The registration fee is Y40,000. Registration is capped at 500 delegates.

You can register online now at https://apecw.securesites.net/registration.

Online hotel reservations can be made at http://www.kingtour.com/apecwln2010eng,

Registration closes on 10th August 2010.

Welcome to APEC Women!

I have written elsewhere (http://posts.apecwomen.com/2010/05/about-apec-women/) about the vision for APEC Women and how it came about. Find. Connect. Do. To improve the status of women … be it about our heath, our education, our economic and financial independence, our general welfare.

To maximise the effectiveness of APEC Women, we need to get to know each other in order to trust each other sufficiently to work together. We need to know each other's capabilities, interests and aspirations; the projects we are working on; and how we think other members can assist us in all of them. Your Profile is central to this getting-to-know-you phase. So take the time to create yours once you're registered.

And for those who are attending this year's APEC Women Leaders Network (WLN) meeting in Tokyo (http://www.apecwln2010.jp/), now is the time to Find and Connect so that you're on your way to Do when September comes around the corner.

Find. Connect. Do.

Visit the site now: http://www.apecwln2010.jp/

The registration page will become available online on 7th July. Additional information will be progressively uploaded to the site.

It only takes one APEC Women Leaders Network (WLN) meeting and it becomes starkly obvious: the missed opportunities for effectively connecting with the hundreds of WLN delegates at the meeting.

Many of us go in cold (just as I did when I went to my first WLN in 2007), not knowing a single soul. We definitely come out of it a bit warmer — but for many, not much warmer, I’d argue. Sure, there’ll be the occasional luck when you accidentally sit next to someone at lunch and find out that, yes, you do have common interests that can form the basis for doing something together. But why leave it to chance when we’re putting our money and time in to be at the meeting?

Why does making connections at WLN meetings have to be so haphazard? And I’m just talking about the missed opportunities DURING the meeting itself. Many of the connections established at these meetings are often difficult to sustain, much less to strengthen, due to time, distance and other factors.

For many of these delegates, particular those from the host economies, attendance at a WLN is a one-off. We lose the bulk of the delegates every year — WLN is like running a business (and a multinational business at that without a global HQ) with a 20%-30% annual customer retention rate. Think of all the lost opportunities for connecting women across APEC economies with such a high attrition rate.

The problem is clear and obvious. And so is the solution. In fact, the solution is so clear that I created the http://www.apecwomen.com website back in early 2008 to provide, among others, a virtual hub for WLN delegates to connect with each other in-between the annual WLN meetings. But the timing wasn’t right for me to get involved intensely with something like it at that time so I took the site down after a few months.

Fast forward 2010 and this I can say: I’m ready. I have been developing the (new) apecwomen.com site for weeks now. The first part of the site, at http://posts.apecwomen.com, is technically live now but cannot yet accept your (free) registrations (here’s why: http://posts.apecwomen.com/2010/05/almost-there/). I’m working towards getting the site live sometime this month. If you subscribe to the e-mail notification service (http://feedburner.google.com/fb/a/mailverify?uri=apecwomen&loc=en_US), or provide me with your e-mail address via the contact form provided, you’d be notified when the site is ready to accept your registration.

Don’t forget: http://posts.apecwomen.com (you will be redirected here if you go to http://www.apecwomen.com). With the 2010 WLN in Tokyo only a few months away, now is the time to connect with each other so that we’ll be further down the track (discussion and negotiation) by the time we actually meet each other face-to-face in September.

See you at the site soon.

Regards,
Grace

The organisers have advised that a dedicated site for the meeting will go live in June (next month). Apart from providing more details about the event, the site will also start accepting online registrations at that stage. The official WLN site at http://www.apecwln.org will have the latest info from the organisers. We will feed those info here, too, as they become available.

With the meeting only 4 months away, no doubt there are many of us who are now starting to plan our trips — booking flights and accommodation, setting up meetings, identifying things to do/to see while in Tokyo/Japan, wondering which types of clothing to bring and if our mobile phones and laptops will not go AWOL on us during the trip. And, of course, the logistics of being wired during the trip. Certainly, these are some of my own questions, as I have not been to Japan myself.

I have initiated the '2010 WLN' tag to cover discussions and issues related to planning our trips to Tokyo in September. Let's share tips and perhaps even arrange to meet during this trip. Take time to create your profiles so that others will have a clearer idea if your personal and professional interests match with theirs.

In reality, the site's not 100% there yet.  A core development remaining is a members-only professional networking facility. It's laid bare under APEC Women Connect in the menu.  Members (or registered users) will have the opportunity to create their own profiles containing information about themselves, the organisation they are affiliated with and what sort of interactions they are aiming for with other APEC Women members.

These profiles will be initially searchable via parameters such as name, organisation, country and city.  We can be more targeted with our efforts to connect with other members, whatever our interests are — public policy, business, arts, entertainment, community development, social entrepreneurship, etc.  How great is that?    

And there's more to come.  But I'd rather not dwell on them here.  Now.  Well, at least not until I get through the first hurdle of delivering the above.  

I got a young freelance web developer in Vietnam who's helping me with doing just that.  Going (truly) live sometime this month is definitely in the cards.  If you'd like to be advised when that curtain-raising moment happens, subscribe now to our e-mail notification service.  You'll be notified every time a new post appears here.  Or drop me your e-mail address using the contact form below.

The need for such a meeting place became evident to me while attending the Digital Economy Forum for Women (DEW) and APEC Women Leaders Network (WLN) meeting in June, 2007. The annual cycle of both DEW and WLN meeting means that there is no natural momentum to strengthen connections established at these meetings. Complementary online tools immediately came to mind to enable participants to these meetings to engage with each other — before, during and after these meetings.

APEC Women was initially conceived in this context. But then why stop there? There are many women in the APEC economies who are unable to make it to DEW and WLN for one reason or another. And what about women in non-APEC economies within our region? Why not aim higher? And so I have ….. APEC Women aims to become the go-to site for women who are involved or want to be involved in various aspects of social and economic development in Asia and the Asia-Pacific region. A first iteration of this site was soft-launched in early December 2007 but was discontinued a few months later. Now APEC Women is back up again … this time, for good.

The current Twitter-inspired interface is deliberate to make it easy for users to post to the site. The free flowing format produces rich materials for a more nuanced understanding of issues on users' minds. These will be useful guides to me as I continue developing the site. For what you see now is only a start, and not the final destination.

I hope that we find each other here. And having found each other, I hope that we will then work together, leveraging off each other's capabilities, to achieve concrete outcomes, particularly for women, in our part of the world.

Here's hoping that you find this site useful. And if you do, don't forget to spread the word!