Women’s Internet History Project advisory board is comprised of prominent women investors, business owners, public relations, journalism, and non-profit sectors. They are helping us gain manage the vision of the project, introducing us to other women to help fill in the gaps in the database, and pointing us in the right direction for help.
- Elaine Paque
- Francine Hardaway
- Gloria Feldt
- Lisa Napoli
- Mary Boone
- Renee Edelman
Francine Hardaway
A technologist without credentials, geek-to-human translator Francine Hardaway bought her first Apple product in the (very) early 80s, abandoned it for the supposedly portable Compaq a few years later, and returned to Macs soon after. By the late 80s, she was haranguing her daughters’ journalism teachers for continuing to make the students literally cut and paste up the school newspaper copy when desktop publishing already existed, and had sacrificed their high school popularity for their greater good. She also tried to give them fax machines for Christmas, which they returned.
Her passion for hardware died when the Internet “came along” and she realized the future was in software. She adopted email when her daughter at Cornell showed her how to talk “free” across the country by going through the connected university systems. Her first real experience with the power of online communities was in 1996, when insomnia after her husband’s death led her to discover Widownet, followed a discreet year later by Match.com.
In the early 90s, she made herself less popular with her friends by insisting that they all learn about email and the Internet, although they all assured her they would be dead before they needed to know it. She started a weekly email list that evolved over the years, and is now known by people who still don’t read blogs as “Francine’s blog.” Francine’s real blog — for those “in the know”–is at http://blog.stealthmode.com She can also be found on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Plurk, Identi.ca, and every other social network someone asks her to try.
And, oh by the way, she is a serial entrepreneur who counsels and invests in other startup entrepreneurs at Stealthmode Partners. She can tell you how long it REALLY takes to get beyond those early adopters.
Gloria Feldt
Gloria Feldt is a leading activist and author who blogs about women’s lives, rights, and leadership from where the personal meets the political. Her newest book, No Excuses: 9 Ways Women Can Change How We Think About Power ~ Tools for Leading an Unlimited Life, will be published October, 2010. It reveals why women are stuck at 18% of top leadership roles and, through both inspirational stories and practical tools, shows how we can redefine power, lead ourselves with intention, and reach parity from the boardroom to the bedroom for good—our own and society’s.
Former president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Federation of America whose journey to leadership began as a teen mom, Gloria was dubbed “the voice of experience” by People Magazine. Her books include New York Times best seller Send YOURSELF Roses co-written with actress Kathleen Turner, The War on Choice, and Behind Every Choice Is a Story. Her commentary has been featured in national publications such as the New York Times, the Daily Beast, and Salon; find her Heartfeldt blog at www.GloriaFeldt.com. Glamour honored her as Woman of the Year; Vanity Fair named her to its Top 200 Women Leaders, Legends, and Trailblazers; she is a Women’s e-News’ 21 Leaders for the 21st Century. She serves on the boards of the Women’s Media Center and the Jewish Women’s Archive, and the advisory boards of Our Bodies, Ourselves, Women’s internet History, and SheWrites.com. She teaches “Women, Power, and Leadership” at Arizona State University. She and her husband Alex Barbanell have a combined family of six children and fourteen grandchildren. Connect with her on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter where she hangs out far too much. photo credit: Mary Anne Russell
Lisa Napoli
Lisa Napoli remembers the first time she sent email. It was in the days of Prodigy, when you could only communicate with others on the same service. Thanks to a former colleague of hers from CNN who was an early Internet pioneer, Mark Benerofe, she also got to write a bit for the service. She also remembers the first time she started into the grey, slow-loading magic of a Netscape page, just after the blockbuster IPO. She was working at Delphi, which Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp had bought in the nineties in order to get into this newfangled thing called the Web.
When Delphi exploded, Napoli went back to her roots as a reporter, and convinced the NY Times Electronic Media company to let her cover the burgeoning industry for them. A new section called Cybertimes had launched, and many veterans of the paper didn’t even know it existed. So they relied on interloper outsiders to contribute. The column she wrote, called Hyperwocky, was an early example of a blog.
After her next job, as Internet correspondent at MSNBC, got axed in a round of budget cuts, Napoli believed the new medium had sufficiently come of age and that her nice long run in that world was through. She lucked into a job in the retro medium of public radio, as a reporter at the show Marketplace, and just wrote her first book, RADIO SHANGRI-LA: What I Learned in Bhutan, the Happiest Kingdom on Earth. It’ll be published by Crown in February.
Mary Boone
Mary Boone is an early innovator and expert in the use of technology for collaboration. She helps senior leaders consciously design organizational collaboration to improve business results, drawing on both new methods and new technologies.
Mary began her career in the field of teleconferencing in the early 1980s, and she was involved in early experiments with collaborative “workstations” at The Institute for the Future in Menlo Park, CA. Her early work on the Internet was based around helping IT departments discover innovative applications of the internet for business purposes.
Ms. Boone’s work integrates diverse disciplines. Her formal degrees are in organizational communication. She also has over 20 years of experience and extensive personal networks established in the arenas of IT, social media, leadership development, knowledge management, organizational behavior, and the meetings industry.
Boone has written hundreds of articles for the trade and business press, and she has authored several books, including Leadership and the Computer (Prima, 1991), and Managing Interactively (McGraw-Hill, 2001). Her Harvard Business Review cover article, “A Leader’s Framework for Decision Making,” (co-authored with David Snowden) won an award from the Academy of Management in 2008.
Boone’s work has received praise from thought leaders such as Tom Peters, Don Tapscott and a former Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives who placed Leadership and the Computer on a required reading list for the U.S. Congress. She has been featured in major news media such as The New York Times, CNN, NPR and The Wall Street Journal.