Having just attended the 2012 Geek Girls Con, I can say, without reservation, I am one. I get excited about science fictiony things, I play with tech toys, and I understand the significance of the number 42. I tweet. I skype. I blog. Yep, I’ve got it bad, that geek thing.

Geek culture, in many ways, doesn’t include much of a feminine perspective. Many women feel invisible within the ranks of nerdness and want to expand their voices in that world. To that end, the Geek Girl Con was created last year by a hard-working group of volunteers. The first one, last summer, completely sold out. This year, there were over 6,000 attendees, and it seems that it’s going to continue to grow next year.

I really enjoyed it. The panels, which talked about everything from creating comics to being a geek parent, were informative, hilarious, and engaging. My favorite one was about the Kickstarter experience. For those who don’t know, Kickstarter.com is a way to fund projects or businesses using a crowdsourcing model. It also is a method to gain new customers at the same time. Let me give you an example:

The Little Brown Farm on Whidbey Island started a kickstarter to raise $21,000 for new cheese-making equipment and to enhance their ability to teach cheese processing on the farm. The process is innovative: describe your project, create some levels for sponsorship, tell everyone that you have a “kickstarter” and that they can receive some great premiums for sponsering you, set a time limit, and wait to see if they sponsor you and you meet your goal. If you do, only then do the sponsors get charged. Once they are, you have to fulfill the requirements of the sponsorship. The Little Brown Farm used their classes, exisiting cheese stock, and notecards as premiums, which they then sent out after they met their goal. They raised over $22,000 altogether, introduced their products to some new customers, and didn’t have to pay back a loan. How cool is that?

This online tool works really well for small farmers, especially if they get the community involved. I’ve also seen small town theaters create projects to update their projectors to digital. All first-run movies are being sent to theaters in digital format, only, starting next year and small, historic theaters are disproportionately impacted by this. They must make the change or show only old films which are still available on film stock. A Kickstarter may be a viable way to help theaters make this change without going into serious debt.

(See my previous post, An Open Letter to Hollywood, on the difficulty we, in rural communities, have in trying to see a movie. It’s a bad business model when you make it difficult for your customers to give you money, no?)

But I digress. The Geek Girl Con was excellent fun and I would recommend it to any nerdette or nerdette supporter. (Yes, boys are welcome.)

And now, an obligatory and purely gratuitous picture of Chewbacca, who showed up at the con. Enjoy!