Constance Fleuriot & Claire Morley will be talking about Bristol’s very own Grrrl Games, a meetup for Women working in Games, or who want to get into the Games industry. Constance is a regular Girl Geek DInner attendee who set up Grrrl Games to encourage more women to get involved with places like Bristol Games Hub.

Claire has been involved with Grrrl Games since it started, taught herself coding by creating an adventure game, and will showcase some of her latest projects.

We are hosted by ADP for this evening, a leading payroll, time and attendance, and HR service provider. ADP are very new to Bristol and handily located in Temple Back near the centre & Temple Meads.

Sign up on our meetup page so we have an idea of numbers. There may be pizza or somesuch and non-alcoholic refreshment.

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/

This month our speaker is Emma Prest, General Manager at DataKind UK. She spends her time explaining what data science is to charities and nurturing an influx of data science volunteers looking to donate their time and skills. Before joining DataKind UK, Emma worked for a range of non-profits including Tactical Tech, Amnesty International UK, the Campaign for Freedom of Information and Chain of Hope. She was a freelance contributor to The Independent and worked as a Spanish-English translator. Emma holds an MA in Public Policy from Central European University in Budapest. Her first degree, in Politics and Geography, was from the University of Edinburgh.

This event is kindly hosted by MixRadio at their offices on wine street in central Bristol at 7pm.

Find out more info on our next dinner page

Sign up here: www.meetup.com/Bristol-Girl-Geek-Dinners/events/225089486/

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

Software developer Kate Richardson will be talking about her work as a Software Developer at JUST EAT, where she works in one of the API teams, writing the code that underpins their front end website.

Photo courtesy of Iconphotomedia Ltd

Find out more info on our next dinner page

Sign up here: www.meetup.com/Bristol-Girl-Geek-Dinners/events/220702429/

Samantha Payne, recently shortlisted for the Women in Business’s ‘Young Entrepreneur of the Year’ award and runner-up in Intel’s international ‘Make it Wearable’ competition presents Open Bionics.

Open Bionics, based inside the Bristol Robotics Laboratory, uses 3D scanning and 3D printing to innovate the prosthetic industry.

The young startup aims to radically reduce prosthetic fitting times, prosthetic cost, and innovate design for amputees across the world.

This event is kindly hosted by Infineon at their office near Bristol Parkway on 18th feb – 6:30pm for 7pm start.

More info on our next dinner page: bristol.girlgeekdinners.com/next-dinner/

We’ve now switched from Eventbrite to Meetup for our events – please sign up here: www.meetup.com/Bristol-Girl-Geek-Dinners/events/220330559

Thursday 15th January 2015. The Porter, Bath.

We were very excited to have kicked off Girl Geek’s 10th Birthday year with a hands-on workshop on data hacking from the team at Bath:Hacked.

There was a drinks reception from 6.30pm to catch up with fellow Girl Geeks and welcome new faces to the group. Followed by a presentation, dinner and a hands-on workshop.

Knowing how to glean useful insights from data is becoming an increasingly important skill to have. Leigh Dodds from the Open Data Institute, who also plays an instrumental role in Bath:Hacked events, delivered a presentation and practical workshop on ‘hacking data’ to give us a taster of what’s involved in a typical ‘hack’, the skills involved and how to get started.

Thank you to our wonderful sponsors at Bath Ruby

Our wonderful sponsor for our next Girl Geek is Bath Ruby Conference.

The one day event is a community focused conference for Ruby developers of all skill levels. There will be talks from some of the Ruby community’s favourite speakers from around the world, including Linda Liukas, founder of Rails Girls  and Saron Yitbarek, founder of CodeNewbie.

The conference will take place in Bath’s Assembly Rooms on Friday 13th March and, since we’re running it as a non-profit event, tickets are just £99 + VAT with 10% of sales being donated to Shelter.  Please visit the website for more details, including our Code of Conduct and accessibility statement.

Happy new year! Our 2015 programme of events kicks off with a talk about women in software engineering with Rabeb Othmani, a software engineer working currently for Microsoft as part of the MixRadio client development team.

The event is sponsored by ClusterHQ and will be hosted at their shared workspace at the Engine Shed in Bristol. ClusterHQ are hiring, so this is the perfect opportunity to come and check them out if you are interested in a new career for the new year!

More details on our Next Dinner page

Sign up here: geek-event-39.eventbrite.co.uk