist for the ongoing complexity conversation.

  4. There’s much more, and I’m behind on my book pile, too, but at least I’ve got a good start on networks, complexity and relatedness.

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March 23, 2009 by Patti

Honoring Anita Borg on Ada Lovelace Day

My Ada Lovelace day tribute is to the inspiring Anita Borg, who was committed to bringing women into the field of computer science and whose work continues at…

In 1987, I was part of a small group of women in the software engineering group at Digital Equipment Corporation who were convened to work with Jean Baker Miller and colleagues at Wellesley College’s Center for Research on Women. Sometime during that fall, one of our group returned from a computer systems conference on the West Coast talking about how all the women at the conference (perhaps a little more than a dozen) had all had lunch together one day. Among those women was Anita Borg, who founded (from there or around that time) the systers list. Mailings from the list animated my days at Digital, as the postings ranged from the technical questions, to career support requests, conference room sharing and ride information, and into the deeply personal.

It was not a happy time for women in engineering. I had fared somewhat better, though I was not a software engineer per se and had been given many opportunities. As a “senior consulting engineer,” the first women from the documentation/information architecture field to be granted that title, I sat on the review board that approved candidates for promotion to senior positions in engineering. Anita was one of the few women engineers in these coveted positions.

She talked about the need to bring women into engineering every chance she got. But people weren’t always listening. I talked to her at an awards ceremony at which she was due to speak, sometime in the late 1980s or early 1990s, before Digital crumbled. She had prepared remarks directly focused at a number of senior managers in Digital who were present. However, one of them had earlier apologized that he would not be able to stay to hear her speak, because, Anita reported blood pressure rising, he had to “walk his dog.”

That is as as good a sign of those times as any. Thanks to Anita and her vision, the world has changed, but I think we are still not as far as we could be. And what could be? Jean Baker Miller, herself an inspiration to many women for pointing out at a time when it was not politic to say so, that “women are different from men.” She firmly believed that if women were designing the computers and applications that were becoming such an integral part of our lives, that the world would be very, very different.

I also blogged about this some time ago.

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December 26, 2008 by Patti

Five Good Things

I’ve been on the theme of relationships and relationships for close to 20 years, much of it stemming from work with Jean Baker-Miller, who was an inspiration to me in the late 1980s when I participated in a Stone Center project. Jean’s ground-breaking work in understanding the psychology of women opened the way for many changes in the workplace as well as in the discipline of psychological counseling. As more research shows how men and women are different in many physiological ways, it becomes clearer and clearer how revolutionary her ideas were.

Fundamental to Jean’s theory is that women grow in relationship; we become transformed and empowered by through shared experiences and authentic conversation. Such transformation is not unique to women, but most often experienced by women. Growth-fostering relationships empower all people in them.

The five good characteristics of growth-fostering relationships:

  1. A sense of zest or well-being that comes from connecting with another person or other persons.
  2. The ability and motivation to take action in the relationships as well as in other situations.
  3. Increased knowledge of oneself and the other person(s).
  4. An increased sense of worth.
  5. A desire for more connections beyond the particular one.

This work has always been founded on face-to-face personal, intimate, relationships, which we tend to think are more in the province of the feminine side. I wonder if our social media-based networking via technology has made it easier for men to develop relationships that they might not have done otherwise?

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