blogbloghttp://causeit.org/blog/2012-04-09T18:19:20ZSquarespaceDisseny Hub Barcelona—making tech accessiblehttp://causeit.org/blog/2012/4/9/disseny-hub-barcelonamaking-tech-accessible.htmlCauseit, Inc.2012-04-09T17:14:18Z2012-04-09T17:14:18ZAs I explore the city of Barcelona, I'm fascinated by the ease with which the city can be navigated. It's more than the ample bike lanes and easy transit options—it appears to be cultural as well. While wandering towards the Picasso Museum with a friend, I happened upon Disseny Hub Barcelona (DHUB). This design center featured a number of fascinating exhibits on systems design and machine senses—all focused on making interaction with systems and technology more human-friendly.
There were two primary exhibits at the space focusing on innovative approaches to human interaction with tech:
Industrial [systems] design affects our lives deeply—from the interactions we have with our cyborgian appliances, like smartphones, to the less-flashy but deeply important interactions between children and their toys or mothers and their breastmilk pumps. The DHUB exhibit is a selection of projects by the Department of Industrial Design at the Eindhoven University of Technology in The Netherlands. They have a great video explaining pieces of their work.
The I/O/I moniker for DHUB's exhbit refers to the critical design focus on a feedback loop. Typically, I/O refers to input/output, as with the input of a user manipulating a mouse, "Augmented Shadow" by Joon Yong Moon (2010, South Korea)and the ouput of a display. I/O/I adds a second I, signifying an input back into a system, creating interaction. I was surprised to find almost every piece in the exhibit invited touch or movement, often in intuitive ways, like a table which rendered shadows based on the location of cubes placed on it.
Perhaps the most novel element of the exhibition was the staffed laboratory, where I met a number of researchers and assistants, including a PhD candidate working on diversity in innovative technology, Susanna Tesconi. She explained how to program Arduino circuitboards (easy-to-use, pre-soldered boards loved by the Maker movement) and then all but insisted I try for myself.
I'm looking forward to going back to DHUB this week to interview Susanna and the rest of her team to find out about the hackerspaces throughout the city, how the DHUB exhibitions are being received, and her interesting research. Stay tuned!
]]>X.commerce: designing a lingua francahttp://causeit.org/blog/2011/10/14/xcommerce-designing-a-lingua-franca.htmlMJ Petroni2011-10-15T00:47:40Z2011-10-15T00:47:40Z"The face of commerce is going to change more in the next three years than the last fifteen," said John Donahoe, President & CEO of eBay.
He's right. Until e-commerce arose, the way we bought things had not seen major innovation since the advent of the department store. Sure, global corporations, increasing use of credit cards and international business changed what we bought and who made money from the process, but most consumers still purchased in stores or via catalogs. We all know how e-commerce changed things starting in the late 90s, with PayPal and eBay at the center of creating cottage industries for online sellers and trusted online payment for brands of all sizes.
Now, X.commerce, the new unified brand behind eBay and PayPal, wants to create a unified platform for the biggest changes commerce has seen in decades.
Social, local, mobile: SoLoMo
These days, SoLoMo is the hottest new term—a confluence of social, local and mobile commerce. Social commerce can be roughly framed as the confluence of recommendations by people who actually matter to you, more relevant promotion, and a highly-responsive buzz engine that lets small, disruptive brands like TOMS shoes reach breakthrough sales figures in months or years, not decades. Local commerce, long limited to in-person interaction, joins mobile commerce—in-store price comparisons, location-sensitive coupons, reviews and even handheld checkouts. The innovations of e-commerce are getting far more personal and even better at empowering consumers—at least tech-savvy ones.
So far, though, the hodgepodge of services—Groupon, PayPal, Yelp, Milo, online shopping carts, small- and big-business inventory systems and the like—have not been integrated. Using SoLoMo innovations has meant a strong commitment to remembering passwords and peering into your smartphone in store aisles—or committing to one basic ecosystem, like Amazon.
X.commerce: a digital commerce lingua franca
X.commerce is planning to change the landscape of SoLoMo and retail at large. "Today, in almost half of all retail transactions, the consumer accessed the web at some point of their shopping experience," Donahoe told attendees at the X.commerce Innovate 2011 Conference. Citing smartphones enabled with apps like RedLaser and Milo, Donahoe describes the paradigm shift: "Consumers are taking the e out of e-commerce."
X.commerce is the merger of three key services—eBay, PayPal and the open-source online commerce platform Magento—via an ecosystem called X.commerce Fabric. This collection of synchronized backend tools integrates basics like inventory, shipping and payment information with site visitor analytics, advertising optimization, recommendations and more. By making X.commerce open and accessible, the big leagues are leveling the playing field—because it's good for business.
The Ecosystem
Merging PayPal's electronic payment processing, eBay auction marketplaces and Magento's online shopping cart tools is only the beginning. Using X.commerce Fabric, small and large developers can create tools empowering merchants of all sizes to bridge the online/offline commerce divide. Suddenly, mom-and-pop soccer shops can access the same shopping cart and visitor-tracing tools industry giants like Target use.
X.commerce has an idealized clip that sums up how small merchants take advantage of this new ecosystem. [Jump to 7:16 in the video embedded below or click here]. In it, we see a transition from frustrated in-store customers, missing inventory and slow product changes to an idealized (and tech-centric) world of responsive commerce with happy merchants and consumers.
During the keynote, Matthew Mengerinck (VP and General Manager of X.commerce) demos the platform for a small shop called Soccer Pro in a cheeky makeover-special-themed clip. Check it out:
In the video, a small shop's inventory is instantly integrated with any marketplace (like eBay) which opts into the X.commerce Fabric. At the same time, the owner's local foot traffic is integrated with local shopping service Milo and online marketing analytics from Adobe's SiteCatalyst (42:02). In one system, small merchants have access to new ways to sell and the ability to know how effective their online advertising is—a formerly challenging intersection of many, many systems.
Playing well with others: PayPal Access & Facebook
PayPal announced a big change in their user experience during the X.commerce Innnovate 2011 conference: the ability to sign in with one click. Much like the single sign-on tools offered by Google and Facebook, PayPal Access will allow merchants to work with PayPal and its users with less back-and-forth to the PayPal site and more integration. For example, verified shipping addresses can be automatically imported into a merchant's site once a PayPal user has signed in.
Facebookjoined the conversation, too—through their increasingly flexible Open Graph standard, e-commerce sites built with Magento will now be able to integrate with Facebook. For example, a user could click "want" next to an item and their friends would see a news feed update saying Annie wants an iPhone from ABC Merchant. Users can also click 'own' next to an item to create a similar post.
By simplifying payment and integrating with social tools users are already familiar with, X.commerce lowers the 'activation energy,' a software user experience term referring to effort required to complete an action (or transaction). At the same time, by being first to market with these innovations and strategic partnerships, they make it harder for other online payment tools to compete with them.
Small partners (and new acquistions) mean big innovation in the X.commerce neighborhood
Small software and business services startups, especially in the Software as a Service realm (SaaS) are helping X.commerce promise (and deliver on) meaningful small business support. X.commerce is clearly committed to startups, having bought a couple and presenting funding opportunities to others through their VC Bait/VC Speed Dating events. A few key players are emerging in the X.commerce ecosystem:
Kabbageis a firm allowing online retailers to quickly access cash to purchase inventory without the complexity of big-bank loans—allowing online sellers to quickly take advantage of emerging market trends.
Kenshoo integrates and manages online advertising, allowing a reseller to optimize their Facebook, Google and e-mail marketing budgets, for example. In the X.commerce keynote demo, we saw a user dashboard which clearly indicated how an increased spend on e-mail had the best conversion value—without custom reports or needing to toggle between reports. What's more, the dashboard allowed the user to instantly adjust their ad spend. This is a critical piece for small merchants who may be incorrectly allocating their ad spends because they don't have time to analyze the results.
FreshBooks provides simple billing and invoicing services for small business. With PayPal's business-to-business payments, merchants realize a huge savings over traditional merchant processing—and the service is integrated into FreshBooks.
Milo, a startup recently purchased by eBay, provides a simple mobile app to browse live online and local inventory. With X.commerce integration, local merchants can easily place their inventory in front of online mobile shoppers in the same way that big retailers do.
RedLaser, another acquisition,provides in-store purchase support via barcode scanning. Now, with X.commerce and Milo integration, users can tap into huge catalogs of products with live inventory from both local and national retailers.
Where, another startup recently bought up by the X.commerce team,puts reviews, activity suggestions and Groupon-like local coupons alongside Facebook-integrated social tools. This means users can suggest activities (restaurants, for example) to their friends as a way to find things to do together. Where brings place information and reviews into the X.commerce Fabric.
The challenge: adding leadership to infrastructure
Purchases of startups, a stronger brand community and a clear commitment to be the biggest commerce player in the world—X.commerce's intentions are clear. Can they make it happen?
X.commerce's constituent parts—PayPal, eBay and the like—have become business-as-usual. Their combination further consolidates critical services and makes X.commerce a formidable competitor—or ally—for anyone entering the digital commerce realm (like Google Wallet and Square). Clearly, eBay intends to see huge surges in inventory listings and PayPal could benefit from increased transaction volume.
Right now, X.commerce seems to have solid technological backing, a strong position in the market and a healthy developer community. However, thought leadership around the future of commerce is lacking. The X.fabric behind the X.commerce platform is a critical tool for empowering small businesses, emerging markets, and new forms of entrepreneurship. So where's the discussion? The Fabric is also a place where innovation around the very nature of commerce, retail and merchants can change as middlemen are cut out and complexity is reduced. Conferences like Techonomy, TED, Wisdom 2.0 and the Compass Summit should have X.commerce leaders at the table to talk about how the changing nature of commerce is affecting (and being affected by) pressing world issues.
At the Innovate 2011 conference, a track existed on the future of commerce, but the tone was a little off. Presenters from Where, Milo and other firms created a world of what was possible with SoLoMo, but their messages fell flat with an audience of developers. While engaging developers in business innovation conversations is a laudable effort, X.commerce stands to benefit from creating an in-depth, focused conversation which invites more than developers to the table. Their Trends in Commerce conference track and Crazy or Brilliant site were a great start. To really be as disruptive as it aspires to be, the brand needs to increase its presence amongst major innovators in the startup scene and leaders within progressive Fortune 500 companies.
]]>X.commerce live notes—Keynotehttp://causeit.org/blog/2011/10/12/xcommerce-live-noteskeynote.htmlCauseit, Inc.2011-10-12T16:22:00Z2011-10-12T16:22:00ZJohn Donahoe (President & CEO of eBay, Inc. presenting)
9:22: We are at an inflection point—the commerce and payment landscape will change more in the next three years than the last 15
In almost half of all retail transactions, a consumer accessed the web at some poitn in the commerce experience
First and foremost, the consumer is in charge
Cosnumers have a mall in their pocket
9:29: We were the first to open up our platform to external developers. Now, there's more—we have opened the full commerce stack. Retailers are not tech companies, and so we have multiple stakehoders.
X.commerce is the world's first open commerce ecosystem: bring together the full suite of commerce tools and services and open them up so that you (merchants and businesses) can open up the world of a new commerce reality
Create compelling consumer applications
Partnering with merchants, not competing with them
Partnering with X.commerce platform partners like you
Matthew Mengerink (VP and General Manager, X.commerce)
9:40: X.commerce is the most complete commerce platform in the world. And it's open. As much about respecting the merchant's brand as the developer's independence.
The X.commerce ecosystem
SoccerPro—the demo
Ray Tanaka (@rtanaka) opens up the Magento store and Carlos' inventory and his online store is nearly complete.
Accepting payments, tracking inventory, tracking and analytics are all available. Look and feel completed—and you're done.
[eBay integration shown]
[Milo.com integration shown for local presence]
Bill Ingram, VP Product Management with Adobe
X.commerce integration
SiteCatalyst integration
Adobe's analytic tools are the perfect match for X.Commerce. Analytics drive business strategy and improve customer satisfaction, and must be intergrated across all channels.
[Magento enterprise admin shown with Adobe's analytical tools] This data tells the merchant where sales are happening and where to put marketing dollars.
Search is the default way to find products—direct path to purchase and high conversion rate. Are the searches your customers are using finding your products? [Search analytic tool shown]
[The interface for the end merhant user on Magento is pretty sexy—very simple flow showing marketing->searches->browsers->buyers with clear analytics #killerapp].
9:58 Kenshoo talks about their automated demand generation, demoed:
Flow: Kenshoo dashboard for ad spend, placement automatically into Facebook and Google ads.
Roy Rubin, Co-Founder, Magento
Positioned to bring developers and merchants together through extensions—even more powerful than apps. Can make changes to the core operating system.
Easy search for extensions that can be purchased and enabled with just a few clicks. Plug'n'play integration
X.Commerce
We intend to create a one-stop shop for extensions in 2012.
Mark Lavelle, VP Strategy, PayPal
Demos Tiny.me—sell items in 60 secs or less. A one-time ask for permission to sign in with PayPal credentials. Can use OpenID principles on your own site in a similar fashion after you go to x.com/identity to register your site.
Betsy Poirier, Director of Digital Channels and Partnerships, Toys R Us
Introducing partnership with eBay Local tab to offer in-store pickup of products ordered online (for those last minute purchases).
Can also use Red Laser on his phone to identify the product and find related products, purchase via Paypal on his phone and go to the local store to pickup at the customer service desk.
Social+Local+Mobile with Facebook: Katie Mitic, Facebook (now on X.commerce Board of Directors)
10:25: How do we find the best gifts? We find out from friends [wonder where this is going… :)]
The old new model was the collection of documents on the web to find information—but the new model, the second phase of the web is personalized with our REAL identities. No cryptic code names or weird handle.
It's discovery, not search. Facebook calls this social design: moving from the what to the who. Decisions about car purchasing, for example, are not so scientific and solitary—friends talk about what they love. Last Cyber Monday, Levi's traffic was from Facebook by 50%. American Eagle found that Facebook-referred customers spent 57% more than other customers.
The Open Graph as the map of all the connections between people and things. You connect to something on the open graph by Liking something. Mapping these connections put order to them and made them integrateable. Giving them the opportunity to like things was not enough. The open graph is about to be updated to do more than like—don't just like a book, but read it—listen to music instead of just liking it.
In commerce, customers can do more than just like them. They can own them, like them, add them to a wishlist and more. Friends can ask friends how clothes look on them, for example.
Social design takes word of mouth marketing and put a bullhorn to it.
Magento developers can now seamlessly integrate open graph actions into their toolsets. This means that your store can become social nearly instantly.
Forrester asserts that merchants intend to increase online spend up to ten-fold.
Recently, we've been working quite a bit in the realm of technical writing (documentation, and copywriting for technical audiences) and thought it would be useful to discuss what constitutes good, readable technical writing.
In our survey of the literature, we've found the following are some good tips for making documents accessible, understandable, and memorable:
Write short documents in short paragraphs in short, right-branching sentences
Bold and italicize liberally, when ideas warrant additional attention (and to disrupt visual uniformity)
Use bullets and numbering for lists of items, including steps, sequential definitions, and the like
Consider the best format to showcase your information: tables, charts, and infographics
We'd be thrilled to develop a one-page guidelines document, a brief readability crash course, for technical writers around the world, but we want to hear from you first!
What are some protips you have encountered, or resources for improving the readability of documentation and technically-focused copy?
]]>Community Manager Breakfast: Notes on Working With Your Development Teamhttp://causeit.org/blog/2011/10/11/community-manager-breakfast-notes-on-working-with-your-devel.htmlCauseit, Inc.2011-10-11T18:28:24Z2011-10-11T18:28:24ZWhen at the Community Leadership Summit in Portland a few months ago, we met Evan Hamilton from UserVoice. He hosts a monthly Meetup called the Community Manager Breakfast at UserVoice's offices, and today's meetup was a great chance to hear from some very talented community managers as they unpacked the thorny challenge of working with their company's development teams.
Causeit has had our own ups and downs with development teams; we have an internal Lead Technologist who is also a developer, but largely depend on clients' own developers or outsourc shops or independently contracted freelancers. We've found a few great pieces about how to connect your community, your own business cases for action and your developers so that eveyrone is aligned and on the same page, and we've integrated those comments into the notes we have from the meetup. Sorry we can't attribute it all perfectly—we had a hard time tracking names and handles. If you attended, please list your twitter handle in the comments and/or on the Meetup so we can all get to know each other better!
Here are our raw notes, centered around questions. Be generous with the writing, please—these are mostly unprocessed!
What works in your formal processes with developers? What doesn’t?
Many attendees related that the formal processes for accessing developers in their companies don't work particularly well other than for establishing priorities, and leans on more personal connections to get results and build relationships. Out of the conversation, a number of different questions arose, providing a bit of what-to-ask-after if you're interviewing a company to work with them or brainstorming with your team to increase communication:
How to work with management to re-prioritize?
How to communicate with the community about the problems they may experience when the developer can’t attend to it immediately?
Evan: how do you create the middleman to prioritize tickets, etc—so that the developers respect that prioritization?
One attendee shared that running social media listening post reports and ticket reports quantifying how many people are reporting an issue is a great way to prioritize by community impact. Storify reports from Facebook and Twitter are a great way to show what features get feedback one way or another.
How do you build rapport with your development team?
It also became clear that a lack of transparency about development goals/CM goals makes it hard for either side to ‘get’ each other. Jeremy and MJ from Causeit mentioned a focus on bringing people into meetings which aren’t ‘theirs,’ like developers in strategy meetings and vice versa.
CMs focused on supporting internal development communities seem to report more succes than community managers viewing only external communities (like customers) as true communities. For example, community managers who write user stories for developers can make a big difference for their internal and external communities simultaneously, while building rappot. Another community manager lets her developers know about their wins from/for the community so that they have the experience of acknowledgment and positive feedback which puts negative feedback in perspective.
How can you ease work with remote team members?
Again, manay community managers emphasized reaching out to your offsite developers as another community you ‘manage’ so that you can ensure you’re in the conversations that matter to your developers. Ideas like welcome notes when they join the team, CC'ing people on strategy (and not just bug/feature emails) and reaching out for online social events (think chatrooms and Google+ meetups) were all suggested.
That's great, but how do you build a functional internal development community? (a brief brainstorm)
Weekly meetings
Met devs on their terms: chat, etc.
Happy hours
Scrums
Using Campfire
Transparency
Developers: having them ‘get’ the use cases
Using your CM chops to let the devs know what’s up for users—what matters to them.
Do you use Yammer, Jive or other community tools?
CMs raved about a couple of simple strategies they've found to build up the fabric of their intenral development communities:
When new features are wanted or needed by community, and only some transparency is possible, what can you do?
Evan and other attendees suggest bringing the angry tweets and feedback from customers to the development and management teams to create a case for action, with reminders to the development team that the users have little to no access to what’s going on in the development plan. In other words, managers and developers who see customer complaints and, exasperated, throw up their hands and say 'we're doing all we can' can use gentle (or firm) reminders that end users often don't know what is being done or why their request/bug is being prioritized the way it is.
Other topics for discussion which were touched upon but not fully explored included:
How to deal with merged products/acquisition challenges?
How to bring transparency to CM?
How much truth can you tell your customer? When possible, immediate and clear response makes a big deal.
Time-boxing responses to feature requests, etc.
Using bugs or other breakdowns as a moment to connect with community and develop relationships
During DoS attacks etc, direct the energy and anger where it’s deserved, like at the hackers.
]]>X.commerce Innovate Conference: will you be there?http://causeit.org/blog/2011/9/29/xcommerce-innovate-conference-will-you-be-there.htmlCauseit, Inc.2011-09-29T18:10:35Z2011-09-29T18:10:35ZCarolyn Mellor, who we met at Jono Bacon et al's Community Leadership Summit, is the rockstar behind X.commerce, the PayPal+eBay+Magento commerce platform. At CLS, she told the Causeit team about the upcoming X.commerce Innovate conference coming up October 12/13/14 of this year, which has great tracks and an impressive speaker list.
Check out their innovative use of their conference-promo site crazy-brilliant, too—they've looped in a simple hashtag-scraping tool in a slick interface to prompt conversation and a thumbs-up/down about the emerging ideas of commerce which people are tweeting about.
Plan to see Matt, Jeremy and MJ at Innovate, and check in as we'll likely be blogging and tweeting a lot at the conference. We'll put our intended schedules up as we get a bit closer.
]]>Queers in Businesshttp://causeit.org/blog/2011/6/16/queers-in-business.htmlCauseit, Inc.2011-06-16T20:46:52Z2011-06-16T20:46:52Z
What inspires Queer people to begin small businesses? While the allure of the American Dream, avoiding pressure to conform to hetero ideals within workplace environments, and the entrepreneurial ‘bug’ could be the reasons, perhaps some queers choose being in business for themselves to finally play by their own rules and to contribute to their own communities.
Small business is a phenomenon which provides powerful opportunities for personal growth and development, social change and, of course, profit. The small business owner must possess and cultivate vision, drive, planning and team-building skills. Small businesses accounted for 60 to 80 percent of net new jobs over the last decade, according to the Small Business Administration, which also indicated that the United States’ most innovative products, services and ideas are most likely to come from small business. Without effective management and direction, though, those ideas may never get to market.
Fortunately, queer people are in some ways ahead of the game. We have already dealt with many of the hurdles associated with small business management in other areas of our lives. Maintaining a sense of self-worth and faith in our vision (without agreement from our surroundings) is a skill many of us have already cultivated in the face of discrimination in schools, workplaces and mainstream society. Queer people often excel at finding powerful allies, fighting for personal and collective visions and creating effective, supportive communities—all talents essential for success in small business.
The same skills and comfort with risk that many Queer businesspeople have used to their advantage in the corporate world equip queers to transform what’s acceptable and celebrated in business. A small business allows a queer person to take the energy and effort they’ve been devoting to recognition and equality in the workplace and put it towards business itself. Performance—not their gender expression or sexual orientation—may now be the primary factor determining their success. While Queer business owners, especially transgendered people, still must manage the disclosure and presentation of their identity, the daily administration of their business no longer need be an energy-sapping battle.
Queer chambers of commerce and business associations play an important role in furthering queer businesses’ efforts. After a recent presentation by Aditi Dussault of the National Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce, I left confident that advocacy for Queer small business is more powerful than ever. Due in part to the efforts of chambers of commerce, larger companies like Intel, Wells Fargo and Apple are prioritizing the inclusion of Queer businesses in their supply chain while capital lenders, mainstream business associations and the media are recognizing the influence of queer business and the queer dollar. Queer chambers also serve to network and develop wholly-queer-owned businesses to strengthen their collective power, providing a web of connections much like the ‘old-boy’ networks of yore.
We have never had as hospitable an environment to be out in small business, nor have we had as much collective expertise. Simultaneously, due to our ability to be open and out, queer small businesses have an unprecedented capacity to direct our efforts and economic resources into our community; we can attend to the important healing needed for equality and self-confidence—while causing our own success and livelihood.
MJ Petroni previously served as an executive officer of the Portland Area Business Association (a Queer chamber of commerce), and is the founder of Causeit, Inc., which has supported over 150 minority-focused businesses, social enterprises and organizations through coaching, planning and public relations. Investigate at www.causeit.org or call toll free 1-855-CAUSEIT.
All rights reserved. We are open to re-posting and publication; inquire here.
Posted 22 August 2007; also published in Echelon Magazine.
Of the ten virtuous act spoken of in Buddhism, four are verbal: not to lie, not to engage in divisive talk, not to speak harsh words, and not to engage in frivolous conversation.
—The 14th Dalai Lama
In business, it's often easy to focus on what we perceive to be broken or wrong. Instead of focusing on what's wrong, try looking at what works and what could work better. From that lens, what might transform in you conversations with other team members? What could you acknowledge them for producing?
There is a value of the Causeit vision which seems quite apropos to His Holiness' comments. In a recent retreat, we declared:
Our conversations are about works or what doesn't work in servive of profoundly important visions; we don't dwell in the old paradigms of right/wrong, good/bad, blame, fault, guilt or shame.
What could you adopt in your organization to build consensus around a value of generous, compassionate communication that also produces the results you're committed to?
]]>Working with Social Privilegehttp://causeit.org/blog/2011/3/25/working-with-social-privilege.htmlCauseit, Inc.2011-03-26T00:16:12Z2011-03-26T00:16:12ZIf you had to go online today to find a photo that represents your company or business team, how easy would it be? Could you simply search for “business” on a stock photo site? How many words would you have to add to find a picture of someone in your profession who resembles you? In what circumstance would it be easier, or harder? Whether it is finding a photo, talking comfortably with co-workers about your personal life, or simply feeling safe or welcome in the neighborhood of your office, the degree of ease or difficulty you experience in any of these scenarios could be the result of social privilege.
The term “social privilege” is used to explain a phenomenon where unearned advantages are awarded to people in a dominant social group. Presumptions of innocence, credibility, or competence are all advantages of social privilege. Though it may seem to be an uncomfortable topic, it is important to realize that privilege has broad-reaching benefitsCauseit had to search for quite some time to find this photo on a popular stock photo site. Why is it so hard to find women of power in images? Look at the photographer's mindset and the buyer's assumptions. and disadvantages for everyone. People in the United States who are identified as being a part of the dominant group of white, male, heterosexuals are still subject to the effects of oppression, even if only because of how narrow thinking can be in places without diverse contributors.
Privilege is not always visible. In addition to race, gender, and sexual orientation there are a number of other assumptions that we may hold in everyday interactions with others. Our ideas about family structure, class, and mental health may disadvantage or privilege others in our eyes based on what we think we know about them. When privilege is further examined as an intricate web of experiences and interactions, almost everyone can see places in their lives where they feel either accepted or othered as a result of cultural presumptions.
At Causeit we do not see social privilege as good or bad, but we acknowledge that it exists and has real effects on our businesses and our lives. One example of the power of social privilege in business is the archetype of the white, hetero-masculine businessman that still serves as the dominant image of success. Another is the difference in the perception of an assertive woman compared to an assertive man in the workplace. When we examine the expectations we hold for different roles in business, we can start to see how social privilege norms may be affecting our workplace.
At Causeit we believe that social privilege can be shared and exercised for good! While we can’t choose whether we receive social privilege, we do have a choice of how to use it. We can challenge privilege by recognizing the value of experience and knowledge that is different from our own. We can subvert our own privilege by advocating for a diversity of voices, prioritizing those that are often not heard. We can share privilege by using our influence to empower others in a system where they are disadvantaged. With that said, it is not necessary to try to map out every complexity of social privilege that exists in your life. Instead, try to live and work in a way that acknowledges social privilege by asking yourself what assumptions you hold and where they might be coming from. Questioning ideas we have about the people we interact with is a positive way to make our workplace a more comfortable and more diverse community that is better equipped to take on all obstacles to success.
By Maggie Mahoney, with contributions by Jessica Long and MJ Petroni
]]>BlogHer BEThttp://causeit.org/blog/2011/3/25/blogher-bet.htmlMJ Petroni2011-03-25T21:14:02Z2011-03-25T21:14:02ZKaplan University's Jacqueline Jones (Executive VP of New Product Development, and a Causeit client) speaks about "managing up" in your organization at BlogHer | bet
I'm here at BlogHer's blogher | bet 2011 conference. It's been great to see the amazing speakers talking about being a woman of power in business, how to "Manage Up" and how to deliver a pitch which is both effective and authentic. Here's the conference concept:
If you're a woman who has a big idea that involves technology, the Internet or social media, we have an opportunity for you. With the leadership of 50 pioneering entrepreneurs, technologists and business leaders, BlogHer is hosting a special event for women who want to start something. Whether you're considering a start-up of your own, or innovating from inside a company, we invite you to join BlogHer's 2011 Business, Entrepreurism and Technology conference on March 24-25 in Silicon Valley.
Check it out by following @causeit and the hasthag #blogher or #blogherbet on Twitter.
;)
"Augmented Shadow" by Joon Yong Moon (2010, South Korea)and the ouput of a display. I/O/I adds a second I, signifying an input back into a system, creating interaction. I was surprised to find almost every piece in the exhibit invited touch or movement, often in intuitive ways, like a table which rendered shadows based on the location of cubes placed on it.
;)
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