Greetings ladies (and gentlemen), 

I’m here to float an idea around: are there any ladies out there who would be interested in joining together to write a blog? This is something that I’d like to do, and I realize that having a team to collaborate with and learn from can only magnify the potential impact of the project. To me, the best blogs out there have a collective voice, are a prolific resource, contribute interesting perspectives, and produce quality content on a reliable basis that is all inline with a collective goal. This is what I hope the blog will achieve.

The topic would essentially be twofold: women writing on international security related issues, and women in international security jobs (interviews, career advice from the classroom to the boardroom). The tone of the blog would find a balance between that of the Levo League and the Foreign Policy blogs, depending on the subject. The point of the blog (and blogging in general, I’d say) is not just to generate content, but to initiate a conversation with the readership. This will include comments on ongoing issues, resurrecting ignored issues, resource filled posts, advice columns, book reviews, interviews, and more. I would ask each contributor to use her own voice and see each post as the beginning (or continuance) of a conversation. Each contributor has creative control, though the community of bloggers would come together to find our collective voice and fuel our individual and collective fire.

The goal is to gain a wide readership: practitioners, academics, women professionals, curious observers, and the like. I’d like the contributors to come from a range of security related fields and levels in their careers, and commit to submitting pieces on a schedule that suits them (once a week, once a month). Initially, contribution would be on a volunteer basis, though the hope is to monazite the blog and pay contributors per post.

If this sounds like project you’d like to be involved in, no matter how much or little time you have to contribute, I’d like to hear from you. Please let me know if there are additional skills you would be interested in contributing to the project, and how involved you’d like to be. No prior blogging experience necessary.

In this form, you’ll find a request for a short writing sample plus a few additional questions. Aside from the writing sample, the form should take about 3 minutes to complete. Your information will stay between me and the future blog team.

The initial due date is December 15th, though consider the call for people who are interested ongoing indefinitely. Please feel free to forward the link and call for interest to anyone you think may be interested in the project.

Thank you for your interest and support.

- Shawnna

 Note: I’m constantly impressed by the range and number of people who have expressed interest in this project. Thank you everyone for your outpouring of support!    

Links for inspiration 

Progress Report on Women in Peace & Security Careers (2009) - WIIS

City of Men (July 2011) – Micah Zenko

Feminine Realpolitik (July 2011) – Heather Hulburt

Women and Foreign Policy II (August 2011) - Micah Zenko

A Seat at the Table – a Twitter-ful list of women crucial to foreign policy (December 2011) - Elmira Bayrasli

Several people have asked me recently, “Where do you find all these jobs? How do you have the time while writing your thesis?” The truth is, the initial work took some digging, but now I look at over 100 available jobs every day from different websites in under 3 minutes. Here’s how you can set up your own job search system. Best of all, you don’t necessarily need to understand the technology to use it (I sure didn’t when I started).

EDIT: A few friends have mentioned that while this is great, it seems so complicated. I’ve simplified a few things. Also, only steps 1-5 are necessary to do. After that, the rest of the page is a short tutorial on how to use google reader.

You’ll need:

1. Google Reader
2. Your favorite job sites or organizations that post their job adverts
3. http://page2rss.com/

Steps

• As you’re reading literature for school, take note of interesting sounding organizations that are written about or cited. Visit their websites to see if they advertise openings.

• Google search for job sites for your topic. Here are some that I find interesting:
  • http://se.indeed.com/
  • http://www.idealist.org/
  • http://jobs.euractiv.com/
  • http://jobs.foreignpolicy.com
  • http://unjoblist.org/

Next we have to “add feeds” to Google Reader. A feed essentially sends new jobs to Google Reader any time a new job is posted, which saves you from checking individual websites all the time. There are a few ways to do this, and you may need to try more than one way until it works the way you want it to.

1. Use this if If you want get job alerts from a job search website when any job is posted on that website. In Google Reader, click “Add a subscription” and paste in the URL of the page. If not, try step 2. 
2. Use this if If you want get job alerts from a job search website and get alerts when any job is posted on that website. If you’re using Firefox, look for a symbol on the right hand side of the address bar that looks like:  Click it to add the RSS feed from the website to the Reader. If not, use step 5.
3. Use this if you want to get all job alerts from specific companies. On the jobs page for the company, look for a symbol that looks like: Click it to add the feed to Reader. If not, go to step 5.
4. Use this if you want to get alerts for specific types of jobs from a company or a job website. For instance, choose to only get alerts for jobs in Sweden. To do this, perform your search. When completed, look for a symbol that looks like: Click it to add the feed to Reader. If not, go to step 5.
5. Use this step if the others didn’t work. Many job sites and organizations do not make their job advertisements compatible with Google Reader, but page2rss.com will. Simply copy and paste the link to the job board or to your search results. Page2rss will give you a feed that you can add to Google Reader using step 1.
6. If you’ve gone this far, you’re done if you want to be! Congratulations. You’ve taken the first steps towards searching for jobs in just minutes a day! Repeat as many times as you’d like with as many job sites as you’d like.
7. Troubleshooting: If you use steps 2, 3, or 4  and get a weird page or a blank page, copy the link in the address bar and use step 1.

How to use Google Reader

Google Reader has lots of features. Play around to figure out what works best for you.

1. Go into Google Reader and view your handwork, which will look something like this:
2. Click on each feed and look to the right to see the posted jobs, or click on the folder to see them all at once.
3. View the results on the right as “Show List” or “Show Expanded”. When viewing as a list like below, click an interesting job to see the details.
4. When viewing expanded like below, click the title to open the page for the job advertisement where it was originally found.
5. View only items you have not seen before by showing only new items, or see everything by showing all items.
6. In Feed settings, organize your jobs into folders based on location, types of organizations, etc.
7. In Feed settings, translate job boards into your own language, or view similar types of feeds:
8. “Add Stars” and then view a list of only the results that you have starred:

EDIT: Feedrinse has stopped working for me lately, so I do not recommend the advance steps any longer and have removed them. However, for other advanced readers, Google Reader is not the be-all-end-all of RSS, it is just what I use. Also, there are lots of other ways to add feeds, I just chose to simplify things while giving the reader options.