The Good, the Bad and the Myopic: What Nora Ephron has to do with Techweek

Techweek 2012 is a wrap. Despite some organizational stumbles, the sheer mass of programming and the crowds guaranteed good things would come of it. They certainly did for me.

Techweek ran the gamut, from Howard Tullman’s tour-de-force talk on the data-sliced present/future, full of utopian potential and dystopian risk, to Dennis Manarchy’s stunning oversize Vanishing Cultures portraits, an homage to the present/past of both people and technology. It was wonderful to meet and reconnect with people, to talk about projects, business models, progress. And god bless those ever-resourceful Task Rabbits who brought the Wow Bao buns: brilliant marketing—really, truly I will use you when the need next arises.

Yet throughout the event, there were little off-notes of sexism, most likely unintentional, but nonetheless there.

• Only 7 women on the Techweek 100 list
• An all male panel of judges for the 2012 Final Five Launch competition
• Only one woman entrepreneur in the Final Five pitch

Which is neither to say that there are not a lot of talented men on the Chicago tech scene, or that all of the men on the list didn’t deserve to be there. Rather, it is point out that the number of talented women on the scene is on the rise. And though plaid and t-shirted men still outnumbered women strolling the trade show aisles and attending lectures, I would guesstimate that at least a quarter of attendees were women. 

There are more women enrolling in Code Academy. Three of what I think are among the most promising startups in Chicago happen to be women-run:

• Sharon Schneider, Good Karma Clothing for Children
• Julie Bashkin, KLUTCHclub
• Jennifer Thomas, Travel720

This is something to celebrate. Yet when numbers skew so badly—only 7% of the techs-to-know in Chicago are women? really?—it raises questions.

I probably would have let this slide, but for a quote of Nora Ephron’s that I read this morning in an obituary. In a graduation address to her alma mater, Wellesley College, she talks, with her trademark razor sharp wit, about changes in attitudes toward women and by women since was a student in the early 1960s. Then she gets to the rather serious nut:

“What I’m saying is, don’t delude yourself that the powerful cultural values that wrecked the lives of so many of my classmates have vanished from the earth. Don’t let the New York Times article about the brilliant success of Wellesley graduates in the business world fool you — there’s still a glass ceiling. Don’t let the number of women in the work force trick you — there are still lots of magazines devoted almost exclusively to making perfect casseroles and turning various things into tents.

Don’t underestimate how much antagonism there is toward women and how many people wish we could turn the clock back. One of the things people always say to you if you get upset is, don’t take it personally, but listen hard to what’s going on and, please, I beg you, take it personally. Understand: every attack on Hillary Clinton for not knowing her place is an attack on you. Underneath almost all those attacks are the words: get back, get back to where you once belonged. When Elizabeth Dole pretends that she isn’t serious about her career, that is an attack on you. The acquittal of O.J. Simpson is an attack on you. Any move to limit abortion rights is an attack on you — whether or not you believe in abortion. The fact that Clarence Thomas is sitting on the Supreme Court today is an attack on you.”

So it makes a difference. There are good things happening on Chicago’s women-in-tech front. More good things need to happen. And we all need to do a better job both seeing and acknowledging them.

—J.A. Ginsburg / @TrackerNews

(originally posted on Built in Chicago)

Innovation, Impact, a Darn Good Party and What Chicago Can Learn from Cambodia

If there had been a collective speech bubble over everyone’s head at last night’s “Founders” party for Impact Engine, a new social innovation accelerator program just revving up here in Chicago, it might have read, “Well, about time!”

In Boston and New York, techs, investors, ad execs, designers, scientists and journalists literally trip over one another. Seattle basks in the Microsoft effect. Silicon Valley is one big virtuous circle of critical entrepreneurial mass.

But Chicago has long been lost in the shuffle: a great place with loads of talent and the occasional big hit, but somehow lacking the alchemy that transforms individual parts into a larger, qualitatively different whole.  

Steve Jobs famously talked about “the intersection of technology and the humanities.” It is the sweet spot—and speaks right to the mission of the TrackerNews Project, which is all about the mix and the match of ideas, disciplines and perspectives. 

The Founder’s party fairly glimmered with that elusive alchemy. It was, in fact, a mixer, bringing together entrepreneurs (wishful wannabe’s to those well on their way), mentors and investors. People whose paths simply never cross were seriously delighted to meet. Technology, have I got a Humanity for you… 

Over the last couple of years, Chicago has seen the emergence of a number of such “centers of mixing.” Tech pitch nights now routinely sell out. So do Creative Mornings talks. Maker space Pumping Station One has seen its membership zoom past a hundred. Incubators have opened, accelerators have accelerated. There is even a entire TechWeek.

And then there is The Plant—a vertical farm in a massive Sinclair Lewis-era meatpacking facility on the city’s southwest side—that seems to bring out the innovative best in everybody. It will take years for the build out to be complete, but in the true spirit of Burham, there are “no little plans” here.

Beyond systems thinking, there is ecosystems thinking at work. Waste is never wasted and it all weaves together: an artisanal brewery, mushroom farm, commercial kitchen space, grid-independent biodigester power and aquaponics set-ups. Technology meets Humanities meets Food. Even better. 

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At what point does all the mixing start to turn magical? What does it take for an entrepreneurial culture of innovation to really take root? 

Three years ago, halfway around the world in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, my friends at InSTEDD* decided to find out. They helped organize the first BarCamp ever in Southeast Asia. Three hundred people, almost all with minimal tech experience, came. Clearly, this was a community bursting to be born. 

Next, they opened an innovation lab—an iLab—a place where the community could develop.

CTO Eduardo Jezierski:  

We set up the iLab in early 2008, with support from Google.org and The Rockefeller Foundation. We started in a large house, with a mix of bedrooms, open space workrooms, classrooms, etc. A lot of people would crash in the bedrooms during BarCamps and other events. We had a constant cycle of foreigners—both from the region and beyond—who helped InSTEDD set up in Southeast Asia, or just wanted to connect with the accelerating local tech community.

We have iterated the physical set-up and now the iLab occupies part of a floor in an office building with beautiful open spaces. One thing, however, has remained constant: The internet connection is awesome—and a large part of the cost of the iLab’s infrastructure!

…Something I hope distinguishes the iLab from Silicon Valley, though, is that it helps foster a broader focus, one that includes social impact as an explicit initial goal of a business and part of the bottom line.

It is easy enough to write a grant to set up a space. Funders get that. But the InSTEDDers were actually hoping to spark something more enduring, if too ephemeral to include in a funding request: a sort of “garage culture” esprit de tech that would expand beyond the iLab to develop as sector; and enduring relationships between techs and groups working on humanitarian projects.

Today, the iLab is humming along, completely Cambodian-run. Whether or not it survives as a self-sustaining institution beyond its grants (likely, though you never know), a matrix that strengthens local resilience is now in place. The iLab, along with more Barcamps and Hackerspace Phnom Penh, have provided opportunities to collaborate and network. 

EJ: 

One the key moments for me was the day one of the developers told me about “Hello World of the Month.”

It’s brilliant. The iLab developers were getting tripped up, worried about their speed whenever they started to work in a new programming language. They realized they kept reverting to “old ways” that were more comfortable. So they created “Hello World of the Month,” an exercise to take something they knew absolutely nothing about and figure out how do something useful with it. There is always a mix of curiosity, frustration, even trepidation when trying to do something in a new programming language. “We want to feel comfortable with learning new things. We need to feel comfortable not knowing so we can look for the answer.” Now that’s the right attitude. We could all learn from that.

So, yes, you need the money (philanthropy or investor). You need technical expertise. You need good ideas. But the “secret sauce” turns out to be…us—meeting, talking, sharing, doing. 

Impact Engine, then, is already having an impact. Sweet. 

— J. A. Ginsburg / @TrackerNews

* full disclosure: The TrackerNews Project was incubated at InSTEDD