Some of the concrete ideas that emerged from our discussions and meeting:
- linking to print feminist journals (Camera Obscura, Feminist Media Studies, Women and Language, et al.) as a way of broadly supporting feminist publishing
- organizing a preconference for ICA 2013 in London, that would devote an entire day to discussing Fembot and FemTechNet
- establishing Wikipedia parties to create entries for feminist scholars.
- publishing a “SPOTLIGHT” section on fembotcollective.org for people to post “post-cards” about their projects
Here are some things that were already set-in motion:
- Sarah Kember is now on-board to network the FemTechNet effort at Goldsmiths College and elsewhere in the UK. She has offered to teach a nodal course on a related topic.
- Karen Estlund and Bryce Peak have already implemented some modifications to the fembotcollective.org website to make the FemTechNet links more prominent.
- Karen Estlund and Carol Stabile offered to teach a BETA or NODAL course at Univ of Oregon on the topic of feminist publishing, archiving, and library informatics.
Here are some of the Next Steps that were discussed at the small group meeting:
- Anne Balsamo will provide some funds to fembotcollective.org to pay for additional website modifications so that this site can serve as the platform for future FemTechNet activities. Karen Estlund will send Anne an invoice for services.
- Carol Stabile, Karen Estlund, and Bryce Peak will determine the structure of an online space for document storage (i.e., Google Docs) and for collaborative writing. We discussed that it would be useful to have copies of various pieces that have been written available so that we can borrow language and descriptions for use in new grants, etc.
- Anne Balsamo will draft a set of powerpoint slides and a timeline for people to use to describe the FemTechNet effort. These will be located on Google Docs.
- Carol Stabile, Alex Juhasz, and Karen Estlund will have a meeting to discuss a coordinated approach to setting up the database for the storage and future archiving of FemTechNet materials.
- Karen Estlund will speak to her contact at UC Davis about how to work with Wikipedia, and how to structure our Wikipedia “parties.”
- Karen Estlund will send Anne Balsamo language about revised technical specifications
- Paula Gardner offered the help of some of her graphic design students to create a graphic “identity package” for the collaborative project between FemTechNet and fembotcollective.org. Alex Juhasz will send her the postcard assets that we’ve already developed.
- Paula Gardner will explore the possibilities of getting a grant to hold a workshop at OCAD that would bring all the teachers of the nodal courses together to coordinate efforts in April-May 2013. The priority for funding should be covering the travel costs of international participants.
- SOMEONE (Paula Gardner?) contacts Carolyn Byerley to see if she would be willing to distribute the FemTechNet information to her network of international feminist scholars.
- Carol Stabile and Tara McPherson (along with Anne Balsamo) need to talk about the use of SCALAR in relation to the fembot journal ADA and the FemTechNet project.
- There are grants that need to be explored: Soros, Carnegie, Google, Gates. Please consider volunteering to form a task force(s) on these grants. SOMEONE??
- We discussed two National Science Foundation (NSF-US) grant opportunities; we formed an initial task force to work on these grants. Anne Balsamo will contact the NSF program officer for both grants to start the conversation about FemTechNet’s grant proposal.
- Lisa Parks will talk to colleagues in the University of California system about the names of feminist computer scientists who might be recruited to the NSF Task Force. (NOTE: in a discussion today, Lisa Cartwright suggested Bonnie Nardi)
- Bryce Peak will provide information about Merlot (the digital learning object platform)
- Karen Estlund will discuss FemTechNet at her NSF meeting later in June 2012.
TASK FORCES:
- NSF Grants Task force: Anne Balsamo (organizer), Lisa Parks, Carol Stabile, Sarah Kember, Karen Estlund, Bryce Peak, Nina Wakeford (as volunteered by Sarah K.)
- Graphic identity
- Collaboration with Wikipedia Foundation and structure of Wikipedia insertions
- Grant Research
- Course Structure
