Today I received an email from Dani Malik asking for suggestions for women to speak at conferences. I provided suggestions and then proceeded to spam every woman I know professionally in my address book with the same request (sorry ladies… not really though). Regardless of putting a list together, I received some AMAZING responses, from testimonials, to references to anecdotes about being a woman and how that impacts their lives professionally, including speaking at conferences.

I’m still frustrated that I don’t have an identifiable “thing” that I feel I can do to affect this. Trying to tackle this issue is hard not because it’s just a hard issue, but it’s part of a more complex problem, which is women and career issues in general. Or women issues in general. It can be very easy to get stuck with paralysis by analysis - specially for me, the over-thinker.

I am not comfortable addressing feminist questions. Or discussing feminism. I suppose because I am part of a small elite and have been shielded from most of these issues. Maybe because I was brought up by a mother who told me constantly and repeatedly that I could do anything, a grandmother that would play ‘president’ with me (where I was president of Brazil and she was my second-in-command) and a grandfather who challenged my intellect at every opportunity. Or maybe because I really didn’t care about what other people had to say about roles. Or maybe because I was always a big sports jock and I firmly believe that being involved in sports, specially in leadership roles, make a big difference in how you face other non-sport situations. Who knows, whatever the reason, I have not experienced or never felt strongly that I was discriminated or been presented with barriers that were that different from what my male counterparts were presented with.

Or maybe not, maybe I’m just kick-ass talented and know how to overcome such barriers — but even writing that makes me feel self conscious (very likely the reflex of being brought up ‘as a woman’, where regardless of your cultural background and upbringing, will likely assume modesty as positive trait). Still, whatever the genesis, I don’t feel knowledgeable enough to discuss bigger feminist issues, so I’ll try and stay away from that (while probably very relevant and likely an influencer on the issue of speaking at conferences).

So ladies, what is up with us? I don’t want to ask why are we not speaking at conferences anymore, but what can we do, what can I do, to encourage and support you to do it? What’s missing? Where’s the tipping point? Are we missing tools? Understanding of the ROI? Time? Motivation? Peer pressure?

What would help you? I want to hear it - I’m very interested in doing something about it.

The most recurring note that I found, from different contexts and conversation, was ‘why aren’t more women presenting at conferences?’ I don’t have an answer for that and don’t really know what I can do about it. I’m forcing myself to deal with everything in this pile so I figured writing about it would help me think through that issue.

I truthfully never really cared about that. In the past I was usually so amped that I got to go to a conference or talk that I didn’t much mind who was talking. I notice though that almost every time I return from a conference, someone I know will ask that question. Living in the US has also heightened my perception of that fact. I don’t think I experienced an unbalanced ratio of women speaking in public back in Brazil.

I was discussing this with Kit the other day and she made an observation about seeing presentations that make her go “I can do that!”. I feel that way all the time. But I don’t really present much. Why is that? I know I procrastinate a lot, but I actually do enjoy presenting things to people — but I can’t remember when was the last time I gave a public presentation.

Last year I remember reading Kottke’s post on this topic and his conclusion “[these] concerns are not getting through to conference organizers or that gender diversity doesn’t matter as much to conference organizers as they publicly say it does.” I think that’s partially true; I believe we haven’t gone from ‘aware of the issue’ to ‘acting on it’. And that’s probably because it’s not clear what can be done.

So what can be done? It’s easy to blame conferences, but I’ve been part of conference committees and I really don’t know what we could have done differently to address the issue. I’m hoping to ask that question to more of my peeps and see if I can get some ideas, but I have a hypothesis. When these issues come up, we usually try to look for the root cause (and that’s a lot of effort in itself), so we never really spend the energy working on a solution.

While that makes people aware of origins of the problem, still doesn’t help anyone much. We learn that women typically have family commitments that take precedence over career building activities like public speaking, that some have high standards for what they would talk about and feel like they don’t know enough so they don’t present, etc, etc, etc…

That reminds me of what Jesse said at five-minute madness during the last IA Summit when he was disappointed that new people didn’t come up to the microphone: most folks presenting are making it up as they go. It’s entirely true. And that’s not a negative thing, it’s just a fact. But I do know that myself and other women I know feel strongly that just making something up to talk seems wrong in some way. Why? No real reason I can think of - even if you’re presenting something very rough, putting it out in the world allows that thinking to evolve. Presenting is not regurgitating wisdom, it’s about initiating conversations.

I’m starting to think we’re mistaking facts of life with empty excuses. For example, I have a tendency to over-think things. I can come up with every edge case and scenario you can think of for a given situation, which makes me a good information architect, but a very frustrated person. So it’s easy to think of reasons why I shouldn’t bother to make professional public speaking happen.

But deep down I know it’s important. It’s important because it brings diversity to the conversations that people get exposed to, it’s important because it gives me professional visibility, it’s important because of a number of other things. It’s important — when something is important you just make the time, you make it happen. I am pretty sure that most women know that this is important.

There is nothing at all preventing more women from engaging in professional public speaking. Let me propose an approach then:

If every woman I know professionally today makes a pledge to speak in at least one conference in 2008, I am confident we can make a difference in presenter diversity issue from previous years.

I may not be famous, but I know a lot of people professionally. A lot of them are women. What do you say, shall we?

I have always jumped on the alpha and beta band-wagons and am the first in line of coming soon lists, so I join stuff just to see what it’s like left and right. While that has always generated a volume of username and passwords I couldn’t possibly keep track off, it’s sort of a non-issue as some of these services become uninteresting and whiter.

Recently, though, a lot of the these services have started to become more of connectors of existing services than anything else. While openness and sociability have long been attributes of these systems, it’s only been in the last few months that I’ve seen it realized in the sense of function reuse and content cross-pollination.

Jott is a really nice service that allows you to call in and leave notes to self and others. It also allows you to automagically have your notes transfered to I Want Sandy, which is another service with similar intention but different approach. I Want Sandy allows me to interact with it via Twitter, which serves an entirely different purpose, but which has a very good input method that’s omnipresent in my life.

As you can imagine, this results in triplication of information — which totally works in these three instances because things only get divulged to the connected services to the extent that I want (as defined by my preferences). Not all systems play nicely like that though. And it becomes increasingly difficult to remember which systems I can count on and rely on to get to what I have gathered.

Last week I was in Chicago and I took this photo at Midway airport as I proceeded to the TSA line. I captured that with the intention to share it with Jared, who loves TSA as a metaphor in his presentations. I snapped the photo with my phone and uploaded directly to Flickr. Then I sent Jared a public message via twitter about it. Jared is connected to me on Flickr, so he probably also saw it on his friend feed. Because my message was public, Bill followed the link (he is also connected to me on Flickr so he’d get it eventually anyway) and added a comment asking if he could use the photo for a presentation. I immediately went to Twitter and told him he could. Then I thought maybe I should post that comment on Flickr as well in case anyone else wanted to use that photo. Two minutes later I checked my email and Bill had asked me the same question in a message (probably thinking I would not see his comment on Flickr soon enough). I wrote him back in confirmation.

Then I stopped and realized a) the sheer amount of content produced throughout this story b) the amount of interactions across and within different systems that allowed this to happen and c) the convoluted duplicated and triplicated content that came out of it as a result.

What this will mean for the non-hardcore early adopters of tomorrow? Will any of these products even reach such audiences? Will these things also wither and die for me because of the cumulative effect of these small duplicative efforts? How long until this social noise gets in the way of the conversations I actually want to have?

While I won’t promise to blog here, I have been thinking of ways to make this thing more interesting and relevant - probably surfacing all the other channels where I AM actually having a conversation in (twitter, discussion lists, etc) instead of thinking about it as a publishing platform. Meanwhile, just wanted to report to the world that I am having a grand time.

Catch you on the flip side (that is soooo American, what’s up with that).

Yes, you read that right: I’m not going anywhere, yet, I’m going forward!

Coming to Comcast was a great opportunity for me - I wanted to work for a large organization and experience the trials and tribulations that my clients expressed when I worked as a consultant. I also wanted to manage a larger team and experience the challenges of long-term people management. Comcast welcomed me with an opportunity to do all that and more. Not only to manage people, but to start and build a team from scratch; not to just be in a large corporate environment, but establishing a new competency (information architecture and usability) across a very large organization.

This was a very enriching experience and I’m extremely satisfied with the outcome. What a learning experience! Fortunately for me, realizing that I reached this point didn’t mean I’d come across a dead-end at Comcast. Comcast Interactive Media is continuing to grow and so we came up with the Principal position, allowing me to keep growing and focus on new strategic challenges.

As Principal of Information Architecture I’ll be responsible for evolving the vision and establishing UX best practices across Comcast Interactive Media properties. Those include Comcast.net, Fancast, Ziddio.com, GameInvasion, Chill and all Comcast Cable, High-Speed Internet and Voice services.

I couldn’t possibly do that without passing on the baton of managing team and practice to someone else. That is a hard call to make given that this is “my baby” and I want the very best. Which is why I’m THRILLED that my dear friend Dennis Schleicher stepped in to take on the Director of IA role. Dennis is one of the nicest people I know. I’m not just saying that because we share a love of cheese. He’s also very talented and inspiring to be around - nothing seems impossible or hard when you discuss it with Dennis - you know you are talking to an anthropologist when you start answering your own questions. Welcome Dennis!

I’m very excited about all this so I’ll try and blog a little more frequently to talk about what I’m up to. The last I’ll add today is really the only reason I decided to write this post, to say thanks to the absolutely fantastic team that made this possible for me. Crystal Kubitsky, Eddie James, Austin Govella, Aparna Ramchandran, Paul Kali, Cynthia Hoffa and David Fiorito. You all rock. I hope I have reminded you of that frequently enough and I hope you are as proud of this team as I am. I can’t wait to continue working with you.

Mel and I argue all the time. It’s not negative, vicious or combative, on the contrary, it’s often energetic, positive and leads to growth and enlightenment on either side if not both. Though I’ve known we are a good match for each other for over five years, it’s been only a couple of months that we have lived together in the same house and this physical closeness has cemented that assumption. It has also created more opportunities for conflicts to happen. And by conflict I simply mean A expresses something different from B’s worldview and a negotiation needs to happen to resolve the mismatch.

99% of the times that we get into a debate, regardless of the origin or the resolution, we have meta-discussions about the way we are talking (what we are saying as well as what we are not saying). I have attributed that to a) Mel being the best-read person I know and having a wealth of knowledge and vocabulary that results in me learning a new word or meaning in every discussion, and b) my interest in the link between thinking and language, and therefore it’s impact in people’s behaviors, c) we were each raised in a different cultural setting with a different primary language (ok, ok, and d) the fact that lesbians are notorious for processing everything).

We can be in the middle of a discussion about something really important or emotional and one of us will go off on a tangent about the word usage in the sentence one said to explain why they were acting in manner X. When you’re already pissed off, that can be quite enervating, but it’s also fascinating (scientifically), so as painful as it may be (to get your very important topic interrupted by linguistic analysis), the scientific interest often wins.

Which gets me back to Haidt and Lakoff. As Andrew points in his post, Lakoff is very influential in IA and, to me personally, opened the doors to a part of science that I’m very fond off. To Lakoff everything in our thinking is grounded in metaphor (and therefore, language is how those metaphors are expressed). I feel that personally being bi-lingual and knowing how thinking about the same thing in English versus thinking about it in Portuguese affects my judgment and interactions - the metaphors are not quite the same when the language, thought translatable, is not quite the exact match.

But there is something about that fundamental assumption that language plays such a large role in our actions that bothers me. I always felt like it was accurate but insufficient. There is something else, something related to moral dimensions that affects behaviors as strongly as language, if not more strongly.

Living in the US for the past three years, having been raised in Brazil, gives me a perspective on the US society that I don’t believe a native would be able to appreciate (likewise, I lack that perspective about Brazilian society). I see incredible debates about social issues where it’s easy to spot how the specific use of language wins or loses the argument. At the same time, I see debates where the use of language is “at the same level” (if there is such a thing - roughly equivalent) and yet, one side is absolutely more successful than the other in the behaviors they affect. I see the same issues being discussed in Brazil and all things being equal, the outcome is entirely different. It would be easy to encapsulate the difference as “cultural”, but that doesn’t explain much. I believe the fundamental difference, which makes up the ‘cultural’ difference, is about moral dimensions.

I wouldn’t know who to quote to support this argument, but I firmly believe morality is personal. It’s informed and reflective of cultural and social morality, but cultural and social morality are just aggregates of the “majority”.

Mel (I think because of being Jewish - her social/cultural morality?) has very high standards for social interactions, specially how to treat people. People who are rude, people who are vicious, people who are unfair and people who try to take advantage of her upset her to a degree I find unbelievable. Any of the resulting behaviors that I would consider small and quickly dismiss, like talking louder or “making a face” or sounding dismissive, upset her to the core. I get frustrated because I don’t want to see her upset and will say something like “Why do you let something so small get to you?” or after I feel it’s been sufficient time, “Why can’t you let it go?”. Though I may agree about how other people’s behaviors were indeed negative, I cannot internalize the values that drive how she interprets people’s behaviors. I can certainly appreciate that perspective, but the extent and intensity of the reaction makes no sense to me.

That’s one example, there are hundreds of things like that. When I can’t solve a problem to my satisfaction, even if it is not my problem, I get extremely frustrated, much the same way she does when subject to someone being rude to her. In my thinking, there is no problem without a solution. I have always been the kid that had an answer for everything; whether or not that was the answer people were looking for. That drive is what led me to the career I now pursue. In my head, everything has a next step and every question has an answer: If you don’t know the next step or the answer, you haven’t looked hard enough or you haven’t asked the right questions. So, this past month when we had 5-8 flies flying around the house at any given time (I HATE flies), I cleaned every nook and cranny, ensured every window, door and access to the outside was sealed and eliminated any possibility that flies could get in or grown in the house. Plus I killed all the flies currently roaming. And the flies continued to appear. This kind of situation gets me at wit’s end and leaves me feeling overwhelmed, disappointed and distressed. It’s a violent reaction. I like this example because language has no impact in the issue. I hate flies in English, Portuguese and French and I can’t understand where the flies are coming from in either language. Thinking about the problem in any of these languages leaves me equally distraught. There are people I know who respond to a situation like this with “oh it’s a mystery” and “we’ll never know” or something else of the sort and are able to let it go; some can dismiss it immediately even. My reaction makes no sense to them.

Moral dimensions are so central to how we think that it is not surprising how much impact it has in how we behave, including how we express ourselves through language. All this thinking is telling me I need to study this further because Lakoff is not quite cutting it anymore. One initial question that comes to mind is: if language is the basis of our thinking, we can identify and de-construct it with something like speech analysis or a similar tool. If moral dimensions are the basis of thinking, how do we analyse it? what methods capture that level of abstraction?

Thanks Andrew!

I’ve been buying a house and working hard so I decided blogging was not a priority right now. I will make it a priority again after I move into my lovely new place (next week) and things start to settle down. Meanwhile, I’m sharing my brisket recipe because yesterday I cooked the most delicious brisket I have every a) cooked and b) eaten.

I don’t cook with recipes and don’t like following instructions so consider these ‘guidelines’ for a yummy saucy brisket. Be creative!

Liv’s No-Fuss Brisket

Effort: 15 minutes preparing, ~3 hours cooking (unattended)

Ingredients:

• 1 3lb Thin Cut Brisket (check this if you don’t know the difference between brisket cuts)
• 2 large white onions
• 2 tablets of beef bouillon
• 5 table spoons of Dijon Mustard (I recommend Maille)
• 2 tea spoons of powdered cumin
• 1/4 cup sea salt
• your preferred spices

Preparation:

Wash and clean the fat off the brisket. Recipes usually recommend leaving some fat on the brisket to add to the flavor and prevent it from drying. I agree with that but my tip is that it is hard enough to take it all off, so the amount you can’t remove will be more than enough to keep the fat flavoring you need. Poke holes with the tip of your knife on both sides so it can absorb the juices well.

Slice two onions (0.5cm - 1/6 in slices) and place as much of it as you can fit at the bottom of your baking pan. Coat it with powdered cumin. Grab a handful of sea salt and rub all around the brisket. If you’re a fan of garlic, stick whole cloves into the holes you poked (don’t overdo it, use no more than 3-4 cloves for 1 lb of beef). Place the brisket in the baking pan over the onions.

Pre-heat the oven at 450F - 230C.

In a separate dish, dissolve 2 tablets of beef bouillon into 1.5 cups of hot water. I prefer Carne-de-sol bouillon, but that’s not easy to find outside Brazil. Beef will do just fine (that’s what I used last night) and you can use other bouillons to vary flavor. Add 4-5 table spoons of Dijon mustard and mix until it’s uniform.

Coat the brisket in the pan with the sauce and add any spices you like - I recommend some more cumin, freshly grated white pepper and a few bay leaves, but I believe people should spice their dishes with their preferred spices, specially when they are cooking hearty comfort-food meals. Don’t add more salt, remember you have sea-salt and concentrated beef bouillon in there!

Place the remainder of onions on top of the brisket and wrap the pan in aluminum foil. Make sure it’s tightly sealed and place it in the oven, bringing it up to 500F - 260C. Leave it alone for 1 hour then bring it down to 350F - 175C for another 2 hours.

Go do something while it cooks otherwise you will be tempted to open to see how it’s going. Resist the temptation. While you wait I recommend making plain white rice to have with the brisket or a simple couscous with parmesan cheese and/or pine nuts.

After all the cooking is done, remove the aluminum foil and coat the brisket to make sure it’s moist. Bring the oven up to 500F - 260C and let it bake uncovered for 15 minutes - this allows the sauce to thicken. You might want to slice it to serve - if you’re cooking for the week (as I am) I prefer not to so it doesn’t dry up) - otherwise, it’s ready to serve.

The meat should be so soft you won’t need a knife. It literally melts in your mouth. If you try this, please leave a comment and let me know how it turned out.

I know that there is a product that allows me to attach things the way I want, but I can’t for the life of me remember what it is called, much less where to get it. I have a hard time even describing it (lacking the right vocabulary in English I believe) - Eddie and Aparna tried to help me and I think they figured out what it was but they also couldn’t think of a name.

It’s a type of non-stick adhesive (?), not a tape, but some kind of dough (?!), often gray or white used to adhere paper to various surfaces. Eddie said it was big in the 80’s in the US. To me, it looks sort of like epoxy, but that’s not quite it since most epoxy products harden permanently fairly quickly.

This substance is really flexible, like molding clay, except you can reuse it over and over (eventually, after a lot of exposure to oxygen it hardens. If you keep it closed in a plastic bag it lasts for ages). You take a little chunk, roll it into a little ball and press it between the sheet and the surface you’re adhering to.

I’ve roamed two large art supply stores in vain. I have a faint memory that the original package was from the UK; I recall seeing it used at the British Council in Sao Paulo in the early 90’s (Yikes, I wish I had used that memory cell for something else…)

This is driving me nuts, so please help me if you can. Thanks!

Spending just 10 minutes on it allowed me to frame it much differently (better) than I had before when I was just considering how nice it would be to have this thing available to me as a user. 4 sketch pages later, I posted it on the wall and let it sit. 10 minutes later I had added 3 post-its notes with additional improvements.

I’m curious to see where this goes. Even if I never go any further with this particular idea, I’m feeling that it’s helping me getting into the ‘idea generating’ mode, which I think is the only thing that can truly propel our thinking to move forward.