Joan Blades
Joan Blades (b. ca. 1956 in Berkeley, California) is an American businessperson and liberal political activist. In 1987, she and her husband Wes Boyd co-founded Berkeley Systems, a San Francisco Bay area software company known for marketing the After Dark screensaver and the You Don't Know Jack trivia game. After selling Berkeley Systems in 1997 for $13.8 million, Blades and Boyd founded the liberal political group MoveOn.org. Blades received her B.A. in History from UC Berkeley in 1977 and her J.D. from the Golden Gate University School of Law. She was a member of the Alaska Bar Association and State Bar of California, taught mediation at Golden Gate University, wrote a book Mediate Your Divorce (published by Prentice Hall), and co-wrote The Divorce Book. She was a member of the board at Berkeley Systems and its Vice President of Marketing. Blades created many of the box designs for the early Berkeley Systems products such as Stepping Out and After Dark based on her original collage-art. In 2006, Blades and Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner co-authored The Motherhood Manifesto and co-founded the organization MomsRising, dedicated to "bringing millions of people, who all share a common concern about the need to build a more family-friendly America, together as a non-partisan force." In 2010, Blades and Nanette Fondas co-authored The Custom-Fit Workplace published by Wiley. A practical guide for making the workplace more profitable and a better fit for employees, the book describes work practices like flexible work, virtual work, high-commitment work, non-linear career paths and babies at work. MomsRising launched a companion to the book on Labor Day 2010 to encourage supporters of custom-fit work environments to join the conversation about transforming work culture. In 2011, Blades co-founded Living Room Conversations in an effort to bring both sides of the political spectrum together to discuss individual issues in a comfortable environment. Based on five basic rules of discourse, Living Room Conversations have been held on a variety of subjects from Energy and Immigration to California Realignment.[citation needed]