Listics

Kaliya Hamlin and Mary Ruddy are here at the SSA.  Great joy to meet each one of them.  This is the benefit of face-to-face gatherings.  You can meet people who are genuine and deep and good at what they do.  I’ve paired Mary and Kaliya in this post because they are both into "identity."

I met a great handful of others for the first time as well, everybody from Ann Geller to a woman named Regina whose last name I didn’t get.  Regina is heavy into Indo identity politics, and she had a presentation with her that she shared.  I suggested she connect with Global Voices people!  I met Jon Turow and deserted him… left him standing there taking in Regina’s presentation while I went to search for another drink.  I met Deborah Finn, the cyber-yenta…. Deborah and I had crossed paths online recently.  Deborah introduced me to another woman who has all kinds of vowels and an I and L or to in her name.  I am going to be embarassed when I discover who this person is.  Right now I am suffering from some combination of social aphasia and social dyslexia and the names aren’t coming like they shoudl (<– illustrative typo–).

I met Veronica, from TechRepublic and BNET… Veronica and Jon need to hook up since BNet needs writers who know finance.  I just put this together and will mention it tomorrow to each of them.

I met Liz Lawley face-to-face for the first time, and Jon Garfunkel.  And Halley’s son Jackson.  And Hylton Jolliffe.  And Vin Crosbie.

Chris Nolan was there and wonderful and gracious and funny.  Charlie Nesson was there. 

"Namedrops keep falling from my head…"

JD Lassica (didn’t remember meeting me in Nashville, but why should he.)   David Weinberger - funny and charming (Ann Geller’s husband).   Stowe Boyd.  Halley.

And the Degas exhibit was wonderful.  I snagged pictures of "The Little Dancer Age 14" among other things.

Early in the evening somebody was worried that this was another male biased conference demographically speaking.  As the night went on, it seemed to me that were a lot of women there.  Also, there are at least three I was hoping to see who I understand won’t be representing… Susan Mernit, Judith Meskill, and Danah Boyd.  They were invited though.

Ethnic diversity is another matter… the headcounts for non-whites at tonight’s gathering were horribly under-representing… I’ll do a scan tomorrow just to have something to gripe about.

This is actually shaping up to be a very interesting get together.