Geek Girls – Page 2

Indigenous Literacy Day and TechEd women’s panel

Today I went to a talk by a great man, Noel Tovey, a 64yr old Australian Aboriginal man who has been through some of the most awful experiences you will ever hear. He shared his story, and how he overcame extreme adversity to become successful globally. He wrote a book a few years back called “Little Black Bastard“, and he read a little from the book which I will absolutely be going out to buy now. Anyway, it was awfully sad but inspiring at the same time. I spoke at the event about the OLPC project and how it might be both beneficial to disadvantaged communities, but also a way to get Australian Aboriginal cultural content out to children through the project.

Straight after that event I went and spoke on a panel about women in technology at… TechEd 🙂 It was pretty amusing to be there in a way. The other panelists were all Microsoft or Microsoft engrossed, and we all spoke about our careers, answered questions from the audience and just enjoyed being in a room full of women in the industry. It was good to get different perspectives particularly given how my experience is quite different from a typical IT career largely due to the awesome nature of the FOSS community, which went down pretty well. There were some good questions from the floor, and I spoke with one women from Malaysia afterwards for a while about the poor self-image of a lot of women in technology. It was a fascinating conversation and I learnt a lot 🙂

Good day, now to work late to catch up :/

Who wants to sleep with Bill Gates?

I have a lot of blogging to catch up on! In the last month I’ve been to Norway, the US and Niue on really cool projects and conferences, Software Freedom Day is only just over 4 weeks away, and I’ve had some awesome ideas I want to blog. All will happen in the next few days, but last night I went to another Girl Geek Dinner in Sydney, which was awesome. About 80 women who love technology, great cheese and chocolate, talks and networking. It was a really fun night, and a huge thank you to Damana who organises the events!

Some highlights:

Fountain of Chocolate – now I’m not really a chocolate sort of girl, but when you throw strawberries in the mix, I’m totally there! Plus lovely cheeses, champagne and other nibblies made it really nice! Thanks Thoughtware!
A talk on Agile programming, presented in Agile format, that left me a little confused. So Mary in about 45 seconds explained what they meant. Thanks Mary, you rock!
Mary winning the sparkly girly Microsoft shirt in a competition where you sat down if you weren’t geeky enough. Her putting it on and the girl sitting next to me saying “I really wish I was more geeky, I LOVE Microsoft!”. I made the introduction figuring Mary probably would grow tired of it fairly quickly (seeing she is a Linuxchix gal) and the other girl told us that if she could sleep with any man (but her husband to be) it would be Bill Gates. Mary and I were a little stunned at that one 🙂 The girl was very enthusiastic about big trends and also fangirls Google, so we had a very interesting and fun discussion after the fact, but I’m still a little stunned. I mean my picks would be Trent Reznor or Jet Li, but I guess it takes all sorts. Also, to be fair she was pretty nervous, and a really interesting person nonetheless 🙂
Quote of the night, in reference to Ruby on Rails:
Question: I’ve heard that Ruby on Rails doesn’t really scale when you starting getting thousands or tens of thousands of users?
Answer: There are loads of large successful Ruby on Rails implementations. For example, Twitter!
FAIL! 🙂

I’m looking forward to the next one, which will be at Tech Ed. That will be quite weird but hey I’ve been invited onto a panel about women in technology there, so it should be interesting 😉

TechFest, TechGirls, GeekGirls and Software Freedom

The last couple of weeks have been CRAZY! After getting back from my incredible Gung Fu week away, It was straight into everything. I flew back Saturday night, Sunday morning Jeff and I ran an OLPC TechFest in Sydney which had some amazing people come along, get talks about the OLPC server and XO projects, and then have some useful hacking time. In the middle of that I ran away to a wedding which was a big and wonderful Italian wedding, so Jeff was left holding the fort at the TechFest. There will be a more full report about the TechFest soon but there is a great write up by Sarah Maddox, so thanks Sarah! Awesome work by Martin Langhoff and Joel Stanley, who both totally rock!

A couple of days ago I spoke at a TechGirls event up at the Central Coast. I was the keynote speaker to about 200 girls aged 11-16 from the area, and it was fantastic! I got some excellent feedback (from girls and teachers alike) and I received this email which made it so incredibly worth it!

I thought you spoke extremely well and you have inspired me and my friends a lot. I aim to be a Graphic Designer sometime in the near future and you have encouraged me to follow my dreams. Up until today i was undecided if that was the career i wanted to pursue but after your speech today it has made my mind up. Thankyou very much for attending and sharing your views today. You have helped me choose my career.

Yes! I got a few other awesome emails and it was so exciting to have so many girls keen to get into IT.

Tonight was the third GeekGirl dinner in Sydney, which was awesome. Over 110 people (about 85% women) all getting together for an awesome evening of food, wine and talks. We had Claudia and another girl from Yahoo, and then Sara Falamaki, and all the talks were awesome. Then we played Guitar Hero for a while and it was a late night home. An awesome night and a major thanks to Damana, all the other organisers and to Yahoo for putting on such a great night 🙂

I’m currently (and have been for a couple of years) President of Software Freedom International, the body behind Software Freedom Day which is coming up in September. This is an awesome day and we had over 330 teams from over 90 countries last year all taking the concepts of freedom, democratic software, and of course FOSS to the mainstream. All the teams generally do events that are locally relevant and you’ll see some teams have an entire village do a march, or a music festival, or, as Nepal did last year, a candle lighting ceremony 🙂 It is a fascinating and exciting event and I’m so proud to be able to help make it happen. Anyway, we opened registrations for teams almost 2 weeks ago and we already have over 160 teams registered for this year! We are expecting around 500 teams. Check out the easy to browse map for teams near you, and register your event today! Only the first 300 teams get a team pack with shirts, stickers, badges, some CDs and more 🙂

Lastly, one of my best friends Sue recently posted a whole schwag of photos on Facebook from our trip to China in 1999. It was one of the best trips of my life. I learnt a lot there and it reminded me how much I want to return! Below is a (kind of crappy) scan of one of my favourite photos!

Yes, that is me with short, red hair and riding a young and very fast horse. The locals thought I was lost control but I galloped to the group in the distance and back again. It is one of my best memories 🙂 There are also some photos of us at Shaolin Temple and more, but you’ll have to find me on Facebook 🙂

“Tech girls are chic, not just geek”

Last week a book was launched called “Tech girls are chic, not just geek“. I haven’t had a chance to read it yet but a friend of mine was one of the authors and it looks really good:

Tech girls are chic, not just geek is a fun new book showing that it takes all types of people to work in Information Technology (IT). Our 16 ‘tech girls’ are women working in a range of technology jobs across Australia. They are a bunch of fun and funky women who find working with technology challenging and interesting, and they are far from fitting the stereotypical ‘geek’ image portrayed by the media. They use their technical and/or non-technical skills (usually a combination of both) to have a successful career in IT.

I think this is very much on the right path of showing different jobs (tech and non-tech), and then getting the books out to schools to help inform girls and hopefully help them not self-select out of ICT jobs to start.

Great job Rebecca! I look forward to reading the book 🙂 They also got some coverage from Computerworld.

One of the really nice parts of this project is that the book is on sale, and every copy purchased pays for another copy to be donated to a school on top of the 5000 they’ve already pledged to schools. So buy one to help get it out to girls in schools 🙂

Happy International Women’s Day

So today (March the 8th) is International Womens Day, so the Sydney Linuxchix decided to have a hackfest/movie night. It was a fun event with about a dozen women popping in throughout the day, a few short talks about pet projects, some hacking (when our internet wasn’t fluctuating) and then dinner and Office Space, just for a laugh 🙂 It was a fun and relaxed day.

Getting girls (and Gen Y) into IT

I’ve spoken to thousands of school kids over the last few years trying to encourage young girls to consider IT as a career choice. Along the way it has become obvious that Gen Y doesn’t really care about IT as a valid career choice generally, not just girls. I’ve come to a few conclusions that I thought might be of interest.

I think there are two parts to the women in IT/FOSS debate specifically:

1) Women already in IT/FOSS
2) Getting more women into FOSS

The former ends up being a matter of support for those that need/like it, and for those that don’t it doesn’t matter. The second issue isn’t one that many women already in FOSS/IT can answer because most of us are not representative of the majority of women due to the interesting filtering mechanism of society and school that for various reasons turns many little girls off IT and therefore off FOSS (in some countries anyway, there are several countries where this isn’t the case).

I do a lot of stuff in category 2, as I’m trying to understand why young people generally are turned off IT and thus FOSS, and I’ve come to the following conclusions:

Job perception – IT is seen as being anti-social, boring, and something that only “nerdy” boys get into. I always stand in front of these kids and proudly declare I am a geek (which I define as a person who does cool stuff with tech) which blows their minds. A young, extrovert female who loves travelling and trying to help make a better world. I talk to them about the variety of jobs available and about how IT is always changing and fun to get into, which is information they simply aren’t getting from school at the moment. We could all take a little bit of time to talk to schools in our local areas to help the careers advisors, teacher and parents to know more about why IT is an important option for kids to consider
Role models – there aren’t many female IT role models actively influencing the choices of young women. This also gives young men that come into the industry incorrect assumptions about women in IT, so women being visible is really important for young people in general. Getting more young women and men working in IT out there as role models is important in getting more young people interested in IT across the board
Active turn-offs – teachers and parents actively tell kids to not go into IT, as they think there aren’t any jobs. I’m not kidding. I think this has even more of an impact on girls as they are more career focused earlier in their school life and thus make subject choices much earlier that takes them away from the possibility of discovering the fun and challenges of IT careers
Social awareness – kids today are more socially aware than ever before, and they see IT as not a very socially beneficial jobset. This is where I usually bring out the OLPC and talk to them about using technology to improve the world and the lives of millions of underpriveleged people which gets them interested in IT more, and is also a great segway to getting them interested in FOSS

Hopefully that is a useful insight to some of the issues we are facing getting kids and particularly girls in IT today.

Internet gurus, go girls and more

The last two weeks have been madness. I’ve been to several events, met some amazing people, travelled a little and had a birthday somewhere in between.

Firstly, I already mentioned the education.au conference, which has now put up all its talks and recordings, the most interesting of which include Robert Cailliau (one of the pioneers of the internet), Leigh Blackall, and Geetha Narayanan (an inspiring Indian woman talking about technology assisting disadvantaged communities). I met some great people and really enjoyed the speakers.

Then I went to the Go Girls event in Melbourne where I gave 6 talks over two days to about 2000 schoolgirls about why IT and FOSS are such great career options. There were some amazing students there who were more socially and environmentally aware than I was at that age. We had 14 yr olds challenging the Coles home shopping initiative as it might “worsen the obesity problem in Australia”, and others questioning the impact of technology on the environment. I had some delightful girls talk to me after my talks wanting to be programmers, games developers, sys admins, and more! I also got to meet some inspiring people including Jane Treadwell, the Victoria Government CIO who was very FOSS saavy and interesting 🙂 I had a great time and am planning on doing a similar event in Sydney but looking at entire schools (girls, boys, broader age brackets and teachers) and how we can help in looking at IT careers. Anyone interested in this please contact me 🙂

TechGirls!

Warning, major pink ahead! (Not my fault!)

Yesterday was the first TechGirls event, which is strongly based on the success of events like Go Girls, Gidgits and other events linked from the TechGirls website. We had ~250 girls in the Central Coast with some great speakers, and awesome demo zones. I was looking after a room of girls and ran a Linux gaming demo zone with hardware generously donated by Craige for the day, thanks! The girls loved the games (particularly Super Tux) and I had one girl who came specifically to see Linux come over really excited to see Linux there and keen to get more involved. Awesome stuff!

Every attendee got an Ubuntu CD, and there was information about usergroups, the Australian Development Gateway, FOSS and more on display, as well as the few remaining SFD tshirts, which were all XXXL sized, but still very appreciated 🙂

We are looking to run the first such event in Sydney (of such size) mid next year for about 2000-3000 girls. Anyone interesting in helping out or sponsoring, please get in contact with me 🙂 The current website will be updated with a report soon.

Pia Waugh – “most awesome talk”

I’ve been speaking about FOSS at a lot of non-FOSS conferences recently, including the Go Girls event in Perth, a few school events, some NGO conferences and to some Universities around NSW. I’ll also soon be speaking at another couple of events aimed at school kids, Software Freedom Day in Sydney and strangely enough at a “telecentre” conference. Apparently a conference about the deployment of telecentres around Australia, a great place to talk about FOSS for sustainable networks 🙂

Anyway, I was very pleased to find out that my talk was rated the “most awesome” at the 2006 Go Girls event, as judged by about 2300 school girls. Rock on! Perhaps we’ll have a few more young people getting into FOSS from Perth 🙂

If every person in the Australian community did just one outreach project a year, even if it was just installing OpenOffice for someone, then imagine where we can be just a few years from now. In Australia, I estimate we have around 5000 people in our FOSS community (LUGs, developers, sysadmins, advocates, etc). 5000 people influencing 5000 people who in turn talk to their friends about it…. We could probably reach most of Australia in about 5 years if we tried 🙂

Women need “simple pleasures”

Mr Laurie said rural women, like their urban counterparts, needed simple pleasures such as going out for coffee and playing tennis together.

Wow, now I know what I’m missing in my life. Obviously not enough coffee and tennis time with the girls! Tee hee hee!

Comment made by the President of the NSW Farmers Association. Thanks Tongmaster for pointing this out. I love it when people demostrate their biases through what they probably think is a perfectly reasonable comment 🙂