Each time I read an announcement for the upcoming Blogging While Brown Conference, June 19-20, 2009, in Chicago I get excited. The format is straight-forward and the conference itself should be a great networking experience.
Track No. 1 – John H. Johnson Track
This track will feature sessions related to blogging about current events, news, politics, activism, and bloggers who are leveraging their online resources to get offline results.
Track No. 2 – Window Synder Track
This conference track will feature sessions related to the nuts and bolts of blogging such as technology, blogging widgets, increasing blog traffic, legal issues, design, layout and improving the reader experience.
Track No. 3 – Madame C.J. Walker Track
This conference track will feature sessions related to the business of side blogging, monetizing blogs, better marketing of blog sites, and getting your work noticed and published by mainstream media outlets.
My first blogging conference – ScienceOnline09 – covered these same topics, too, even more. I learned about new online tools (which I now use) and met some amazing people. It was a great experience.
It was also free. There was no registration fee.
I am sure the Blogging While Brown Conference will be great; I would love to meet people in real life that I interact with online – like Villager or other YBPGuide contributors, but I’m conflicted. On one hand, it’s not worth paying a registration fee to sit through workshops I’ve already attended – for free. Secondly, and more importantly, what role does science occupy in the melanin pigmented blog-o-verse?
As a Science Blogger, I often feel like my genre of blogging is marginal to other more popular topics discussed in the Black Blogging Community – politics, crime, racial disparity, social commentary, pop-culture, fashion, music, etc. Science and Education never seem to make it on the radar except when a social justice issue is being debated. These subjects rarely get their due –for their own sake. So, it is in this light that I find myself thinking about the upcoming Blogging While Brown Conference and I get, well, a little deflated.
Part of me says that I should attend and represent these and other important and oft-under-represented blogging topics. That’s the responsible, pro-active way of doing things. After all, I am trying to proffer myself through my blog as an online science communication leader in the Black community. But I shy away from that call because I feel like I am speaking into a vacuum. There was a call for workshop proposals which would have been a perfect opportunity for me to present these issues front-and-center. However, I perceived the tracks were too rigid to allow for non-political topics to be presented. So, I punked out.
I think now that I should have submitted anyway and risked being rejected. At least I would have received some feedback and not just chatter in my head. If I had submitted a proposal I would have included some of the ideas I learned at the Science Blogging Conference – such as participating in Carnivals and Memes, live meet-ups, pros and cons of virtual communities, cyber-safety for young people, and some science-specific stuff to introduce non-science audiences to science blogging culture and community.
I wonder if there are other bloggers of color who feel marginalized because of their subject matter.
