Social networking resources like LinkedIn and Facebook help to expand
professional networks, but sometimes you just need the equivalent of a
good phonebook.
Toward that end, a particularly valuable resource that lists women entrepreneurs is now being compiled by
CoCo, a coworking and collaborative space that recently expanded into Minneapolis.
The
project
got its start when the founders of CoCo were talking about creating an
advisory group of successful business people and entrepreneurs who could
offer wisdom and advice, according to co-founder Don Ball.
"We
created a short list of candidates that we might approach and it was
apparent that we didn't have any women in the list," he says. "Kind of
pathetic."
So, Ball tapped into his Twitter network to find a
list of successful women entrepreneurs in Minnesota, and discovered that
one didn't exist. He put a web form on CoCo's site to collect that
information and immediately got questions asking for definition, such as
"What do you mean by entrepreneur?" and "In what fields?"
"I
made the list really open-ended," Ball says. "We're looking for
information about any women entrepreneurs, however one interprets that.
So, if you look at the list, you'll see that we have some diversity in
peoples' pursuits, which seems healthy and appropriate. I don't need to
set the criteria on the collection end. People who want to access the
list can determine what kind of entrepreneurs they're interested in
knowing about and connecting with."
Currently, the list has about
75 entries, and Ball is hoping to get many more and turn the
information into a searchable, sortable database so that the data is
more usable.
If the initiative is successful, Ball envisions
similar efforts for other directories, like compiling the area's
innovators, social entrepreneurs, Hispanic entrepreneurs, or
green-energy business owners.
Source: Don Ball, CoCo
Writer: Elizabeth Millard