Stay Connected

By Wendy Cole/Chicago

Veteran info-tech executive Liz Ryan never did like professional networking events. During her nine years with modemmaker U.S. Robotics, outside Chicago, industry cocktail parties, at which people seemed intent on bragging their way up the corporate food chain, made her queasy. "I once read that the secret to networking was to enter a crowded room with 50 business cards and get rid of them in an hour. That made my stomach turn," says the unpretentious Ryan. "For me, it would just be wasting cards."

What a difference a few years make. The former antinetworker now has more contacts than a political fund raiser. She could hardly have imagined regularly flying off for networking events--and loving it. And her circle is about to expand again as she prepares to launch an Internet radio program offering advice for juggling work and home duties. She's the queen of WorldWIT, a global e-mail networking group with outposts all over the planet.

Ryan reached her current path almost accidentally. After leaving the corporate ranks to start a human-resources consulting business, one summer night she found herself staring at a six-inch pile of business cards--mostly, it turned out, from female vendors, clients and other new acquaintances--and had an epiphany that would transform her professional life. "I thought to myself, These are people who should know one another," says Ryan, who was also the mother of four children under age 7. Some of her new contacts were moms from her kids' Evanston, Ill., schools who had left their careers years ago but were ready to tiptoe back. "I was meeting accountants and lawyers at mom-and-tot classes who wanted to find a little work," Ryan says, "but who had no idea how."

So Ryan started an e-mail discussion group--ChicWIT, short for Chicago Women in Technology. She sent e-mails to five people and asked them to spread the word. Within five months ChicWIT mushroomed to 500 members. Still reluctant to call her creation a networking group--with that term's evocation of self-centered corporate climbers--she thought of ChicWIT as more of a "community" in which "through relationships, good things would happen."

That was three years ago. Today ChicWIT, which costs nothing to join, has more than 4,000 members. About 10% are men. Its popularity led to the creation, under Ryan's guidance, of WIT lists in 52 other communities in 19 countries, including India, Ireland, Poland and Taiwan. With 20,000 participants worldwide, Ryan says, what is now called WorldWIT worldwit.org ranks as the world's largest moderated--and spam-free, thanks to human filtering--e-mail discussion group.

While many postings are from people seeking jobs (or employees), users also exchange information on everything from real estate to restaurants. Many seek child-care referrals. "Finding a nanny is a business matter," says Ryan. "If a mom doesn't do that, she can't work." Messages on traditional female topics like dating are conspicuously lacking. Such talk isn't banned; it has just proved not to be a priority.

Ryan, now 43, incorporated WorldWIT as a for-profit business two years ago and started selling ads. Clients include Sun Microsystems and Deloitte & Touche, and Ryan says that WorldWIT broke even last year on revenue of about $150,000. Affiliates, from a newsletter service to a computer-training firm, pay WorldWIT for transactions conducted via the lists.

Not all the chat is faceless: at Ryan's urging, members sometimes meet locally for wine-and-cheesers. "You get curious about who these folks are," says ChicWIT mingler Amy Braun, a manager for a Barrington, Ill., computer-consulting firm. At a recent get-together at the Illinois Institute of Art in Schaumburg, 100 women (and a few men) greeted Ryan with thunderous applause.

The reluctant networker is grateful for the affirmation. But she surely doesn't need it. Ryan and her husband, a stay-at-home dad, decamped with their children to Boulder, Colo., in 2001. Last year she gave birth to their fifth child, Darrien. He has already joined his mother on a dozen business trips. Now that's a born networker.