Charlotte has been working in IT for eight years and made the transition from IT trainer to Digital Project Manager in 2012 after taking on an internal web project for a former employer – going in blind and coming out with a sense of career direction. Since then she has worked at several London agencies and is now working for children’s cancer charity CLIC Sargent here in Bristol.
At the start of this year Charlotte took a keen interest in hackathons and attended a course run by the NHS Innovations team. This enabled her to create materials, organise, run and facilitate a hackathon with CLIC Sargent’s service users and staff – with just three weeks notice – as part of the NHS Transformathon series of events.
Having caught the hackathon bug she then went on to assist a group of women in Bristol who wanted to run their own hackathon for finding ways to assist refugees in Bristol using technology, and helped to create, organise and run the first ever Bristol Refugee Hackday which ran as part of the Refugee Week series of national events.
Catching the hackathon bug
Having once been a high intensity event attended over 24-48 hours, by pizza and Red Bull fuelled coders, hackathons have now become an alternative and accessible way to approach workshop style sessions to collaboratively find solutions to problems across an organisation, industry or theme.
Hackathons are incredible events that can be held cheaply, or for free, and can be a great way to manage collaboration between service users, customers, designers, developers and key stakeholders to co-create solutions to a problem in the digital and physical worlds.
In this talk Charlotte will be discussing the benefits of holding your own hackathon and what she has learnt from past experiences in both attending and organising hacks.
UX with Rachel Eardley
Rachel Eardley is a user experience designer who has spent time on various research projects with Hewlett-Packard Research laboratories, Microsoft Research in Cambridge and Brunel University. She has also worked in industry for just over 10yrs, working for Skype, Friends Life and start-ups such as HouseTrip, Ticket.com and MovieGlu. She currently works within the technology agency Somo 4 days a week and spends 1 day a week on research for her PhD.
After the presentation and any questions we will open the floor up for a discussion, if anyone feels like they would like to bring along any ppt’s or links that they want to share for discussion then please bring it along on a USB or mail the team with info and we can share this during the discussion period. Don’t forget – you don’t have to work in the industry or be a geek, this is a group for anyone with an interest in the subject!
Please sign up on our meetup page here MEETUP
Do come along for pre-presentation mingling as we will be there from 6.30pm. As always, we welcome men to our group, but to keep our audience predominantly female, we ask that all men are accompanied by a woman (just add a +1 on the meetup).
Where
The food and hosting is kindly sponsored by Somo Global who are based at desklodge in Bristol on the corner of old market
DESKLODGE
5TH FLOOR, 1 TEMPLE WAY
BRISTOL
BS2 0BY
Girl Geek Dinners 
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