eGirls event in Armidale

Earlier this week I spoke at this years e-girls event, a Zonta initiative. It was a lot of fun, and I looked after an awesome group of Yr 10 girls from all around the Armidale region. I spke to them about Linux, networking, community, my experiences in ICT and why ICT jobs are so fun 🙂 Many thanks to Cherry for organising yet another fantastic event! The girls made logos using gimp and I have to say, my favourite is the butterfly one below 🙂
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On this topic, I’m in a team putting together a large event for Sydney girls about ICT. We’ll be running the Sydney one next June, and one in the Central Coast this Sept/Oct. Contact me if you want to participate or have any cool ideas for it 🙂 I have a basic website up which is in the process of development and the organisers’ email is there. Many thanks to Linuxchix Brazil for letting us use Marie, the Linuxchix Brazil mascot!

Geek girls on the way!

So over the last few days I have presented about the wide world of IT and in particular FOSS to about 1200 out of ~2400 young women at school. The event was called Go girl, go for IT which admittedly is a bit of a silly name, but the event itself was incredible. Loads of great speakers, heaps of very smart, confident and rocking young women, prizes, a beautiful Ducati motorbike (for show only 🙁 ) and much more. I think some stats out of this will be great and very interesting.

Every one of these attendees took home a copy of The Open CD, kindly donated by Kevin Russell from Opensource WA which is a great Government project with a demo centre of loads of FOSS as well as doing mini-projects like buses kitted out with computers to help people in rural and remote WA. Every one of these women learnt something about FOSS and why we have all been drawn to the penguin, and hopefully more of them will participate in FOSS andfind out for themselves how wonderful and diverse a world it is 🙂

Rock on geek girls, and welcome to the community!