Nov 11 '24 by Rose Kaz

I give thanks weekly, sometimes even daily. I also find Thanksgiving to be a bit of a farce, followed immediately by one of the most massively marketed days of gross consumption as a national sport, not to mention the whole high-jack your country vibe that the Pilgrim colonial story forgets to add to the small pox-covered blankets so graciously shared with the indigenous people of the Americas. I promise, this post is a glass half-full article. 

And please, mansplainers, kindly won't you stay out of my DM’s? Thank you!

All that said, I will do my best to be an optimist about both gratitude and the digital community we can lean into with the current state of both the world and the ever adapting technologies that serve us. Yes, serve us as its benevolent overlords and lordesses not the opposite.

Afterall, we humans write the code, at least for now anyway. Though not nearly enough of a diverse writing committee aka developers and coders but we are working on it before we are written out of the history books in trying.

My obsession with both using #techforgood and the importance of community is pretty much my life’s work. And even though I’ve recently taken over as main contributor to the Boss Blog in the last few months, I know that my gratitude list always has connections to thought leading women and femme forward industry disruptors at the top.

But lately, I need more than just gratitude lists and saying thanks for my $12 a dozen eggs and hard to find medications. Really, I swear, I have some uplifting things to say here. This constantly nagging feeling I have that we are quickly becoming less community focused and more tribal with a capital “I” globally. This leaves me and many others I speak to more anxious than ever about how we do community care; even with a more matriarchal way of leadership & developing tech with inclusion in mind at the very top of my gratitude list.

Also, please remember the opposite of Patriarchal order isn’t a Matriarchy. Please note the gentleman who give the Wiki definition are, well, male. Patriarchal organization is top down, “might makes right” and leaves little room for diversity, equity or inclusion. Whilst a Matriarchal order does prioritize those structural inadequacies, it also does not leave out male leadership and or men. Again, mansplainers please stay out of my dm’s. Thanks!

Why I care and maybe you could, too!

I attended my undergraduate studies at a farm school. Not because I was a country mouse, far from it in fact. I was and still am a city mouse who likes all sorts of boots, not just shit kickers you wear when bringing the cows in from pasture. I chose Warren Wilson college because it had such a unique focus on community and student lead work crews; most all students, faculty and support staff lived on the sprawling 1,100 acre campus and participated in maintaining the pillars of the WWC triad: academic education, student run work crews ranging from cow pasture duties to HVAC, plumbing and pretty much anything a campus needs to run. Add a commitment to community service hours off campus and the average Warren Wilson student was decently exposed to circles outside their own upbringing, became fairly well educated from a liberal arts perspective and ambidextrous af, willing to put out a yard fire with a thimble and a garden hose.

True story.

In short, my 3 years at Wilson taught me the value of doing good work in the community and surrounding areas, returning back to campus to share meals and being encouraged to participate in academic discussions, active political campaigns and learning to co-pilot student lead rallies and protests. In short, WWC taught us students the value of civic engagement and our individual value was expressed through the collective. I received my Poli Sci degree from a gun toting Libertarian, a Red Book carrying Communist and a Wall Street Journal reading Republican. - Well this is how they all identified themselves at the time. Things may have changed.

Fast forward the tape give or take 20 years and many Wilson graduates have gone on to build amazing communities, businesses and social impact orgs of their own. One could say that my building of LBI Digital is an obvious extension of the traid’s training. And I can see that but also wonder if this insatiable desire for a community like that which raised a young, curious Rose into a globe trotting producer with big visions of building a better, more inclusive internet on the web’s next update, is maybe just a pipe dream of liberal arts folk lore.

Maybe I am a visionary. But so was Bucky, Jobs & Gates.

Most innovators are visionary, out of touch with the dumpster fire that can be reality and willing to continue the vision no matter the storm. I can relate.

Covid gave us a window to really reprioritize how we spend our time, resources and energy, well those of us that had the luxury to do this. And I will add to my gratitude list that I’ve had a lot of time to study the internet and the community of women I’ve been building since 2014 when I started my women lead production company and then when I started LBI in 2017 as an in person conversation focused event series with ‘bossy’ women.

And in this ‘getting back to normal’ phase in a ‘post covid’ world, I’d say we are anything but normal. With the intention to stay optimistic on this post, I won’t include the long check list of current dumpster fires that likely number far more than what was B.C. ‘normal’.

( B.C. = Before Covid) AND we now have an even clearer view into the crack in the facade of both communities and how technology is utilized.

So, what can we do now besides make gratitude lists and send thoughts & prayers??

Yes we can be kind and hold open doors, use our damn blinkers and help old folks cross the street. Great ideas. Always.

AND let’s activate more sharing as actual caring, aka Mutual Aid

In our most recent LBI Digital Podcast, we talk with industry disruptor AJ McCreary in Portland, OR and how her organization Equitable Sharing Circle is doing the seemingly impossible.

Sharing IS f*cking caring (and so is SEO, LLMs and backlinking properly )

I started this blog to better share proper SEO with people who are interested in searching the web about women so that when anyone starts to Google such a phrase as ‘Women in…..’ the first 5 things that come up would not be related to our body parts. Please and thanks.

Also, true story.** Did a quick Google check and we are doing better, ladies. Certainly there is still much work to be done but at least the Women in labor, orgies and similar scenarios are further down the list. I want the community of internet users to gleefully search about ‘Women in…..and find immediate SEO generated keywords like: Women in business, Women in tech, Women in leadership, Women in shit kicker boots, etc etc. 

I’m throwing around some commonly heard but possibly not always commonly understood tools of tech and their creative uses so that we can use #techforgood. I hope to break down how doing things like simply connecting our threads of thoughts, thanks and resources can be to build a better internet for its next version.