Today I resigned from Iron Bloggers SF. I made it almost five months, I guess. Groovy.
It started with a few small things, and snowballed into a large enough issue to push it to the top of my “queue of things to discard to make more time for other things in this queue”.
At the most basic level, I am bored of it. While it looks great on (digital) paper, the premise as executed doesn’t play out the way I would prefer. I thought we would be blogging and supporting each other, and every so often we would have an excuse to meet in person, and solidify the bonds between internet commentors. What happens is that so many people lapse that we have to drink each month or less, or the money pool becomes unwieldy.
I’m an adult, I can go out drinking whenever I want. However, it is difficult to incentivize taking the time to share your voice. I had hopes that would be the case; unfortunately it didn’t pan out in this instance.
That aside, there is the issue of so many white male techies. I find myself paying more attention to the group dynamics and body language than the content of their conversation; it is very boring. I don’t want to know what you are working on, or about the latest gadget. I want pain, hope, redemption, passion, and a sense of wonder. Half the time the posts are written in that robot speech that does well on ranking sites, and the drink-ups feel like homogeneous networking events.
Of course, there have been a couple of instances where someone made an over-the-top, uninformed comment about women’s groups, or stating how they got where they are completely on their own, no privilege or society gave them anything…
Normally I would embrace the idea of challenging folks, of bringing the discussion around to just how privileged they are, etc., etc. However, having a child and being busy helping those so-called charity cases have a platform to speak through, well, it changes my threshold. I could try to change the group, advocate for more self-education, and work on individual cases of misinformation. It is a cop out, but I am just so tired at the end of the day, and that is before work.
So, I am out of that. I’ve met some really interesting folks, and I intend to keep in touch with them. I also plan on incorporating them into a more family-friendly, non-booze-centric series of events, so we can do all that important in-person bonding. And if I meet diverse folks who like drinking instead of blogging, I will definitely suggest they dilute the Iron Bloggers. Perhaps in time it will become less boring, and they will become an interesting, active community. I hope they will have me back, then. 