Girl Geek Dinners

MT’s ‘35 women under 35′ 2010: Creating the future

Management Today has released a list of “35 women today under 35″ showcasing high flying women who are determined to thrive in hard times.  Two major trends have emerged: women from the Creative Sector (12 in total) and women in Finance(9 in total). Surprisingly the number of female entrepreneurs is also high at a total of 16, many of whom stated their businesses just as the markets crashed.

Maggie Berry from Womenintechnology and (as it happens) from bonnie Broughty Ferry is top of the list : )

Read more here

http://www.managementtoday.co.uk/news/1012333

Two Amazing Speakers for May

We can now announce our two amazing (!) speakers for May. They will be Justine Cassell director of the Center for Technology & Social Behavior, and a full professor in the departments of Communication Studies and Electrical Engineering & Computer Science at Northwestern University.

We feel we have a real coup with Justine as received the Anita Borg “Women of Vision”Leadership award in 2008. To give you an idea of just how awesome that is… there are only three Anita Borg awards each year — one for innovation, one for social impact, and one for leadership. They are extremely prestigious and winners include high profile peeps like Kristina M. Johnson the Under Secretary for Energy, US Department of Energy. (WOW!)

If that wasn’t enough we have also hooked the fabulous Eileen Brown, CEO of Amastra; a company which helps you achieve your aspirations using offline and online social methods. Eileen has a amazing career record and is a keen advocate of women in technology currently Chairing the Intellect Women in Technology strategic group.

We will have more news about our Aberdeen event soon. In the meantime have a look at the section for “Our Speakers” on our website.

There’s Something About Mary

High profile entrepreneur visits Glasgow and Aberdeen to encourage more Scottish women to create technology-related businesses

Get tickets for this event

Serial entrepreneur Mary Vincent is crossing the Atlantic to speak at a Girl Geeks dinner in Glasgow on Tuesday 13th April and give two talks at Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen. Vincent, who’s based in San Francisco, and has an impressive track record of software product innovation, is now an ambassador and evangelist for green software solutions.

The title of Vincent’s talk is “Creativity, Computing and Entrepreneurialism within Global and Small Business Environments” and she’ll be addressing over 100 women working in technology, engineering and computing in her visit to Scotland. In addition to some local sightseeing, Vincent acknowledges the importance of meeting local people to gauge the character of a place “I visited Edinburgh and Inverness many years ago, enjoying Edinburgh Castle, the beauty of Inverness, Loch Ness and talking with everyone I could. For me, visiting a place is not only about the places to see, but the people to meet.”

A report by SMEWeb.com conducted only a year ago showed that women in the US are twice as likely as British women to be entrepreneurially active and that if the UK matched US activity in this area, there would be 900,000 more businesses in this country. Although Vincent is a keen advocate of of networks with both women and men, she stresses the importance of the global Girl Geek dinners, mentioning that the “[San Francisco] Bay Area Girl Geeks have sponsored a variety of thought-provoking events with great speakers and start-up competitions.”

Girl Geek Scotland is a community for women of all ages interested in technology, creativity and computing. We welcome ladies from all walks of life, whether they work in business or research, are studying at university or simply have geeky aspirations. Ticket information for all events will be updated on the Girl Geeks Scotland website.

Review GGD Edinburgh

Emma McGrattan of Ingres & Lesley Eccles of Hubdub

In the outstanding venue of the Informatics Forum in Edinburgh, on Tuesday the 9^th of March, Girl Geeks once again had a place to meet, network and learn – a place were women’s talents, intelligence and experience were celebrated and reflected upon.

As the wine flowed, the room filled with (mostly women) and was buzzing with excitement.  The networking session sent the room into a chatting frenzy as everyone began exchanging business cards, email addresses and ideas for future projects.

After some fantastic food, the audience sat and listened to Emma McGrattan (VP of Engineering for Ingres) talk about the ups and downs of being a woman in the software engineering business. Emma sent the room into uproars of laughter with her wit and hilarious stories.  She spoke about rebelling against her parents by becoming a software engineer and how newspaper articles gave her ‘bad press’ – although “all press is good press right?”  A discussion broke out about Barbies and how Mattel may be creating a ‘Software Engineering Barbie’.  This lead many of the audience to question the relationship between how Barbie subliminally encourages women to become nurses or vets, more maternal, feminine roles. However, a show of hands round the room suggested that most of the girl geeks who attended the event did play with dolls when they were young, and now as adults work in animation, multimedia, computing or engineering. So that theory was perhaps not true. Perhaps it is their individual up bringing or personal goals that encourages women into male dominated jobs.

Discussions of the possibility that women are perceived as incapable of doing “heavy lifting” jobs may be the reason that more women are not taken seriously in IT and computing jobs. Emma McGrattan also posed the question – “Do women code differently to men?” She suggested that women are perhaps more caring and gentle on the person reading the code and so often leave comments to clarify the exact meaning of the code.

The audience were welcomed to ask questions and debated Emma’s thoughts until a final conclusion was made – a balance of both men and women in the work place can only be a good thing.

More wine was poured and dessert allowed the women to do some more chatting and networking.

The second speaker, Lesley Eccles, Co-founder of Hubdub Ltd (an online social games development company) based in Edinburgh, was then introduced to the audience, and she told the story of how she got to where she is now. She described the challenges she faced while setting up a business with her husband, ploughing in time and money to take a leap of faith for a business that they both believed would work. Lesley said, “I can’t imagine a situation where a man, standing in front of a group of men, would be talking about the challenges of being a working father.”  Lesley emphasised her devotion to her family and how having a business, which is flexible means that she could spend valuable time with her children.  She spoke of the pressure of being a mother while working hard in her career.  A show of hands round the room indicated that most women would like to be mothers at some point, despite their career driven mindset. Is it possible for women to be successful in their careers while being good mothers?  Lesley Eccles encouraged the audience, “with an awful lot of hard work, and quite a lot of luck, you can really get what ever it is that you want.”

The idea behind Hubdub Ltd, originally thought up by Lesley’s husband, is based on American sports fantasy leagues.  Launched in 2008, Hubdub Ltd has since received great responses from the public and continues to flourish.

The two speakers were completely different, however they were both women in a man’s world. Lesley and Emma are intelligent, motivated and enthusiastic individuals with a strong passion for women’s capabilities.  Emma McGrattan empowered the women in the audience with her confidence in women, especially in the software engineering industries, while Lesley Eccles empathised with mothers who struggled to balance their family life and work. The overall evening was a great success, with women of all backgrounds taking what they had learned that evening, uplifted and confident to take on their ambitions.

By Dawn Campbell

Square-Go Magazine Interview with Shanna Tellerman

Square-Go magazine have published part 2 of the Shanna Tellerman interview and it is well worth a read for anyone starting a small business.

http://www.square-go.com/feature/988

Check it out and tell us what you think! : D

Square-Go Magazine Interview

On the day of our second Girl Geek Dinner in our series for 2010, Square-Go magasine publishes their interview with our guest Shanna Tellerman. Shanna is CEO of Wildpockets, an open-source gaming platform which promises to open up games development to small time developers. Wildpockets is a spin-out from Carnegie Mellon University

In this feature Phil Harris interviews Shanna Tellerman to find out how she got into games and finds out about her early influences and her new partnerships. Shanna also gets the chance to talk in much more detail about her gaming platform Wildpockets and her hopes for its future.

If you missed the Dundee Girl Geek Dinner, or if you just want to find out more about Shanna and Wildpockets, its a highly recommended read.

http://www.square-go.com/feature/985

We do love those guys at Square-Go as they are great supporters of Girl Geek Scotland. They’ll be at our meeting tonight – so do say hello if you are coming along too : )

A framework for social learning

I thought Girl Geeks might be interested in a post by Harold Jarche that I came across courtesy of @josiefraser on Twitter.

I’d really like it if you could read it and give us some feedback here at Girl Geek Scotland. Perhaps you have some ideas about how we can improve our network? Perhaps you can help us do this too?

Here  is a summary of the post:

“All organizational value is created by teams and networks. Furthermore, learning may be generated in teams but even this type of knowledge comes and goes. Learning really spreads through social networks. Social networks are the primary conduit for effective organizational performance. Blocking, or circumventing, social networks slows learning, reduces effectiveness and may in the end kill the organization.”

He outlines Jon Husbands work on “wirearchy” which describes a dynamic two-way flow of power and authority based primarily on trust: “Communications without trust are just noise, not accepted and never internalized to the recipient” Without those trust networks within organisations, implementation of learning into tangible organisational outputs will be blocked.

About 80% of learning in the workplace comes through informal learning, which “happened by accident or the result of observation, coversation and time in the job.”

Implementing Social Learning in the Workplace

For me this section on how to analyse and implement Social Learning is most interesting. This uses Jane Harts five ways of using social media for learning in the organisation:

ASL – Accidental & Serendipitous Learning: from Stocks to Flow

Online communication can be divided into Stocks (information that is archived and organized for reference and retrieval) and Flows (timely and engaging conversations between people, including voice or written communications)

“the Web is an environment more suited to just-in-time learning than the outdated course model.”

PDL – Personal Directed Learning: from Clockwork & Predictable to Complexity & Surprising

Complexity, or maybe our appreciation of it, has rendered the world unpredictable, so the orientation of learning is shifting from past (efficiency, best practice) to future (creative response, innovation).

GDL – Group Directed Learning: from Worker Centric to Team Centric

Bloggers have learned how powerful a learning medium they have only after blogging for an extended period. With the increased use of distributed work groups, it is even more important to foster social learning and web media are the current tools at hand.

IOL – Intra-Organizational Learning: from Subject Matter Experts to Subject Matter Networks

Subject Matter Networks (Mark Oehlert) are a way of finding organisational knowledge. Collaborative groups are better at making decisions and getting things done. The constraints of the group help to achieve defined goals.

FSL – Formal Structured Learning: from Curriculum to Competency

Work competencies will still need to be developed through practice and appropriate feedback (what training does well) but that practice will have to be directly relevant to the individual or group

In Conclusion

We need to share more of our work experiences in order to grow trusted networks. This is social learning and it is critical for networked organizational effectiveness.

I highly recommend you read the whole article.

http://www.jarche.com/2010/02/a-framework-for-social-learning-in-the-enterprise/

Please also leave comments for us here about how social media can should or could  be implemented in your workplace. Or if you have any ideas about how Girl Geek Scotland can develop a stronger social learning network please let us know.

cheers

morna/ : )

GGD Edinburgh in News

Hurrah! Our forthcoming Girl Geek Scotland event is mentioned in today’s San Francisco Chronicle

“Some teenagers rebel against their parents by getting tattoos, body piercings, having a child out of wedlock, or abusing drugs,” writes Emma McGrattan, senior vice president of engineering at Ingres. “I rebelled by acquiring a degree in electronic engineering.”

How about that ladies!

GGD Dundee Review (09/02/2010)

The first in a series of the Girl Geek Dinners 2010 was successfully launched on Tuesday, the 9th of February, in the appropriate venue of the Dundee Contemporary Arts centre in Dundee.

The Meeting Room was filled to the brim with both men and women, from all different backgrounds; professionals and students in art, technology, games, dance, film, computing and design.

The evening commenced with an introduction and brief explanation into the Girl Geeks community, organised in Dundee by Morna Simpson and Mel Woods. Morna Simpson spoke of the need to encourage women into industries which are men dominated, and their drive to inspire women to lead others. Shanna Tellerman, CEO and founder of the Wild Pockets game platform, later reinforced the idea of women succeeding in the games industry.

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With the wine flowing, a chance to network then sent the room into a whirlwind of excitement when the audience were encouraged to mingle and discuss their interests and professions.

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Mel Woods then introduced the audience to Dr Sophia Lycouris, an artist from the Edinburgh College of Art. Her inspiration came from her passion – dance and performance. Through her current work she explores movement, space and interdisciplinary choreography and, through a collaborative piece is creating a robotic sculpture called “Snake”. She described her fascination of ‘kinaesthesia’ and how the audience feel a connection to a performance.
An interesting incite into performance and robotics, the idea of a ‘duet between the audience and the performer’ was somewhat interesting and exciting.

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Some food and wine then gave the audience another chance to chat, encouraging the female networking ability to shine.

The audience were then introduced to Shanna Tellerman, the CEO and founder of Wild Pockets. She gave an inspirational and uplifting talk about her own experiences in starting a company and encouraged other women to follow their dreams. Shanna spoke of how she started out in the fine arts, and never expected to be leading a computer games company. However it was evident that she certainly has been successful and was beaming with confidence, enthusiasm and a drive to inspire other women.

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After some cheese and oatcakes, and more wine, the informal ‘dinner party’ certainly did allow men and women from all backgrounds to network and gave the people of Dundee a fantastic chance to meet others in a range of industries. Dundee hosts some of the most successful games companies, and indeed the people of Dundee have a drive to discuss technology, innovation and exciting opportunities. The Girl Geek Dinner illustrated the buzz of energy that Dundee has and was a perfect setting for such an event.

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The Girl Geek Dinner enabled professional, motivated and enthusiastic women to network, be inspired and to learn from other women. In the 21st century, you would think that equality issues would be over, however there is no doubt that women still lack the confidence to start their own companies and to be accepted into the technology industries. Shanna, however definitely encouraged’ being female in a man’s world’ by taking advantage of the fact that there is indeed a gap in the market for women.

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It is beyond doubt that the Girl Geek Dinner certainly inspired every single person who attended the event. It was also apparent that both Sophia and Shanna are extremely passionate women and they not only strive to push the boundaries of technology but they themselves are continuously on a journey –of inspiring others and being inspired by others.

The evening sadly came to an end, not without more networking and chatting. The audience dispersed, each taking what they had learned and were inspired to follow their dreams. The Girl Geek Dinner in Dundee was indeed a fantastic chance for geeks to come together and to celebrate what women can really do.

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Announcing the next Edinburgh Girl Geeks Dinner!

We are excited to announce that the next Edinburgh Girl Geeks Dinner will take place on Tuesday 9th March 2010, at the Informatics Forum (10 Crichton Street, Edinburgh EH8 9AB). We have arranged two wonderful speakers for the evening:

* Emma McGrattan,  VP of Engineering for Ingres (an open source relational database company based in California)

* Lesley Eccles, Marketing Director for Hubdub Ltd, the social gaming company she co-founded, which successfully raised $1.2m VC funding last year.

As always, there will be good food and ample time for networking.

Tickets are 10 pounds, covering dinner and a complimentary drink. Note that undergraduate students will receive 5 pounds back at door with proof of ID, complements of Interconnect.

Tickets can be booked at:

https://www.epay.ed.ac.uk/events/eventdetails.asp?eventid=252

Be sure to book promptly, as tickets are limited.

* * * * * * * * * * *

SUMMARY

Venue: 4th floor Lounge, Informatics Forum, 10 Crichton Street

A map and directions on getting to the Forum can be found at

http://www.inf.ed.ac.uk/about/contact.html
Date: Tuesday, 9 March 2010
Time: 6:30pm for a 7pm start
Price: 10 pounds, includes dinner and a complimentary drink
Discounts: Undergraduate students will receive 5 pouns back at the
door (with proof of ID)

SCHEDULE

6:30pm – Doors open/complimentary drinks
7:00pm – Introduction and Networking session
7:30pm – Food
8:00pm – Talk by Emma McGrattan, followed by QA
8:40pm – Dessert
9:10pm – Talk by Lesley Eccles, followed by QA
9:40pm – Networking
10:15pm – Departure

Girl Geeks on GMTV and BBC Radio

If you would like to hear more from Girl Geeks Scotland, please join our facebook group.

Shanna Tellerman, the speaker for our Dundee dinner, will be featured on GMTV on 9th Feb 2010. Shanna will be featured at the launch of the Girl Geeks Scotland Speaker series in 2010.

She will also be featured on BBC Radio Scotland on the same morning.

Next Edinburgh Girl Geeks Dinner Announced!

We are very excited to announce that the next Edinburgh Girl Geeks Dinner is scheduled for Tuesday 9th March, 6.30pm for 7pm start, at Informatics Forum.

Our speaker will be Emma McGrattan, the VP of Engineering for Ingres, an open source relational database company based in California.

Tickets will be released soon – but make sure that you have the date booked in the diary!
View Larger Map

Game Developers Beware..Wild Pockets is coming to town

The latest Girl Geek dinner to hit town is taking place in Dundee on Tuesday 9th February – be there or be square!

Tickets on sale at:  https://www.epay.ed.ac.uk/events/eventdetails.asp?eventid=224

Details are:

• DCA Meeting Room, Perth Road, Dundee
• 6.30pm for a 7.15pm start
• Tickets £10 includes Dinner and a complimentary drink
• Students receive £5 back at door with proof of ID (sponsored by Interconnect)

This event marks the start of an exciting new phase for the Girl Geek network where we will be showcasing high profile speakers from Silicon Valley and the EU to dinners across the UK.

This has been made possible thanks to our incredibly supportive sponsors, both national and local.  At a local level we have NCR and brightsolid to thank for their generous donations which has made this Dundee event possible.

Our two speakers are:

Shanna Tellerman, Founder and CEO of Wild Pockets (game development company) will talk about her journey from starting up in the university environment to where she is today and will outline her vision for the Wild Pockets platform. 

Dr Sophia Lycouris, one of our National Speakers, who has developed a concept of “interdisciplinary choreography”.  So, come along to the dinner to find out more and see what differences it could make to your life.

So, what are you waiting for!  For more details including links to our speakers and venue directions take a look at our Next Dinner page on the Girl Geek Website.

These dinners represent fantastic value at only £10 per ticket (£5 for students) and can be purchased from https://www.epay.ed.ac.uk/events/eventdetails.asp?eventid=224

We look forward to seeing you there.

Dundee Girl Geeks are round the table

Girlgeek Scotland are definitely back in Dundee. Thank you and apologies to all those who booked and contacted us about our postponed event on the 14th, we look forward to seeing you on the 26th instead!!

Date and Time: Thursday 26 th November, 6.30pm for Networking and 7pm GirlGeek Event.

Location: Hannah Maclure Centre, University of Abertay, Bell Street, Dundee. DD1 1HG

Come and join us. We hope to gather the region’s brightest female computer scientists, technologists, artists and designers, entrepreneurs and techies for good food and good company. The evening will be chilled, friendly and informal. We hope to attract students, as well as professionals across the region and beyond. Boy Geeks are also welcome provided they have been invited by a Girl Geek!

Tickets: £12 (£5 cashback for students with a matric card on the door). Buffet + Complimentary drinks included

To purchase tickets please go to http://www.eventbrite.com/event/476102034

Speakers
A round table series of presentations followed by a panel discussion and open floor.
Women & Games with Carol Clarke, Realtime Worlds & Pauline Randall, Virtuale-E, Kirsty Scott, Ruffian Games, Dr Inga Paterson Computer Arts and Media at the University of Abertay and Organiser of Women and Games Conference 2005 and guests from Art, Media, Film and Interaction from the University of Dundee.

‘Do you have questions for the panel? would you like to know what the key trends are in Games & Social Media Design? or how gaming, film and storytelling might come together in the future? Bring your ideas for the audience forum to discuss?

Pauline Randall http://www.virtual-e.co.uk/

Carol Clark http://www.realtimeworlds.com/

Kirsty Scott http://www.ruffiangames.com/

Inga Paterson http://www.123people.co.uk/s/inga+paterson

www.girlgeekscotland.co.uk Morna Tweets @girlgeeks

Girl Geek Scotland is part of the International Girl Geek Dinner Network

Girl Geek Dinners, Definitely does Compute
www.girlgeekdinnersworldwide.com

Sponsored by: Interconnect and Harvey Nash

Dundeenov09

Edinburgh Launch GGD

Thanks to Gail Purvis for this review

The first Edinburgh Geek dinner was originally planned for 40 people and held last week at the Edinburgh Informatics Centre. Three weeks before the launch it had sold out and had to increase the numbers to 50 so the next is planned for October 1 at Edinburgh Napier University.

Browse ‘Geek’ and you will find it defined originally as a ‘carnival performer, often billed as a wild man’ The the word equates to nerd, gimp, dweeb, or dork, though it seems there’s been a shift in implication to ‘a person who is interested in technology, especially computing and new media.’ And a move from being the provenance of boys and men, to the emergence of the “Geek chic” now being adopted by girls and women.

If you go hunting websites, you will find Geek Girls (with a plain English guide to Computing) and you will also find Girl Geek Scotland, or a networking community for technically minded women. It all began in London with Girl Geek Dinners a few years ago, and now there’s a network throughout the UK and Europe, where Jan Van Mol’s cross-over creative cross-over Addict Creative Lab, with more than 4,000 registered creatives from all over the world and from 32 disciplines (fashion, photography, architecture, cooking, design, textile, music, advertising, branding….) might be considered a creative Geek sparking point.

Geeks Girls in Scotland originally emerged in Dundee with Morna Simpson (involved in the start-up through to programme review (2008) of the BSc in Interactive Media Design, at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design at the University of Dundee): Mel Woods, (interested in convergence of visual, text and sound based media through interdisciplinary research in optics) and Sarah Kettley (artist researcher working in the field of wearable technology, collaborating in the Speckled Computing consortium designing wearable devices and developing lo-tech design to smart materials, mapping the space between handhelds and wearables.)

The Edinburgh Girl Geek committee: (R-L)Sarah Kettley, Caroline Turnbull, Jenny Tizard, Allison Johnstone, Kate Ho and Bonnie Webber.

Opening the meeting, executive director of Scotland IS, Polly Purvis declared “The idea behind the Girl Geek movement is great and it is tremendous to see the enthusiasm with which it is being taken up in Scotland.”

Though, good researcher that she is (and confirmed shoe addict) she noted that in London, Girl Geek sponsers, Silicon Stilettoes, were adding a fashion note to the term Geek, and shr concluded in wishing all Edinburgh Geeks, ‘diamonds on the soles of their shoes’.

Changing the image of IT

Purvis (left) confesses she is “constantly perplexed that computing,.. instrumental in breaking down information barriers, through broadband communications, the internet, and the web; which helped unlock the complexity of DNA; provides us all with a mobile computer in our pockets, and is creating a paradigm shift in community building, through social networking, is so little understood, and appreciated.

“Ten years ago who’d heard of Skype, twitter or iphone? In the interim, social networking has become a business tool, instant messaging has replaced email for many, and blogs are now more powerful than the press,” she noted.

“To set the context, the software and ICT industry is one of the powerhouses of the Scottish economy, employing around 100,000 people. Not only a knowledge industry in its own right, it underpins so many other industries, is a vehicle for transformation across business and the public sector, and breaks down the barriers created by our geographic location.

“It is a high skilled industry, providing exciting, challenging and demanding careers and we need talented people to join it. In an increasingly competitive world market we cannot afford to be complacent about the skills base we have. We must raise our game to attract talented people and that means many more women. So how do we do that?”

Top priority she feels is “Collectively we need to do much more at schools, ensure access to up to date informed careers advice raise the profile of the industry.

At school,” she feels, “young people and girls in particular are turned away from an interest in computing, partly because what they are being taught is not what they experience on the web, and doesn’t match their knowledge of the technology interfaces they use – their phones, their games consoles and the internet.

“Making sure careers advice is up to date is in itself a major challenge. The growth in new industries and disciplines, new specialist roles, such as procurement professionals and environmental scientists, nanotechnologists, sports scientists,the list is endless…

“I think we can all help in developing a suite of materials that will provide detailed information about the variety of job roles and opportunities the industry offers, using the latest media such as YouTube.”

The third factor to be addressed she feels is that “downsizing in the electronics industry and the high profile offshoring of jobs has led to a view that there are no jobs in technology. We must dispel these myths, provide careers advisors with regular updates on opportunities and requirements and a concerted effort to promote the industry to everyone.”

Asked for her reaction to the Borders moves to cutting computing lessons in a bid to save cash, she expressed real concern. “At ScotlandIS we have queried whether computing should continue to be taught in schools because the current curriculum is so seriously out of date. Currently schools tend to equate ICT to word processing and spread sheets, and this is turning young people away from an interest in computing. What a tragedy!

“Computing is the corner stone of information technologies, is an essential skill set for Scotland’s economic health, and we need to ensure that our young people are highly skilled in its use. Increasingly ubiquitous, IT will impact all aspects of their lives. Understanding how to maximise its potential to benefit work, rest and play is increasingly important.”

Scottish Geek network hopefully should be a move to compute enthusiasm for creative IT into our schools.