At 4 a.m. one night last week, in a fit of sleeplessness, I couldn’t help drawing some parallels between a recent tubing adventure and a seminar we co-hosted at AAUW.
Last weekend I went tubing with a group of friends on the Potomac River. After a lovely, peaceful, and relaxing first trip, we decided to get back in our tubes and head down again.
It was on this second trip that, for whatever reason—the sun, the early morning—we ran into all kinds of problems. Toward the end of the trip, my friend tried to wave me over to his perch on a rock, but when I got off my tube to walk over to him, I found myself neck deep in quick-moving water.
My tube was pulled away from me, and I got caught up in the current and dragged through several sets of rocks before coming to a stop a few yards later, bruised, shaken, and minus a flip-flop. In a heroic attempt to save me and my shoe, my partner came through the rapids with our tubes, banging his head twice on a rock. We eventually recovered and made it to the end, where I promptly burst into tears at the thought of getting off my tube again.
At the seminar, entitled Using Online Communications to Energize Your Community, Expand Your Audience and Advance Your Mission, the presenters talked about how organizations can and should create online communities to engage with their members and other interested parties. They explained that a necessary component of creating that community is a willingness to give up some control over their message to allow the community members to discuss it fully and engage with the organization.
We even had our own little meeting-style adventure when a panel member recorded Peggy talking about our struggles with the overwhelming response to our Where the Girls Are report. To show us just how amazing technology really is, the panelist posted the recording to her blog as we sat in the meeting.
But we in the Communications Department—the message controllers, if you will—were dismayed that she chose to record and post our challenges in a meeting full of interesting, positive success stories and asked her to take it down. (In fairness, I think timing played some part in her decision; Peggy presented right after we learned what Utterz was.) The panelist later posted a tweet (I learned something!) about us and updated her blog, saying that we didn’t “get it.”
But the problem is that we do get it, maybe a little too well after Where the Girls Are. One minute you’re floating along in the calm, welcoming waters of the blogosphere and the next you’re neck deep in rushing water and your tube is floating away from you as you rapidly approach the white water and all the sharp-edged rocks hidden underneath the surface.
Riding the bus back to our cars on Saturday, wearing one of my own shoes and another I’d found on the riverbank and a band-aid over an ugly cut on my knee, my friend asked if I would ever go tubing again. “Well,” I said, “not tomorrow.”
We’re at the forefront of blogging feminist organizations, and we’re all very much learning as we go. I personally believe, like our critic, that the advantages of a vibrant online community can outweigh the costs and go a long way toward boosting an organization’s integrity, but there’s bound to be some trepidation.
We’re not giving up, though. Check out AAUW Dialog’s Goodreads group, our next baby step into the world of social networking. It’s like tubing in a pond during a drought. But more fun.
