Month: February 2018

GGD #66 Survival guide for being heard and encouraging diversity of thinking

Caroline Morris is a data geek turned Leadership coach, who founded Wide Eyed Group, a leadership and team coaching business.  Her passion of developing people was nurtured during her 20-year career working in data; leading teams of data scientists, developers and analysts.

Her background also means she understands the pressures faced within technical teams. Like the cultural barriers that can exist between logical, technically-minded data scientists and their extroverted, fast-paced colleagues in sales and marketing. Or the challenges of moving into a leadership position after excelling in a more practical ‘doer’ role.

Caroline’s coaching style is adaptable, slotting seamlessly into any organisation and providing actionable strategies that teams can use to transform their way of working.

She has turned her love of “helping people to be the best they can be” into her new career of transformational coaching:

A qualified coach, who uses Positive Psychology, Transactional Analysis, NLP techniques with Nancy Kline’s Thinking Environment in her coaching practice. Her passion for the power of attention and listening has led her to become a Time to Think Facilitator and she can help you and your team communicate more powerfully with each other.  She is also a Master Emotional Capital Report practitioner who can help you understand your level of EQ and areas to develop to help you develop yourself and your team.

Caroline previously ran a couple of great workshops for the Womens Tech Hub WTHub.org during the day and it went down so well that we thought she would be the perfect speaker for our women who are working. We feel that it would be great to learn some skills on how to survive in the workplace and have a voice as its a discussion that we hear often that our members struggle with.

caroline morris

Website:  https://www.wideeeyedgroup.com

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/wideeyedgroup

Linked in: https://www.linkedin.com/in/caroline-morris-73/

When

Wednesday 21st March 2018 – 6.30/7  – 9pm

Doors open at 18:30 talks start around 7pm

Where

The food and hosting is kindly sponsored by Institute of Physics Publishing http://ioppublishing.org/

IOP Publishing, Temple Circus, Temple Way, Bristol, BS1 6HG

Sign Up

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) here Bristol Girl Geek Dinners

Pies De Resistance: Bath Girl Geek Dinner 2018 #1

Hi All,

We are very excited to announce that we will be having our first social for the year straight after the IT Girls Collaborative meet up on 8 March. Very informal, we’ll be heading to the Raven in Bath for a tasty pie and hopefully some good chat about the direction of the Bath Girl Geek Dinners. For this event, we don’t have a speaker booked but hope we can a debate about what we think is needed in Bath to take the vision of Girl Geek Dinners forward here.

So what’s it all about again? Let’s have a recap… (word credit to Bristol Girl Geeks)

The Girl Geek Dinners were founded on the 16th August 2005 as a result of one girl geek who got annoyed and frustrated about being one of the only females attending technical events. She was tired of being assumed to be marketing, tired of constantly having to prove herself and decided that she just wanted a change and to be treated just the same as any other geek out there, gender and age aside.

So what did this geeky girl do to change the world of geeks and girl geeks everywhere… well she got in touch with a few well known bloggers, posted online about her idea of getting geeks to educate one another over dinner and then arranged the first girl geek dinner event with a little help from her friends. The first event had 35 people at it all from London and the surrounding area, shortly after people started to hear about the events and companies started sponsoring them to cover the food and drinks cost.

Then they started popping up in other UK cities as she trained others up in how to run the events, spreading the formula for them… so they then started popping up in Europe… and shortly after that over in Canada… Now they are starting to pop up in New Zealand and Australia. Who knows where will be next

The Vision

The long term vision of these events is to bring Geek (or if necessary Girl Geek) Dinners into schools, colleges and universities around the world to encourage people to embrace their passion for something like technology and to explore what they can do with it. Even better will be doing this in countries where computers are scarce but valuable. Imagine groups of children around a laptop learning about the technology, getting all excited by it no matter what country they are in.

Why should you care?

The UK population of software engineers and technical expertise is diminishing; the amount of work in the UK for skilled technical staff is on the rise. The amount of women in the technical industry is less than 10% and the number of young women (and in fact men) applying to university for a technical degree course is dwindling. This pattern however is not just occurring in the UK but around the world. Why? This is partly due to social stereotypes (see work from Saatchi & Saatchi on Lady Geek), partly to do with university entry requirements (many which require A level maths as standard), and sometimes just in lack of self belief that people can do these roles successfully. Looking at a younger age group they see technology as dull and about sitting looking at a computer all day! We want to break down these myths about technology and the industry at large! Vive la Resistance!!

Technology has been one of thosPieminister-The Ravene black arts for so many years and we think that it’s about time that these myths were broken down and the truth about them brought to light. Social stereotypes damaging the industry will be broken down, and it’s all about educating the media, the people and attracting social change. Along with this is the opportunity to make changes that can affect everyone, even those in the third world. It is an opportunity and one that I think would we well worth anyone who is up for a challenge to consider.

So see you on the 8 March, for a drink and a pie from 8pm. Please sign up to the meet up and RSVP for the event. By the end of the night we hope we’ll have the bones of an action plan for what we want to do for the women Geeks of Bath and its surrounding areas.

Marianne and Serrie

GGD #65 Summoning the Genie: Drones, Robotics and Machine Learning

 i-am-not-a-robot-detail

 

GGD presents an evening of talks looking at the opportunities and challenges of robotics and machine learning featuring:-

  • Bot or not? Robotic technology in our lives today

  • Drop the drone – challenging the security of drone technology

  • Cyber Security Machine Learning

Our team of speakers :-

Gudrun Fedorowich

Gudrun is a Lead Domain Engineer with Lloyds Banking Group specialising in application security.  She holds an MSc in Information Technology from UWE and has wide ranging experience in Security and IT within the Financial Services sector.  Gudrun had a pre-IT life working in marketing, sales and management development.

Jaimi Anderson

Jaimi comes from Brisbane Australia where she has had a brilliantly technical study background. She gained a Batchelors degree in Animation as an early university entrant with Griffith University. After moving to Queensland University of technology she attained a Master’s degree in Information Technology specialising in security and Games design alongside valuable management training. She extended her studies by a year to cover Computer (Digital) Forensics and run a project on Mobile App permissions.

Currently she is studying for a further Masters at Macquarie University in policing, intelligence and counter terrorism, while using her extensive knowledge as a project manager in the NHS. She is currently waiting for her NCA (Security) Clearance so she can further her security and digital forensics knowledge to use in the UK. She describes herself as a magical unicorn!

MM_robot_3

Miranda Mowbray

Miranda is a lecturer at the University of Bristol, where her research interests include cyber security and big data ethics. She has two hexadecimal dollars, and an Erdos number of 3. She has just begun a project investigating ways to subvert a swarm of four hundred robots.

When

Thursday 22nd February 2018 – 6.30/7  – 9pm

Doors open at 18:30 talks start around 7pm

Where

The food and hosting is kindly sponsored by Bristol University

 Queens Building, University Walk, Bristol BS8 1TR

Sign Up

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) here Girlgeekdinners Meetup https://www.meetup.com/Bristol-Girl-Geek-Dinners/.