I got an email the other day from Elisa Camahort Page, one of the founders of BlogHer. She wrote to me and several other leaders of midlife communities, asking us to publicize the Call for Session Topics for BlogHer’14, the tenth anniversary of the Conference:
“You’re probably aware that we always seek as diverse a program and speaking roster as possible, having something for the personal, political, technical, and professional blogger. And in order to achieve that we often reach out and ask for help to dig deeper into various communities to encourage their members to submit their ideas to the call for ideas. We can’t assume everyone keeps an eagle eye on when we release our call for ideas, so we ask for help to get the word out….[W]e want to make sure to reach out into the midlife and boomer segments of our broader community.”
That BlogHer has evolved over the years to a place of actively seeking midlife voices is an opportunity not to be missed. This is a chance to be proactive in directing our social media agenda at the Conference. So–what is that agenda? What do we actually want from popular culture today?
It’s not enough to say as we did in the past, “we want to be recognized.” Or “we want a share of the advertising pie.” When I look over the past Agendas for the last nine years of BlogHer, I see topics that should appeal to everyone. But every year, I hear complaints that the sessions did not fulfill their promise for us. Why not? What’s missing? Is it a topic? Or the focus of a topic?
The only way BlogHer can be meaningful for us is if we tell them what we want. I hate to say this, but it’s kinda like sex: you can’t expect your partner to know what you like or give you what you want if you don’t know yourself. Passivity doesn’t pay in any arena.
I’d like to suggest that we crowdsource the answers to those questions. Crowdsourcing –a uniquely Web 2.0 feature–is a way of mining our collective consciousnesses. It is a viable method of creative group thinking and one that I believe might enable us to propose a number of sessions to BlogHer for this tenth anniversary Conference.
If you already have a session idea for BlogHer 2014, send it here. If you’re interested in crowdsourcing the topic, put your ideas–large and small, half-baked and not–in a comment. Or send them to me, jane(at)midlifebloggers(dot)com.
Let’s see what our “great minds think alike” can come up with.
