Here’s a fun little mental exercise, which ends up with a curious result that I just noticed. First, let’s classify participants in a group blog as entering the group through either a top-down or bottom-up route. The top-down route begins with offline connections: Person A operates a blog; she offers a co-blogging position to Person B, who she knows through some in-person avenue (such as an old classmate). The bottom-up route is based on connections made through the blog itself: Person A operates a blog; she offers a co-blogging position to Person B who she knows solely through contact on the blog itself (a well-regarded commenter). We can divide T & S permabloggers into these two categories, and when we do, a strange pattern emerges.
Listing the permabloggers, along with the origin of their participation, and their classification, we get:
Nate, Matt, Adam, Kaimi. Four regular participants in the LDS-law list decided to start a group blog. These are original members, and so are neither top-down nor bottom-up.
Gordon. Nate tells the group that he’s got a friend who would be interested in joining. Top Down.
Greg. Kaimi tells the group that he’s got a friend who would be interested in joining. Top Down.
Russell. Nate tells the group that he’s got a friend who would be interested in joining. Top Down.
Jim. Nate and Russell suggest that we recruit their former professor. Top Down.
Kristine. Kristine (who isn’t acquainted with any of the permabloggers) shows up on the blog and promptly wows everyone with her comments. Bottom up.
Julie. Julie (who isn’t acquainted with any of the permabloggers) shows up on the blog and promptly wows everyone with her comments. Bottom up.
Melissa. Melissa may not seem cleanly within the bottom-up category, because she knows Kristine. But her origin is bottom-up, because she’s not originally introduced to the group as “Kristine’s friend” (that would be Kristine saying “guys, we ought to try to recruit Melissa Proctor,” which would lead to a top-down designation). Rather, Melissa shows up on the blog and promptly wows everyone with her comments; permabloggers then ask Kristine “who’s this Melissa person?” Bottom up.
Wilfried. Jim tells the group that he’s got a friend who would be interested in joining. Top Down.
Frank. Nate tells the group that he’s got a friend who would be interested in joining. Top Down.
Rosalynde. Rosalynde (who isn’t acquainted with any of the permabloggers) shows up on the blog and promptly wows everyone with her comments. Bottom up.
Ben. Ben is acquainted with Jim, Nate, Adam and Kristine. He sends Kristine some e-mails on T & S topics, which puts him on our radar; he’s invited. Top Down, I think.
There’s a very interesting pattern here: Every one of the female permabloggers came to the group through the bottom-up process, and every one of the male permabloggers came to the group through the top-down process.
A few cautionary thoughts:
1. This is a very small sample size.
2. Perhaps I’m cherry-picking the data. Ben and Melissa are both in a gray area of sorts, and a case could be made for Melissa being “top down” or for Ben being “bottom up.”
3. The original four are excluded, but much of our interaction on LDS-law also looks kind of like a bottom-up sort of connection.
4. This pattern isn’t consistent through guest bloggers. Some female guest bloggers, like Claudia Bushman, Linda Hoffman Kimball, and Brandie Seigfried, came to the group through top-down connections. Some male guest bloggers, like Ben Spackman and William Morris, came through bottom-up connections. I can’t think off the top of my head why the pattern should exist among permabloggers and not guests. So perhaps it’s just random.
And yet, if it’s not random, what are some implications?
-Bottom-up connection is less dependent on “old-boy’s networks” and is more purely meritocratic. How interesting, then, that each of our female permabloggers came to the group through this route. The men in the group all started out with friends on the inside; the women (with the exception of Melissa, who as I noted had already impressed the group by the time we realized she had a friend on the inside) came to the blog as total strangers, and proceeded to make an impression.
-Our female permabloggers have impeccable credentials (the same as the male permabloggers), and they’re all clearly very good at blogging. Yet, none of them were sufficiently plugged in to whatever-networks-we-have to receive a top-down invitation. What does that say about our networks, and their accessibility to women?
-This drives home for me the value of the comment function. Without comments, we’re not only a bunch of blowhards, yakking amonst ourselves about whatever tickles our fancy — we’re also, perhaps, an environment less likely to invite permanent blogger participation from women. Every one of our female permabloggers came to us through the comments, and every one of them is a great addition to the blog. Chalk one up to the value of blog comments.
I was just thinking again at how people joined the group. I’m also not 100% sure on the chronology of Frank’s participation. I think that Nate suggested him as a blogger before he started participating in comments. I could be wrong there.
The women got on board the old fashioned way. They EARNED it.
Kaimi,
I think you’re wildly wrong about the implications you’re trying to draw here, but explaining why would require divulging the details of our prior back room conversations, which I think should be kept private. If you ask me, you’ve gone too close to the line as is.
A related thought that has crossed my mind: if a commenter’s thoughts were absolutely brilliant*, but the commenter was a young, moderately conservative, male, lawyer, would that commenter have much of a chance of being invited as a T&S guest commenter or permablogger? My guess is probably not. I think there is a good reason for this: there is value in having a mixture of perspectives here. I understood this was the explanation behind who was invited when T&S expanded a while back.
*Of course, my comments are generally not even sort of brilliant. So no matter what anyone says, the thoughts discussed in this comment did not come to me as I was wishing that I had been invited to be a guest or permablogger here.
It’s also interesting to note that everyone of the permabloggers appears to have a graduate degree of some sort (J.D., Ph.D. or M.A.)
or has done graduate work of some kind. (Many from prestigious if not Ivy League schools). Is that a coincidence or one of the criteria for placement as a permablogger. Just curious.
Kaimi,
I think the first several of your additions (all male) were within the first month or so, some in the first week, in which case I am not sure about seperating them from founders.
Rosalynde was not unknown. I believe Nate knew her, and Steve certainly knew her. I (barely) knew her.
As for me, I was participating in comments for a couple months before I got a guest invitation. I had been around for 6 months or so before I got a perma-blogger invite.
Re: Melissa and Ben, I think you are right that is dicey to call one top-down and one bottom-up. But I was not there so couldn’t say for sure.
Since I have first been around (4 months into the blog), the additions were Kristine and Julie, then the last five all together. All of the last five had previously guest blogged and all had commented and all knew somebody by other channels. The really interesting ones are Kristine and Julie, the only two to come in without prior connection to anybody.
So, I think there is no statistical case here, although I would not be at all surprised to discover, given more data, that there are differences between the way men and women enter blogging.
A more interesting old boy network would be the over-education of the perma-bloggers. Round one was lawyers, round two was academics. Do we have anybody without an advanced degree or obvious intentions on one?
CJS beat me to it. There is no explicit educational prerequisite, but you’d have a hard time convincing a jury of that once they saw the hires!
Frank, Nate didn’t know me (though there was a subsequently discovered oblique connection), nor did Steve realize that I was someone he had known in a previous life. Neither of them alerted me to the blog, recognized me when I was here, or exercised any sort of a connection. (Not sure why I’m feeling huffy about this!) I was totally and completely bottom up.
Oh, and you knew me? I certainly didn’t know you. I thought we eventually figured out that you knew my brother?
good Lord.
Yeah, as stated, I don’t know that you can make a case for disparity when the largest source of variance are the ideas of those making the final decisions.
As for education, now there is something that is common in the nacle. At Splendid Sun it is Ph.D.s, elsewhere it is J.D.s. Graduate school is a repository for people who have a dialectical affinity. Moreover, graduate school trains people to be critical (we hope) – et voila: Le Blogernacle.
This is a huge diss against all regular commenters who haven’t been invited to be permabloggers. We clearly lost the smart contest. ( grin )
For no good reason this reminds me of some lines from the Fugitive:
BTW, how does a non permablogger who is allowed to submit Notes From All Over fit into the equation? Does that mean I’m at least somewhat brilliant? Or am I merely preventing that feature from turning into highlights of the National Review?
I also think you could call perma-bloggership blog-tenure (with all the ramifications of such an appelation).
RW
Yes I did know you, but I’ll admit to nothing! I also know your brother, barely.
So it appears your status is the same as mine? Although you did know bloggers, you first commented of your volition.
As for the internal workings of T&S, Adam is referring to the often decisive role that goat entrails and the flight of birds plays in our decisions. Who are we to resist the augories?
This question is off topic (mostly) but has been rattling around in my head for the last few weeks. Why are heavenly messengers scarcely (never) women?
I find the idea that there are any selection criteria almost hysterically laughable. It has always seemed to me to be an almost absolutely ad hoc process, with the criteria changing with every decision, sometimes even during the time that the decision is being made. That’s the nature of an entity run by volunteers with no clearly defined raison d’être and nothing of very much value to distribute.
Of course that is just the kind of situation in which we might expect to find results that conform to what appear to be unconscious criteria. The education level of the permanent bloggers might be one such criterion, though I think it has more to do with who we know or run into. As J. Stapley points out, that has a lot to do with who blogs–and whom we have worked with in some way.
seven – Talk about threadjacking … nice job. : ) It’s a good question, but I doubt anyone will have any good answers. If we’re lucky it could lead into a lengthy, overwrought discussion about gender inequality in the church.
A connection between blogging and advanced degrees may be jobs sitting at computers with browsers and little supervision.
Frank, I didn’t know any of the bloggers at all when I began commenting, although I had heard of Jim Faulconer. (I knew one of the commenters, John Fowles, who turned me on to T&S in the first place.) I never told anybody I was interested in joining, and although I have no knowledge of the process by which I was invited (nor am I asking for it here!), I don’t see how it could have been at all connected to anybody I knew.
I frankly find Kaimi’s conclusion completely uncontroversial: women have limited access to social networks among men formed in professional training and practice, and thus less access to its (limited, and dubious) benefits.
Re #10: Thank you Steve; my feelings exactly.
John M. and Rosalynde are right on. However, Rosalynde, why the extra attention to make sure we know you were strictly bottom up?
Steve, I know the answer to that one. The wives of the heavenly messengers are too busy with their blogs to get out much.
RW, you are absolutely right. I was not talking about T&S bloggers. I was thinking of John as a blogger and possibly Jim who I assumed you knew indirectly from Becky.
Rosalynde’s comment (no. 20) raised an interesting question that may deserve its own thread. Since I lack the keys or authority to create new threads, I will attempt an innocent semi-threadjack.
How did everyone here initially find Times & Seasons or the Bloggernacle in general? I got an invitation to join the LDS-law list in law school (sent to all law students at BYU, I think), but ignored it. When I went looking for the list as a lawyer, I found T&S within a few weeks of its founding. With one exception,* I had never heard of any of the permabloggers before, but I was immediately hooked.
*I had helped edit a book review Nate published in the BYU Law Review, and I think his name appeared in the email I received regarding the LDS-law list.
Shawn: I set the ldslaw list up when I was a 1L at HLS and then emailed every LDS law student that I could find on the internet. I believe that I got one of the librarians at JRLS to get their IT department to send an invitation to every student in the school.
CJS, good question! I actually don’t know why I’m pressing this point… Probably because it’s Frank who’s pressing back, and Frank always brings out the best in me! ;)
Kaimi,
Karen Hall was a Top-Down guest blogger (she’s a friend of mine), and could have been a Top-Down permablogger, but she, and Aaron Brown, another friend, were wooed by BCC while we had a temporary hold on adding any more law school friends until we added more non-lawyers.