When I joined [Company] in one of their smallest offices, I asked a female coworker over chat, hesitantly- is there a “Women at [Company]” group?” I knew that there was an internal group on their Jive instance (named Skynet for reasons that I think were intended to be funny). I didn’t really… want anything out of such a group. But my previous company had had one, and I had lurked it because I like lurking everything that has a faint chance of being useful to me, and I was still in the stage of onboarding where I was looking for parallels for my most recent corporate reference point.

There used to be such a group, she told me, but it had fizzled out- there just weren’t enough women. I accepted this. Eventually she left the company and got a job at a place that was more meaningful and had more diverse people and more interesting work and probably also paid more. I was happy for her, but sad for me.

I created the group in Hipchat, even though there was no one in it. I created another group, with another plausible-to-search-for name, and posted in it that the group to use was the other group.

Then I invited everyone who had a vaguely feminine first name. I used lists on the internet, like this and this. I got some false positives. I am ok with this.

There were at least fifty of them, maybe even a hundred. Hipchat offers no visibility into whether you’ve tried to invite someone to a room before, so I may have done some duplicates. Sorry about that. It worked. No one told me to stop. A few people asked why they were invited- I told them that it was because I thought that they might be interested, and that it was totally okay to not join, and that I would remember to not add them twice.

Now there are maybe 30 or so people in the room on a regular basis. Most of them don’t type much if at all. They are lurkers. I feel like- I hope- that they are deriving some benefit from knowing that there are thirty other people interested in what people might type into this room. I try to make sure that there is at least one message a day in the room. If there is an interesting article, I post it. Or if there is a question that I have, I post it. Sometimes I get responses. It’s a start.

Why is this a thing that I’m proud of? Because I was told that it wouldn’t work, and I made it work. Because I think that it is good to create things that I want, even if I’m not sure how to make it be as valuable as I want it to be.