After we created the We Are Black Women network of blogs, we kept bumping into women who said they had heard of blogs but didn’t know much about them.

They used email quite often, either at home or at their jobs, and were at ease with it. But woman after woman invariably joked that she handed her cell phone to her son or daughter to program. It didn’t sound like something they liked doing, but felt they had to.

From these encounters, we determined that these women wanted to step into the world of technology, but were shy about doing it – and afraid. They wanted a comfortable place to ask the uncomfortable questions, a place where they wouldn’t be ridiculed or looked upon as being dumb.

We saw a need ready to be filled and a chasm narrow enough to cross. Given We Are Black Women’s mission to provide a safe place for women to come, kick their shoes off and be comfortable, we felt that we would be a natural fit for a series of sessions on technology.

And so the WABW Tech Camp was born.

We held our first camp on a Saturday morning in October 2010, and 18 women showed up. The place was abuzz:  Women asked questions of the presenters and of each other, they traded tips, they joined in conversations, they swapped business cards, they made contacts, they laughed, they learned. Several returned for hands-on mini-sessions on blogging offered by one of the presenters.

The experience on that morning was exactly what we had in mind for Tech Camp. We wanted to keep the sessions small so that women were at ease enough to open up about what they didn’t know in order to learn. The key was to lose their fear of technology and make it work for them.

Technology is so important in our world – and will continue to be so – that we as women have to get a handle on it or be left behind. We think that we have come up with something that not only helps us dip a toe into the pond of technology but also gives us what we need to swim across it.