A little bit off-top about gendered spaces.
I just returned from BarCamp Latvia which was my first unconference and one of the few non-LGBT events I attend. At the LGBT events I am usually surrounded by gay men and in BarCamp I was surrounded by presumably heterosexual men outnumbering women by about four times. So now you can guess who runs blogs in general and what ‘citizen journalism’ means. Views of male citizens with thousands of people in the audience.
The event itself was extremely interesting in terms of structure and atmosphere. Friendly and simple people plus a lot of familiar faces I was happy to see. It’s also a place where anyone can become an organizer, I spent couple of hours at the registration desk which was fun and useful for organizing future events. Presentations ranged from purely technical to detailed experiences of building social networks. I have a lot of new ideas which I hope to use for this blog.
For me the event was marred by the last presentation of a website much requested by the audience, it was a Latvian website featuring nothing but female breasts and the audience cheered and yelled sexist remarks. I felt very out of place there and also powerless. The presenter said that they were wondering how to get more women to use internet and suggested writing about shoes and cats as a solution. This was supposed to be funny.
