This month we have decided to call an Extra Ordinary General meeting, its extra ordinary not because its not aligned with our normal general meeting but because we generally do not hold a general meeting.

This event is kindly hosted by The Bristol SETsquared Centre which is at Temple Meads – attached to the UK’s most connected transport hub, Bristol Temple Meads Station, at the centre of the Temple Quarter Enterprise Zone, just a few minutes walk from the city centre Bristol at 7pm.

In the last meeting we did a call out to see if any of our members would be interested in getting more involved and there was a surprising show of interest which was great to see. Rather than let this enthusiasm go to waste we have decided to invite members to attend this meeting to discuss further not only any help they wish to offer but also do a general call on what people want from the group and where they see it heading or wish it to move forward into the future.
The group has been running since 2010 and is one of the most active GGD’s in the south west we believe – this has been down to downright doggedness in many cases and largely thanks to Ali who was one of the founding members and also other enthusiastic co-organisors such as Maria, Serrie and Claire as well as many others. We believe in the group and find it heart-warming that we have had such a positive and collaborative relationship within the group and indeed with our sponsors. The group has become very well known within the community and we are often approach by industry to either advertise ourselves or support tech based initiatives, as many of you will know from our busy facebook page.
Some of the things that we would like to consider moving forward are below – we would like you to join the meeting to give us your views and hear your voice on these and suggestions on anything else we might be involved with. We also believe that by building a bigger central support committee all with less responsibilities we will be better able to serve the group as a whole. Obviously we are keeping with the general ethos that we are aware how busy people are and as such will not be pushing anyone outside of their boundaries of either comfort or time limitations.
Proposals:
We are not the only tech group in Bristol and plenty of times we are clashing on dates which affects our participation we propose therefore some of the following:
These are some of the groups we are aware of
Urbanistas, Women who code, Women in engineering, Women in technology,
Women in Biz, Women outside the box, ladies that ux, grrrlgames
We would like to add any others members may be aware of
Plan is to contact them and propose the following:
A shared yearly meetup to present the groups and their activities and hopefully increase participation
A Shared calender- proposed Google calender as its version controlled
Possibly a central site for ‘Bristol Women in Tech Hub’ to share info and initiatives across the groups
Some of the initiatives who are looking for involvement are:
STEM (we know some of you are already involved)
Digimakers – HBB
Codeclub is the current mayoral initiative and they want us to get more women involved
We would like to be made aware of any others
Finally we are looking at any other initiatives that members wish to throw into the ring, some possibilities:
Merchandising – to spread the word and also to allow fellow girlgeekers a chance to talk to each other at conferences (badges was the thinking here)
Conferences – possibly extend the shared yearly meetup with the other groups to invite in industry and publicize ourselves
Blogging – Techspark have approached us to do regular girl geek blogs – any thoughts on this?

The meeting will be held in the engine shed and SetSquared and is kindly sponsoring us this for the space. If we do food then we will need to use their caterers and we have no current sponsor for this – but we (Claire and Serrie) are willing to get some between us once we know numbers.
So please pop along and either just listen in or have your voice so we can move forward in a direction that we all want – for newbies we will also present a bit about the group so you can understand a bit about us also.
Please sign up on our meetup page http://www.meetup.com/Bristol-Girl-Geek…/events/225801917/