Girls In Tech

Girls in Tech LA is very proud to announce our involvement in LA’s very own Twestival on the 25th. Started in 2009, Twestival is a fantastic event that brings together local social media communities in over a hundred cities to raise money for a very worthy cause.  

This year’s LA version of the popular festival is happening at the legendary Roxy Theatre, and proceeds are going to Concern Worldwide — which brings incredible educational programs to the world’s poorest and most marginalized children. Tickets are only $20, and well worth it, because the event is shaping up to be pretty great.

Our very own GIT LA member Shira Lazar is co-hosting, and entertainment includes Youtube’s official video mixing DJ-Mike Relm,  the TweetMuseum of one-of-a-kind celebrity Twitter art, the Polite in Public Digital Photo booth and 16 year-old DJ prodigy and music blogger Jake Simon. Plus, there’s going to be a surprise performance by a top alternative band that’s currently on tour. Not even we know who it is, but we do know we’re excited to find out.

You can find more info here.  And don’t forget to stop by the GIT LA area and say hi!

Tags: charity, event, Fundraiser, social media, twestival, twitter
Posted in Events, Los Angeles | No Comments »

Samasource will host the first annual GiveWork Charity Gala at the University Club of San Francisco, bringing together writers, luminaries, and some of the most influential female entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley.  The event will feature a live auction, with items for bid including a conversation with Nobel Prize laureates George Akerlof and Myron Scholes, a secret challenge with “The 4-Hour Workweek” author Tim Ferriss, and a date with Bollywood actress Vida Samadzai (Miss Afghanistan 2003).

The gala aims to raise funds for Samasource, a non-profit social enterprise that creates computer-based work for women, youth, and refugees living in developing countries.  Samasource provides technical training, then connects workers with clients, like Stanford University Libraries and Bookshare.org, who need to outsource data jobs.  The core concept behind the program is what is called “microwork.” Samasource founder and CEO Leila Chirayath Janah says, “these little bits of labor that can be performed anytime and anywhere can add up to a real livelihood for people in many parts of the world. The driving force behind Samasource is knowing that hard-working people in places like refugee camps in Kenya and women in rural Pakistan can get life-changing work opportunities through the internet.”

The gala’s silent auction, which hopes to raise enough funds to create work programs in two new refugee camps, will be designed Auctionomics, the auction-design firm created by Stanford Professor Paul Milgrom, the world’s most recognized expert in auction theory. Gala co-organizer Silvia Console Battilana, an Auctionomics co-founder, met Janah at the unveiling of the Her Code Report which was released by Orange Labs earlier this year. That study showed that fewer than 9% of Silicon Valley companies have a female board director, and only 3% of venture-funded companies are run by women.  Janah presented the topic of microwork at the conference, and Console Battilana was immediately impressed. “I saw an opportunity to address several challenges at once – poverty, education, and female empowerment,” she says.

With that in mind, the gala will also bring together many of the Bay Area’s leading female entrepreneurs. The event has garnered support from women such as Adriana Gascoigne of Girls in Tech, Women 2.0 CEO Shaherose Charania, and Randi Zuckerberg of Facebook, with whom Samasource has recently partnered. “It’s great that the work Samasource is doing on Facebook Platform is also giving all these opportunities to people in some of the world’s poorest places” Zuckerberg says. Samasource has developed a platform that allows application developers to outsource the testing of their products to workers in Africa and Asia.

Janah is scheduled to speak at the November 21^st meeting of TEDx in San Francisco, an independently organized offshoot of the international TED conference.  The large overlap in attendees between the two events has given the GiveWork Gala the distinction of being the “unofficial pre-party” for TEDx.  Tickets for the GiveWork Gala go on sale on October 1. Visit www.samasource.org/gala for more information.

Tags: crowdsourcing, Fundraiser, Gala, girls in tech, Microwork, Samasource
Posted in San Francisco | 2 Comments »