Why a blog?

Hi, my name is Saskia. I've been writing since I was a kid, like, really writing. Novels, poetry, I even had an obsession with magazines (some of which have turned into my favourite portfolio pieces). From there, I got two degrees, both of which included a lot of writing. So it made sense for me to start writing here.

But I do work in the industry. I work for a small non-profit known as The Newsmast Foundation. The Newsmast Foundation are all about improving social media and expanding this thing called the Social Web (which I'm sure I'll go into more later).

My job is a lot of different things, from app testing, to PR, to data analysis, to curation, to marketing. All of it centers around understanding social media, why we use it, what we want from it, and how to make it better - often before people realise it themselves.

It's kind of crazy to me that when I was a kid, still in secondary school, there were only two girls in my Computing class (sorry if I completely forgot someone) but it certainly wasn't something on the cards for women in that area.

The highlight of my coding career was building a series of YES, NO, IF lines in Python then stringing them together to take you on something which could loosely be described as a journey.

But in that class, our teacher (also a woman) took me and my fellow female friend aside, looked us in the eyes and said:

Now, my friend, is in a much more 'tech' role than I am. She's a developer working to keep the favourite apps of the country running with a pretty big firm. But I'm taking my Woman in Tech badge and pinning it proudly to my chest, even if what I do isn't quite what that teacher meant (or have the same paypacket as a dev!).

I think tech needs more people like me. That's not me blowing my own trumpet, I just think it's true.

Science sees creatives and scientists come together to better explain their discoveries, science communicators are members of the field respected by all.

Sure, every successful tech company has managed to get their message across in some kind of fashion. Usually thanks to very talented marketing & copywriting teams. But we're entering a new age where every idea is a tech idea, there are no more limits on what we can do, but there's a whole lot more people asking how we can do it.

I want to explore this. I'm hoping this blog will be a good starting point. I want to help explain the ideas behind new social technology in friendly, human, terms, whilst also sharing some of the thoughts I have on online social spaces.

I'll explore the ideas behind the ideas, the thoughts inside the tech, and how some of these new social spaces can (hopefully) be a huge benefit to people like us. Maybe it'll go off topic every now and then, maybe (by some miracle), I'll keep posting to a schedule. We'll see what happens together.

Either way, at the end of the day, I really do want FORbetter to be a place where change is something that is actually possible.

At The Newsmast Foundation, we talk a lot about 'Knowledge for all for good', it's a motto I really believe in. But I think there's more to it.

I look forward to seeing where it goes.