Girl Geek Day Dublin

Aloha and welcome to Girl Geek Day Ireland. Firstly let me explain my reasoning behind having a Girl Geek Day.  It started from reading a post about Ada Lovelace Day.

Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace was born on 10th December 1815, the only child of Lord Byron and his wife, Annabella. Born Augusta Ada Byron, but now known simply as Ada Lovelace, she wrote the world’s first computer programmes for the Analytical Engine, a general-purpose machine that Charles Babbage had invented.

Ada Lovelace, 1838 Ada lovelace day is an international day of blogging to draw attention to women who excel in technology.Which takes place on the 24th March.  In a lot of cases women’s contributions often go unacknowledged, their innovations seldom mentioned, a lot of time due to womens shyness or not wanting to draw attention to themselves. We want you to tell the world about these women. The Entrepreneurs, innovators, sysadmins, programmers, designers, games developers, hardware experts, tech journalists, tech consultants, the list is endless.

With this in mind, I decided to have  a Girl Geek Day here in Ireland on Saturday 28th March 2009 at DIT Kevin Street Dublin. A day for bloggers, developers, tech writers, designers, anyone who has even a slight interest in technology or anything geeky!

I would hope to run the event in a barcamp style, informal, interactive and lots of discussions taking place.  I will be updating the site shortly to allow people to sign up and leave suggests on what they want see at Girl Geek Day and how we can all get the most out of it.

February 22, 2009 | Filed Under Events | 4 Comments 

Technical Speaker Training - Free

There are a lot of tech events in Ireland and Northern Ireland right now getting organized (OSS Barcamp, DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper Belfast, etc.), and not surprisingly, we’re seeing a serious dearth of female speakers.  After talking with several women as to why this is, there was a very popular belief that it may have to do with training/experience.  Women who haven’t spoken before may be shy to try it for the first time, and technical people in general aren’t often trained to speak publicly.  In fact, for both men and women, public speaking rates quite high on many people’s list of fears!

So we put together some short, evening sessions to help those who have something to say.  By technical women, for technical women.

The schedule is as follows.  Each session is 1.5 hours and involves a very small group (max capacity ten), including hands-on practice and take-home exercises.  We have three sessions scheduled with a fourth in the diary for either a session repeat or special requests (slide-building, for example).  The sessions are for women only, and we’ll keep them very small (under ten) to allow adequate feedback for people.

Sessions will take place at the echolibre offices at 24 South William Street in Dublin city centre on Thursdays from 6pm - 7:30pm.

Speaker Night 1:               Thursday, February 26th from 6pm-7:30pm

                Topic: What Am *I* Supposed to Talk About?

o   Finding your voice

o   Coming up with topics/content/titles

o   Building a story from your content

 

Speaker Night 2:               Thursday, March 5th from 6pm-7:30pm

                Topic: The Nitty Gritty of Technical Talks

o   Demo-ing with code

o   Useful tools for technical demos/presentations

o   Things everyone hates

o   Failure recovery

o   Your failsafe list

 

Speaker Night 3:               Thursday, March 12th from 6pm-7:30pm

                Topic: Grooving and Improving

o   Handling Q&A

o   Techniques for self-improvment

o   Critiquing your own performance

o   Finding your honest feedback crowd

 

Speaker Night 4:               Thursday, March 19th from 6pm-7:30pm

                Topic: TBD – we’ll either repeat a session or do a special request like slide-building?

 

To register, just put your name in the comments section next to which session you’ll be attending (or say all if you want to attend all three).  Please only register if you’re sure you’ll be attending, as we have very limited space.  If they fill up, we will repeat sessions.

 

If you have comments or feedback about the training or there are additional topics you’d like covered, please e-mail me at martharo [at] microsoft.com.

February 20, 2009 | Filed Under training | 15 Comments 

And Now for Some News

We’ve been very busy here at Ireland GGD headquarters mapping out 2009, and here’s what’s on its way.

The schedule so far is looking like this - any feedback would be really appreciated.

(these are tentative, and we may try and coordinate them with other BarCamps if possible)

For Dublin events, we received feedback that the nice dinners are great, but that people would like to do a more regular & more casual meetup.  So at our meeting in March, we’ll be talking about nights that work well for people, and we’ll just get a regular monthly night in the diary for those interested.

Another event that is a bit more timely is a short and free speaker training series we’re doing in town.  I”ll put up a separate blog post on that, though, so that people can sign up that way.

Looking forward to seeing all of your lovely faces soon.  Please feel free to leave comments below or e-mail me at martharo [at] microsoft.com with feedback on the site and upcoming events.  Thanks!

February 20, 2009 | Filed Under administrivia | 2 Comments 

Website Makeover

By now you’ve probably noticed our shiny new look & feel, courtesy of the smashing Jennifer Farley at Laughing Lion Design.  Thanks very much to Jennifer for giving the site a much-needed update.  Jennifer has put in a lot of time and effort to get this up and running, and I can’t say thank you enough to her for all her energy and work.

Enjoy!

February 20, 2009 | Filed Under administrivia | Leave a Comment