February is Black History Month. It’s a month where we honor those who have made an impact on American culture for equal rights, those who have invented, those who have a helped others and those who have inspired everyone to be the best they can be, not only as a person of color but as a human. For the past two years for Black History Month, I started an online series called 28 Days Diversity where I would feature someone new everyday during the month of February for just being awesome in their own right. Even though it’s black history month, the goal for 28 Days of Diversity is to feature not just African-Americans but other minorities in the web/tech space. Also note that 28 Days of Diversity is not a popularity contest or an influencer list but a list of thought leaders in the social web sector, including entrepreneurs, bloggers, conference organizers, IT professionals and friends not ranked in any particular order who I have either met in person or followed online.

For 2012 it’s 29 Days of Diversity since it’s a leap year and I wanted to not just feature individuals but also ask a question to where each featured person could share their passion with others. For 29 Days of Diversity 2012 each post/person will answer the question “What motivates you to become successful?”

The past two years BlackWeb 2.0 has syndicated the daily post but for this year we decided to post weekly recaps. Here’s week one of #29daysofdiversity

February 1:
Will Lucas

Twitter: @will_lucas

Website/Blog: about.me/will_lucas
Read More About Will

February 2:
Sian Morson

Twitter: @xianamoy

Website/Blog: kollectivemobile.com
Read More About Sian

February 3:
Rob Fields

Photo Credit: Ed Marshall Photography NYC

Twitter: @robfields

Website/Blog: nbifestival.org
Read More: About Rob

February 4:
Brett Anitra Gilbert, Ph.D

Twitter: @profgilbert

Website: http://about.me/brettanitra

Read More: About Brett

February 5:
Joselin Mane

Twitter: @JoselinMane

Website/Blog: bostontweetup.com/

Read More About Joselin

After Black in America 4 aired on CNN a month ago, the diversity issues in the land of technology that is Silicon Valley was talked about more than ever. But the discussion isn’t over. Interactive One’s Navarrow Wright talks with Tech Crunch editor, Erick Shonfeld on Tech Crunch TV about the problems in diversity still faced in Silicon Valley.

Wright addresses why minority incubators like NewMe are necessary and the barriers getting more minorities in the tech space.

Watch the full interview below:

In a recent article Susan Welch, Executive Director, Diversity Best Practices writes about the panels and conversations that took place at the Best Practice Session at Ernst & Young’s New York City headquarters. Some of the panelist included Kam Wong, the associate director of workforce diversity and compliance programs at City University of New York, and keynote speaker Katherine Phillips, a professor of leadership and ethics at Columbia Business School in which they discussed diversity and race in the business world. A few key points the article notes the high unemployment rate for African Americans compared to other demographics, how racism is not just unique to America and how creating awareness about the lack of diversity is a start to uproot racism. Here are a few excerpts.

Phillips’ messages were reinforced by a panel that included Ronald Hall, a professor with the School of Social Work at Michigan State University, who illustrated the self-hate among people of color that results from buying in to what he called the “bleached ideal.” Race, he said, is a proxy for skin color, with white being the ideal. He indicated that, ironically, when people of color achieve status or power, they can exhibit the same prejudices as white people do—primarily because skin color is wielded as a tool for achieving power and domination.

The final panel participant, Louise Covert, principal of Analogies Consulting, described the need to view “whiteness” from a unique cultural standpoint, rather than thinking of it as simply “the norm.” Just as race and skin color shape the lives of people of color, they shape the lives of white people. Covert offered this little-known tidbit: in Pre-Revolutionary America, skin color was less of a barrier and races tended to interact relatively freely. During colonial times, groups in power began to leverage skin color as a way to establish difference and to wield power.

Acknowledging racism and colorism as a critical barrier to inclusiveness makes the diversity practitioner’s job that much harder. As one attendee asked, how do we approach our CEOs and executive leadership and tell them that despite their support of various inclusion activities and diversity strategies, we now need to talk to them about “their whiteness?”

You can read the entire article here: Despite Diversity Efforts, Race Still Matters in Business

?BreakIntoLaw.org is an online platform that was created to get high school and college students of color interested in law careers.

It has relatable slogans for kids such as “If you’ve read all the terms and conditions on Facebook, you should be a lawyer”, but also gives information on diversity and the demand for diversity within the legal industry.

The site plans to be an interactive experience for kids and young adults to relate to but also educate them and provide useful resources for law schools, preparation tests, and debate leagues.

Diversity in Practice, a non-profit organization that consists of 26 firms and 12 corporate legal departments in Minneapolis that have joined forces to attract and retain lawyers of color is behind this new venture to help promote the legal industry to kids in a way that is relatable in the digital age.

For more information visit BreakIntoLaw.org

Creating IT Futures Foundation announced the IT-Ready Apprentice Program, a non-profit program that trains unemployed workers and places them in six-month-long apprenticeships in the information technology field, will launch in five metro locations in 2012.

IT-Ready Apprentice Program was developed by the Creating IT Futures Foundation, which has been helping individuals under-represented in the IT industry prepare and secure careers in the technology industry since 1998.

The program will place a special focus on recruiting individuals who have been affected most by unemployment rates, which is noticeably African-Americans among other groups.

The purpose is to give people the opportunity to build their technical and professional skills. This will give unemployed people the chance to be productive in finding a job, hopefully in technology where there is a desperate need for more diversity including women, African-American, and Hispanics.

The apprenticeship program will launch in Cincinnati, Houston, Kansas City, Minneapolis and San Antonio, with the first wave of apprentices starting work as early as June 2012.

The goal is for the apprentices’ is for them to go on to have success and long careers in the information technology industry. Some companies who will participate in the program will end up hiring after the six month period, and some will not. But having the experience and training will look good on resumes and give people a foot in the door to an IT career.

“The pipeline problem.” That’s the catch-all phrase that keeps coming up in discussions of diversity in Silicon Valley.

Tech companies say they’d love to hire more women and minorities, but that too few qualified candidates are graduating with technical degrees. That leaves them choosing from an applicant pool that is largely white, male and Asian.

“We simply cannot get there without schools,” said Rosalind Hudnell, Intel’s (INTC, Fortune 500) chief diversity officer. “An engineering degree is probably the best you can get for finding a job, yet we don’t have enough diverse students taking an interest.”

The Computing Research Association (CRA) puts together an annual report that aims to quantify the racial and gender breakdowns of graduating classes at multiple levels.

Like any report, CRA’s has its limitations; it’s a survey of undergraduate degrees but it covers only schools that also grant Ph.Ds in computing. It also employs a narrower view of computer science than some other reports do. Still, it’s considered a valuable snapshot of the technical talent emerging from America’s universities.

According to CRA, the 2010 undergrad class was more than 66% white and nearly 15% Asian, a group which includes those of Indian descent. Hispanics accounted for 5.6% of the year’s computer and information science degrees, and blacks obtained 4.2% of them. Both of those minorities were outnumbered by non-U.S. residents, who made up 7.6% of 2010′s graduating computer scientists from American universities.

Read the rest of this article at CNN Money

Hi-ho! One of the NewME Summer 2011 founders here!

I’ve watched the tenor of the conversation around CNN’s Black in America 4 go from the startups and how they’re trying to break down barriers to only the barriers.  I’ve talked to people on Twitter who think highlighting the issue as it stands right now is a good thing to do.  This mostly stems from a variety of comments that came out of a few advance views of Black in America 4 that were held last week.  I want to say that writing anything further about the fact that Silicon Valley has a diversity problem is counterproductive.  This is especially so when the furor comes from a documentary that’s actually a positive portrayal of our experiences (I’ve seen it) and spends less than 2 minutes on the moment that has far too many people wielding digital pitchforks.

I don’t think playing armchair activist and writing more posts (or raining bloody hell on anyone’s Twitter mentions, for that matter) about how racist Mike Arrington and the rest of Silicon Valley supposedly are is helpful.  (For the record, I don’t believe Mike Arrington and the vast majority of the Silicon Valley community are racist.)

So I say, in anticipation of a barrage of angry tweets and blog posts leading up to and after November 13th, when the show airs, before firing up WordPress or Tumblr and writing yet another “Arrington is horrible” blog post, pause for a second.  Instead, let me suggest 7 better things to write about and then explain why you should take this route:

1. Central.ly.  Central.ly enables small businesses build an elegant, easy-to-maintain, social media-enabled website for free.

2. AisleFinder.  AisleFinder is Google Maps for the supermarket. Search for groceries within your grocery store of choice, build a shopping list within the app, and then, get in and get out. If you’re a developer, you can use their newly-released Supermarket API to cook up your own grocery store/search mashup.

3. Kloud.co. Use Kloud.co to search through and organize all of your photos, documents, and the like across all the different cloud-based services you use such as Google Docs and Dropbox.

4. BeCouply. Sitting at the house with your sweetie on a Saturday night and bored to death? Why do that when you can check out BeCouply for date ideas!

5. Playd. Into video games? Want recommendations on which ones you should check out next? Get Playd and be in the know!

6. GoKit.  Branding and identity management for everyone.  Build a profile with GoKit and have a ready-made press kit at the click of a button.

7. Pencil You In. Tired of playing phone tag with your hairstylist or barber? Tell them about Pencil You In and enable them to accept appointments online. (This is my company.)

So, we can talk about the problems with Silicon Valley all day long, but we’re beating a dead horse. That never accomplishes much. People benefiting from any kind of privilege (white privilege, male privilege, whatever) never seem to want to acknowledge it and even seem to fear losing it if they do. A million blog posts won’t make John Doerr eat his words.  So, instead of publishing yet another post about how TechCrunch doesn’t write about black startups and how Silicon Valley has a diversity problem, use your blog or your Twitter feed or however you communicate to help the companies above out.   Or else, I’d argue those who know about the problem yet choose to just keep talking about that are just as bad as those they’re talking about.

What to do?

1.  Contact the founders to write about our companies.

2. Signup (and get your friends to sign up, too) and do a review of our sites.

3.  If we have Facebook “Like” buttons on our sites, click those and take a few extra seconds to fill in the box with a comment about why you liked the site (it helps with the visibility of that “like” on your newsfeed).

4.  Pile onto the NewME Accelerator Facebook page and “like” that, too.

5.  Follow all the companies on Twitter and retweet announcements and anything else you think would be of value to your followers.

6.  Email people you know and tell them to check out the companies.

7.  Download our iPhone apps and take a few minutes to write a review in the App Store.

8.  Run a popular site? Offer free or discounted ad space.  Do an interview.

My thought is that it’s silly to get caught up in rehashing the problems as they stand now as if nobody knows what’s going on. Let the CNN documentary tell that story. You, as the masses, have a voice and it’s helpful if that voice is singing the song of the startups.

This is not just about imploring people to sweep a serious issue under the rug, however.  It’s about something greater.  If you believe an injustice has been done, you normally take up whatever methods you can to fix it.  Instead, I’m seeing instance after instance of people giving power to those who already have it. This is ridiculous.  Of course, I’m biased, but if I weren’t running a startup and walked away from this particular installment of Black in America, my reaction would be the same as it is now.  Don’t forget about the companies.

“…when you know better, you do better.” -Oprah.

[Editor's Note:  The authors suggestions above should be applied to all minority start-ups, not just those who participated in the inaugural class of the NewME Accelerator.]

A new report from The Level Playing Field Institute indicates that women and people of color are significantly underrepresented and have vastly different work experiences than their white counterparts in technology jobs leading to a high turnover rate.

The report, entitled Tilted Playing Field: An Examination of Hidden Bias in Information Technology Workplaces, reports on data collected from a sample of information technology engineers and managers in large companies and small startups nationwide.

The study shows information technology workplace experiences vary significantly by race and gender, turnover rates have increased due to the negative experiences, and diversity is not a priority for gatekeepers.

The findings in the report show that minorities and women experience exclusion from their co-works and even bullying in the workplace at rates significantly higher than male and white employees.

Working in uncomfortable work environments can cause employees to leave seeking other jobs at a different company or another field all together. As the number of negative work experiences reported by individuals across the study increased, the level of satisfaction with their current job and likelihood to remain with that company significantly decreased.

It makes sense that women and minorities are still underrepresented because even the small amount that may hold tech positions, end up leaving in a years’ time. Diversity is scarcer in startups than in major companies.

In the report, minorities were nearly twice as likely as whites to be in favor of a company-wide practice to increase diversity (80% compared to 46%).

Although information technology careers are growing fast, minorities and women are not benefiting from the boom. From the statistics in the study there is a lot to be done internally within the workplace. It is almost impossible to expect a group of people excluded at work to continue to stay.

The same holds true for kids and young adults. The push of STEM programs in minority youth is great, but the current disparities in the workplace increase the risk of deterring them away from fully pursuing a career in technology.

To review the findings as well as recommendations on improving IT workplace diversity, download the full report at The Playing Field Institute

Despite the high number of Black technology consumers and users on popular social networking sites like Twitter, African-Americans are lagging behind in the creation of successful technology start-ups and work in the field of technology.

African-Americans make up just one percent of internet company founders nationally and, on average, Black founders raise less than half the amount of funding as companies headed by whites and Asians. Many say it is this inability to secure funding that has stalled Black tech achievement.

Read the rest of this article at BET

The issue of diversity is frequently brought up across industries. It’s popularly framed in the context of top-level executive positions at Fortune 500 companies, head football coaching jobs and elected government officials. But what does this conversation look like when we discuss it in the context of digital media, given its prominence in today’s modern culture?

In the interactive and social media realm, the user-to-creator ratio is staggering when it comes to minorities. At one time, this could be framed in the context of access, which landed minorities on the wrong side of the “digital divide.” But as technology becomes less expensive and more ubiquitous, some of those issue have been addressed — and yet the disproportionate ratio persists.

Read the rest of this article at Mashable