i love this site, but i’m not 100% clear on who’s behind this whole project.  Is nerd girls a sub-group under IEEE?  Are the forum moderators the same people who’s profile pictures we see on the other pages?

there are the nerd girls on the profiles page, the nerd girls in the you tube video, us nerd girls on the forum… and the overlap or lack thereof is kinda confusing.  Are there going to be more profiled nerd girls on the other pages?  how do you get to the inner circle of nerd girldom?  are we going to start chapters?

+1

I’d like to know who the site moderators are so I know who not to piss off so I don’t get banned. :D

Hello, I hope I can help clarify this for you.  NerdGirls are not part of IEEE, we are an independent group started by Dr. Karen Panetta, my former advisor at Tufts University.  She is, coincidentally, currently the President of the IEEE Women in Engineering Board.  Panetta partnered with documentary filmmakers Paola di Florio and Karen Johnson to extend the reach of Nerd Girls utilizing film, television and web media.  The forum moderators are both NerdGirls featured on the site and in the video, as well as our talented webmaster. 

The girls featured on the site are also featured in the videos.  There are additional girls in the videos who have worked with Panetta on engineering projects such as the solar car and the lighthouse.  We plan on profiling more girls in the near future.  Stay tuned to this site about opportunities for getting into what you refer to as the “inner circle of nerd girldom.” I haven’t heard anything about starting chapters, but why don’t you start a thread and get some opinions on it?

Thanks for replying Lauren, but I’m not too impressed with this community so far and probably won’t start a whole lot more threads.  I run a good-sized website and know that it takes a lot of work, and serious representation from the owners so people won’t feel like the project will be abandoned someday.  And, well, I don’t get that feeling from this website.  It seems like something that someone with good intentions set up hoping that it’d just run itself and they wouldn’t have to talk with the membership base… that’s not how websites work.  That’s why none of the community members are sticking around here.

I’m sure nerdgirls is a great thing at your school but if you want it to be an internet movement, you’ll have to take that aspect of it seriously.  I should not have had to wait two months to get a reply on this thread.  There shouldn’t be weeks between blog posts.  The google pagerank should not still be 1.  I’m not trying to be mean, just saying that an online community takes serious dedication and a motivated group of leaders who are churning out content and keeping the discussion going… you decided not to go that route, so I’m not optimistic.

It happens, you’re not the first.  It’s one of the issues with women engineers… we need to support each other and form communities, but we’re too busy being, well, women engineers :)

spacefem, I’m going to have to agree with some of your sentiments while disagreeing with some of the things you’ve said. I also believe that this site needs more momentum in order to keep moving; more blog posts, maybe some youtube videos or a myspace/facebook fan page/group or anything else that can help drive traffic. You may consider taking some of the more active members of your community and recruiting them to come up with new blog topics too (you can implement an approval process to mitigate unwanted articles until people become full fledged members or something). I do believe that communities take effort, but it’s not a real community if it doesn’t run itself. I think this group may still be in the birthing process so it’s still small, and it will take parenting to help it grow into a mature society, but I don’t think there’s any reason to give up optimism yet. If you run a successful site yourself you know that no matter how active an admin is nothing moves forward unless the members really support it, so, if you really do support this group and its ideals, rather than throwing your hands up in the air and saying “yur not doin it right” be part of the growth; drive traffic here yourself and urge others to do the same. I’m glad to see that it’s been discussed in your forums, but if you really feel this site needs momentum then give it some.

I, too, agree that the site itself needs some maintenance in terms of Search Engine Optimization, and I’ve found a non-critical bug wherein the forums don’t use proper stack processing on nested bbCode tags, but there are only so many people currently supporting the site, so perhaps reaching a good cruising speed should be the first priority. Also, one of the largest factors in Google placement is cross-domain linking where a site links to several other sites of related material, and other sites link to it; the more people coming here and talking about it the more links that will wind up in these forums, and the more blogs and personal sites that will link here. I am a bit concerned about the longevity of this project, but I support it’s goals and hope for the best, so I’ll keep coming, and keep posting, even if it takes a while to get a response. I don’t show up every day myself, I can’t expect everyone else to.

Lastly, if you really support female equality, as well as the goals of this site to challenge the stereotypes then perhaps it might be worth noting that other people won’t have much of a reason to stop looking at “women engineers” as woman engineers instead of just engineers that are all people just the same if you, a supporter, continue to ride on statements like “It’s one of the issues with women engineers… we need to support each other and form communities, but we’re too busy being, well, women engineers.” We’re all busy, men and women alike.

I wouldn’t say I’m throwing my hands up.  If things turn around here, I’ll be thrilled.  But there’s no way I’ll tell my website members, “Let’s go make nerdgirls great!” until I see the same commitment from the people who run this website.  That’s like building a mansion on rented land… you’re developing on something you have no equity in, with no guarantee that it won’t get pulled out from under you, and no one to make supportive improvements underneath the surface if needed.

You can’t make a community with admins alone, but you can’t make it with absentee landlords either.  Most forums actually have the opposite problem… not enough members!  I think the publicity this summer was a great jumpstart.  But the members aren’t sticking around.  So really, I’m posting all this as free advice for the movement leaders, to tell them from my experience how to have an online community that’s not dying.  take it or leave it.

Understood and appreciated, just thought I’d put a different perspective on it; Honestly, I don’t think you would have bothered posting this at all if you were actually throwing your hands up, but I didn’t want people to lose their drive because of your post either. I’ve been on both sides of this line in the past (starting/supporting successful and unsuccessful communities) and I’ve also seen the transitions between them. I hope that these statements inspire change for the better without detracting from the positive opinions. :)

Thank you guys for your suggestions.  I will be sure to forward them on to the people who are really in charge of running this site.  I am going to have to agree that many of the members of this site are very busy female engineers, so daily participation in the community is not really an option, but I do agree that months before a thread is replied to is too long.  We are just developing, and have run into some road blocks, so don’t give up on us yet!  We are still building a member base.

Hello spacefem, HerAlterEgo, and The Xenocide,

Thank you so much for your comments and suggestions.  We hear you loud and clear! 

I wanted you all to know that we have just held a meeting to discuss each of your concerns and that we are on the case.

The bottom line is that this is your community and we are committed to supporting you.  In addition to posting in this forum, please feel free to use the contact us link at the bottom of each page to reach us directly with any additional comments, questions, suggestions, topics of discussion… anything at all.

Stay nerdy,
The Nerd Girls Team

Thanks for acknowledging, I’m looking forward to a long bright future here, lets work together and make it happen.

Staff - 19 September 2008 03:01 PM

The bottom line is that this is your community and we are committed to supporting you.  In addition to posting in this forum, please feel free to use the contact us link at the bottom of each page to reach us directly with any additional comments, questions, suggestions, topics of discussion… anything at all.

Thanks!  But I already felt free to post on the forum and contact you with the links at the bottom of the pages.  I was really hoping we’d hear something more like, “The Nerdgirls are going to become an active part of the community so you & the other members don’t just feel like draft horses pulling our forum along.”

Regarding the blog, as one of the two volunteer bloggers:  There’s stuff going behind the scenes that I’ve heard about, and it seems there must be stuff that I don’t know about at all.  I am prepared to write a blog post per week as is the other volunteer, but our posts are often not added to the site for weeks (we aren’t able to post ourselves).  So once all my pending posts are up, I write a new one.  Hopefully this can start happening more frequently in the near future.  And hopefully we can get an RSS feed with the first block of the post to give people a reason to come to the site ;)