For the last two weeks I have been curating the @femedtech account on Twitter, which has pretty much been a blast. These are just a few of my thoughts before I hand the baton over to Joyce (@catspyjamas) across the globe in Australia.
- On the first day I had no idea where to begin, the shared Google doc had some great ideas but I just wasn’t sure what I could bring to the table. My network was pretty small and I wasn’t going to any exciting or edgy conferences. To get myself off the starting blocks I plumped for looking locally at as many accounts that had anything to do with women and technology and followed them. This did feel like I was taking action and many did indeed follow back.
- I had organised a Wikipedia staff workshop with the fabulous Rebecca (@restlesscurator) from Wikimedia Ireland, on the first Monday, so that felt like a very appropriate beginning. I was also mulling over how it felt to be curating an account that was made up of many voices. How much would I bring my voice to it, versus how much I was attempting to channel previous voices??
- Next up was checking through the suggested hashtags in the doc and retweeted from those and other key items of the day, this got me into the flow for the first few days.
- I decided to have a wander through the internet to find other items of interest outside of Twitter which led to some pleasant wandering around the web and some interesting finds.
- Then a colleague was shortlisted for an award and as I was sharing this I thought that boosting other women in education was something that I could focus in on over the remaining time, weaving it through the other edtech orientated tweets.
- Other’s had referred to thanking new followers but being busy I didn’t get around to this so I opted to leave it until the end of each week and then did a group message wishing everyone a good weekend, again it felt more conversational, more personal (despite the group element).
- Somewhat ironically, I spent the first weekend sharing things about not working for free, not saying yes all the time etc which of course took time to research and read about before sharing. My boundaries are totally blown at this stage in the game however, so I was more than happy to be ‘working’ on femedtech (but boundaries are something I need to pay attention to sooner, rather than later).
- During the last few days I tried an activity to get more conversation going rather than just broadcasting out and asked people to share examples of work by someone who would gain from it. It was lovely seeing the reactions as this developed.
- Finishing up I again tried to focus on the human and spent the last day conversing rather than straightforward retweeting. When I say conversing this was pretty much entirely through gifs – what a fab way to spend a Friday and a perfect end to my time ‘in charge’.
I wish Joyce all the very best and hope she has as much fun as I have and now that I won’t be researching interesting femedtech stories I fear that I am actually going to have to tackle the dreaded housework this weekend, urgh! Bye for now.
Special thanks to Frances Bell the hand over guru, for all her support.
Image attribution: 
Photo: Wikipedia / Shakko
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