From its inception She’s Geeky has taken a unique approach. We are not a once a year big national conference like BlogHer. Nor are we an An open source brand where anyone can produce an ad-hoc event with our name, like BarCamp.
We also are not a membership organization and do not have local chapters. There are many existing groups that have local chapters that we already partner with including; Girl Geek Dinners, Girls in Tech, Women 2.0 and WebGrrls. We can imagine local chapters of some groups like perhaps LinuxChix or DevChix forming after gathering at a She’s Geeky unconference and meeting. A group that gave themselves the name CodeChix formed after meeting at our 2009 Bay Area event. At our January 2010 gathering another group focused on entrepreneurial women working on startups formed and has yet to name itself. Understandably we do not allow groups that form after an event to call themselves She’s Geeky as this dilutes our brand and can be misleading about what She’s Geeky is.
She’s Geeky is an event and we invite and encourage existing local women’s groups to attend with our intention being to provide a space for everyone and anyone to gather, not to compete for local membership with these groups. We see great brand value in being recognized as a neutral event space – open to geeky women of all kinds – and not captured by any one particular group or niche. Our intention is to contribute to building local capacity within these existing special groups by bringing them all together occasionally (once a year) along with women who do not belong to any group. She’s Geeky events encourage, build and strengthen local/regional networks of women in a very board range of geeky (STEM) fields.
A good brand/network for ongoing meetings is Girl Geek Dinners, they explicitly don’t organize conferences. We are working on a way to support groups that form out of She’s Geeky events to use the She’s Geeky logo/name as part of their origin story but not as their name or primary brand.