Girls In Tech

Over 2,139,373 Actions taken by YOU on ending the violence against women. It is one of top sought priority worldwide part of the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women initiative.

Say NO – UNiTE to End Violence against Women is a social mobilization platform on ending violence against women and girls, contributing towards UN Secretary General’s system -wide campaign, UNiTE to End Violence against Women. Launched in November 2009 by UN Women, Say NO – UNiTE showcases advocacy efforts and engages people from all walks of life, online and on the ground. UN Women Goodwill Ambassador Nicole Kidman is the Spokesperson of Say NO – UNiTE.

This year, Say NO – UNiTE  will present 16 actions that organizations and activists can take, to mark the 16 Days of Activism. Actions can be taken online or offline, by participating in the highlighted events or by organizing your own. Activists can pick as many actions as they like, or take the action of the day. The 16 Days page is live on November 21, 2011

Posting your #16Days action on www.saynotoviolence.org is easy – create an account, and once it is activated, post an action page for each event/activity. Please select “16 Days” as the Action Type.

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Tags: #16days, 24notion, activism, gender equality, Ivo Lukas, say no unite, UN, united nations, UNwomen
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Open source: Google Code-in contest kicks in last week. For those students in the ages of 13-17 years old could participate and win fabulous prizes and recognition.  It’s a simple process: Pick a task, complete the task and your task is approved. The contest runs from November 21, 2011 to January 16, 2012. Worldwide participation is encouraged. The goal is to produce a variety of open source code, documentation, training materials and user experience research for the organizations participating this year. These tasks include:

• Code: Tasks related to writing or refactoring code
• Documentation: Tasks related to creating/editing documents
• Outreach: Tasks related to community management and outreach/marketing
• Quality Assurance: Tasks related to testing and ensuring code is of high quality
• Research: Tasks related to studying a problem and recommending solutions
• Training: Tasks related to helping others learn more
• Translation: Tasks related to localization
• User Interface: Tasks related to user experience research or user interface design and interaction

Check out the site to participate and learn more. 54 days left to the challenge, so spread the word!

Be sure to let us know that you are participating so, you might get a chance to be profiled on our Girls in Tech Mentorship Program article. Drop us an email ivo@girlsintech.net

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Tags: girlsintech mentorship, GITmentorship, google code in, Ivo Lukas, k-12, mentorship, open source, technology
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Last week wrapped up the Grace Hopper Celebration Women in Computing 2011 in Portland, Oregon. 3000 attendees (over 140 companies, 235 academics representation and closed to 90% women attendees) from all over the world flocked to attend this 4 days conference. What if, is the topic of the conference – It is about creating the next generation to be the leader in STEM/Tech (science, technology, engineering and mathematics). Telle Whitney opened the conference by introducing an initiative by Anita Borg/Grace Hooper “TechWomen” change agent scholars: 6 women mentees (Algeria, Lebanon, Morocco, Palestine and Egypt) selected as up-and-coming leaders who will advance in women’s participation in technology and help support more women in their hometown and expand STEM education. TechWomen pairs technical women in the greater San Francisco Bay Area with their counterparts in the Middle East and North Africa for a professional mentorship and exchange program at leading technology companies.

Keynote speaker, Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook gave a career advice for any young woman who wants to move up the ladder in the career of technology:

1. Believe in yourself
2. Dream big
3. Make your partner a real partner
4. Don’t’ leave just yet
5. Start talking about this

The conference sessions range from career, academic, technical, theme and industry track. With Saturday dedicated for an open source day: Codeathon for humanity.

Grace Hopper Aspirations computing by NCWIT took place on Thursday night. More than 1200 applicants applied for and top 30 young women were chosen to attend this conference. The Aspirations award is the catalyst that propels young women into studying computer science in college and ultimately pursuing a career in computing and information technology. Event sponsored by Microsoft, Intel, viawest, Lewis and Clark, puppetlabs and 24Notion

Career fair and exhibitors from Google, yahoo, Microsoft, NSA, Deutsch bank, Lockheed martin, Amex, Intel, Pixar, Facebook, Twitter and hundred others gathered to recruit the brightest STEM young leader to lead their company. (Did you know that STEM jobs paid 20% more than regular career?).

Leaving the conference energized and excited that at Girls in Tech Mentorship Program, we are here to support and developed the next generation to raise them up the top. So, what are you waiting for? Get into it!

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Tags: 24notion, engineering, girls in tech portland, GIT Mentorship, gitpdx, grace hopper celebration, Ivo Lukas, mathematics, mentorship, mssonicflare, Science, sheryl sandberg, STEM, technology, women in computing
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Grace Hopper celebration of Women in Computing  will take place in Portland this year November 9-12, 2011. The conferences designed to bring the research and career interests of women in computing to the forefront. Keynote speakers line up would be Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook and the honorable Shirley Ann Jackson, President, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

4 days of conference with special sessions focus on the role of women in today’s technology fields, including computer science, information technology, research and engineering.

Check out daily schedule here.  Registration is now closed, as it’s a sold out conference. So, follow me @MsSonicFlare for conference updates this week.

Tags: 24notion, Computing, executive leaders, facebook, girls in technology, gitpdx, grace hopper, ivo, Ivo Lukas, mssonicflare, technology, women in computing, women in technology
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A recent article from Inc noted that women in technology still face an uphill battle. Quite true!

According to the article, “Women make up half of the U.S. workforce but represent only 25 percent of the technology industry. Despite growth in entrepreneurship, women lead only eight percent of technology start-ups.”

Is this a problem of widespread gender stereotypes? Lack of aspiration to the technology sector by young girls? We need to balance the energy of building awareness with keeping more women in tech arenas. 75% of women in technology report “loving their work,” yet women leave technology careers at a staggering rate.

Finding support and guidance is quite a challenging task. Being in this field for some time, I’ve seen many inspired young women/girls have a hard time finding established women and entrepreneurs in tech to help them maneuver within the industry or corporations. We need more families and friends who can embrace and mentor them within the field.

How do we address this issue? My take is that it starts by exposing, educating and engaging girls from an early young age. Many parents continue to say , “Hey, I would love to have my kids become lawyers or doctors” but you hardly ever hear parents encourage their young girls to become a scientist, or explore technical or mathematicians occupations. Especially at a young age, girls are exposed to more traditional games and toys, but why can’t girls play with Legos? Or create a robotic science project at school?

We invite you to make a difference. We have launched the Girls in Tech Mentorship program in summer 2011. There are huge opportunities to build up the next generation of young girls in technology and entrepreneurship. Our goal is not only to inspire, share knowledge and help young girls to take notice of how cool technology can be, but to expose and educate their parents by encouraging their girls to take part in science, math and tech fairs.  We are looking for mentors, mentees, sponsors, media partners and more. If you are interested in learning more or being part of the program, drop me an email: ivo@girlsintech.net

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Tags: entrepreneurship, girls in tech, Ivo Lukas, Math, mentorship, mssonicflare, Science, STEM, technology, women in tech
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Big Data has quickly become a critical element in determining business strategy. Those who best leverage data will win. Who’s winning, and how? Who’s innovating, and where are the opportunities? These are some of the questions we’ll be asking and answering at the New York edition Strata, the big data conference from O’Reilly Media. A full week of data-focused conversations, training, and strategy is on tap the week of September 19-23, 2011 in New York City, including:

Strata Jumpstart – September 19, 2011 A crash course on how to manage the data deluge that’s transforming traditional business practices across the board-in finance, marketing, sales, legal, privacy/security, operations, and HR. Join us for an intense, day-long deep dive.

Strata Summit – September 20-21, 2011 Two days of executive-level interviews, plenaries, and essential high-level strategies for thriving in “the harsh light of data,” delivered by the battle-tested business and technology pioneers who are leading the way.  Strata Summit is for executives, entrepreneurs, and decision-makers.

Strata Conference – September 22-23, 2011 Strata Conference covers the latest and best tools and technologies for this new discipline, along the entire data supply chain-from gathering, cleaning, analyzing, and storing data to communicating data intelligence effectively. With hardcore technical sessions, case studies, and provocative reports from the leading edge, Strata Conference showcases the people, tools, and technologies that make data work.  Strata Conference is for developers, data scientists, data analysts, and other data professionals.

Register for a Super Pass now, which gives you access to the whole week of conference and evening events, at a reduced rate. Girls in Tech readers get an extra 30% discount. Use discount code GIT

See you there! Follow me @MsSonicFlare

Tags: 24notion, analysts, conference, data, data prof, Developers, girls in tech new york, gitpdx, gitportland, gitweet, ivo, Ivo Lukas, mssonicflare, nyc, o'reilly media, strata, strataconf, technology, women leaders
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Girls in Tech is proud to be part of the Women@TheFrontier  2nd annual conference tonight: Tuesday August 16, 2011 6-10pm at The Tech Museum of Innovation San Jose, CA. This event is open to public. RSVP here

Women@TheFrontier launched in summer 2009- to inspire, to empower and to link female change-agents currently impacting the world through innovation, entrepreneurship, humanitarianism, policy, science and technology.

At its core, W@F celebrates the accomplishments of leading women that are creating positive and innovative change, global in reach and exponential in impact.

W@F also recognizes top organizations empowering and actively changing the lives of women and girls around the world.

 W@F is also collaborating with Women Go Global

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Tags: entrepreneurship, innovation, Ivo Lukas, Science, tech, Women at the Frontier, women go global, women in tech, women's conference
Posted in All Chapters, All Chapters, Events, Girls In Tech, Los Angeles, Palo Alto, Portland, San Diego, San Francisco, santa cruz, Silicon Valley | No Comments »

Another year passed for OSCON 2011 with over 3000+ attendees flocking to Portland, Oregon for this year’s theme: From Disruption to Default.

OSCON 2011 events, tracks, sessions and keynotes raised the bar again.

Here are a few highlights of the keynote session and tracks:

-       Microsoft Keynote by Gianugo Rabelino, Sr Director of Open Source Communities is quite great as he talks about the future of community: informed trends: education, repeatable science and experience. See speakers slides

-       Rob Pike: The  expressiveness of Go programming language. Read blog

-       Ariel Waldman: On hacking space exploration. See speaker slides

-       IBM: On building native mobile apps with phone gap. Becky Gibson and Simon MacDonald showed best practices on mobile apps. See speaker slides

-       Gabe Zichermann discussed the importance of Gamification. Check out the slides

Check out full speaker list

Check out full program speaker and slides

Check out keynote and video interviews

Lastly, On Thursday, July 28th, Global Girls in Tech Mentorship Program kicked off their inaugural VIP sessions at Oscon. Fortune 500, academic, tech and entrepreneurs and leaders from all over the world gathered together to participate and support our kick-off meet-up. Thanks so much to everyone who showed up. We couldn’t have done it without your continued help and participation. Interested in participating? Drop me an email; ivo@girlsintech.net  | Follow me @MsSonicFlare

For More info about GIT Mentorship

Watch video live interview with Ivo Lukas- Director of Global Mentorship/Partnership program & MD of Portland Chapter

Join our Local PDX Chapter

(Photo credit:  Pinar Ozger & OSCON)

Tags: 24notion, education, entrepreneurs, girls and technology, girls intech, girlsintech mentorship, girlsintech portland, gitpdx, ivo, Ivo Lukas, Mentorship program, mssonicflare, open source, oregon, OSCON2011, Portland, startups, technology, women in tech, women leadership, women technology
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I had a chance to sit down with Rob Pike from Google last week at OSCON 2011.  Rob Pike is a Distinguished Engineer at Google, Inc. He works on distributed systems, data mining, programming languages, and software development tools. Before Google, Rob was a member of the Computing Sciences Research Center at Bell Labs, the lab that developed Unix. While there, he worked on computer graphics, user interfaces, languages, concurrent programming, and distributed systems. He was an architect of the Plan 9 and Inferno operating systems and is the co-author with Brian Kernighan of The Unix Programming Environment and The Practice of Programming. More recently he was a co-designer of the Go programming language. Other details of his life appear on line but vary in veracity.

Tell us more about you, your role at Google and your team?

I was at Bell Labs for over 20 years, most of which were wonderful, but the last years at Bell Labs weren’t as much fun.  In 2002, I moved to Google, where I work on infrastructure- the technology behind the scenes. Lately I’ve been working on the Go team. At Google, I’m having fun. There’s strong interest from the engineers to learn more about Go, and we have users from from neophytes to experienced gophers. About 3 years ago, a few of us decided to address the problem that the programming languages we were using at Google for building system software were old and not well suited to the problems and the machinery we were working with. Right now, there are about 10 strong engineers on my team. We work on helping Google use this new language, but do all our language and library development as open source. As it says in my talk abstract, Go is not a small language but it is a simple one. By “simple” I mean that it is built upon a small number of ideas that combine orthogonally to generate power. Go may have fewer features than most mainstream languages but in expressiveness I argue it is ahead. Orthogonality lets elements be combined without unpleasant surprises. Simplicity makes Go easy to understand, fast to use and fast to compile. Go launched in november 2009. We are all over the world. we have team across the world from US to sydney as well.

What does the future look like for Go in the next 2 years?

It’s a maturation process. We want to grow a much larger community of users, which means we need a lot more exposure. Our focus now is to have it adapted by many users while we to continue to develop the language, libraries, and tools. We are giving talks and doing lots of advocacy. From the technical side, we are working on better libraries and making it even faster. It’s already very competitive; we just need to get the word out there: fun and fast.

What would be a single take away for the attendees that you want them to gain from your session?

You can have a nice language that is fun to use, safe *and* efficient

Whats next for GOOGLE?

Couldn’t speak to much besides my project, Go. But, this success of our social networking experiment, Google+, has been awesome!

You are one of the most accomplished individuals and a successful engineer, What can we learn from you?

it is important to do what you believe in. Some IT jobs can be very unrewarding and you can get trapped doing something that you dislike. So, if you find yourself in that position then you must switch to something you’re passionate about. What is  your goal and your interests?  What excites you the most? You should find them and make them what you do!

Which session(s) are you most excited about?

Sad to say I haven’t been focusing on others, except things related my project, and our sessions. I’ve just been swamped, but I know that I’ll be catching up by video afterwards. (I wish my talk had been videoed, hint hint.)

Is this your first time being part of Oscon? If not, then how’s it different from previous years?

This is my second year here. Last year, Go did not have a big presence – I was just a newcomer myself, although Google has been a major sponsor for years. This year, our team is more visible, with multiple talks and giveaways. Have you seen our Gophers? My wife, Renee French is an artist and she designed the gopher. There’s a plush incarnation, made by Squishable, and every attendee got the vinyl version, made by KidRobot. Renee’s name and a link to the Go are on the bottom of the vinyl gopher.

What’s a current device that you couldn’t live without?

Either my 11 inch mac air or my little digital camera. If there is no wifi, then it’ll be my digital camera for sure.

Read, download and check out the presentation by Rob on “Go” here. Good Luck Rob!

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Tags: 24notion, Engineer, girls in tech, gitpdx, go, Golang, Google, gopher, Ivo Lukas, ivolukas, mssonicflare, OSCON, OSCON2011, Portland, programming, technology
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For 13 years, OSCON, the O’Reilly Open Source Convention, has put open source to work building the future. OSCON’s program encompasses 20 tracks to explore all things open source. New tracks have been added to OSCON this year, including Citizen Science, Geek Lifestyle, Open Data, Programming, and Emerging Languages, while Healthcare returns for its second year.

For those of you who couldn’t make it to Portland. Don’t worry! O’Reilly’s OSCON video live stream starts today and continues all week. also, Check out daily schedule

Don’t forget this Thursday: Girls in Tech will be at OSCON 2011 as we kick off the inaugural GIT Mentorship Pilot Programs globally (everyone is welcome-men and women). Learn more about the mentorship programs(for k-12, colleges/universities, working professionals), get involved and participate,  and how you could help spread the word. If you are attending Oscon 2011,  join us on Thursday on July 28th 1-2pm in room #D134. More info about the session. See you there!

More info at oscon.com/live

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Tags: 24notion, girls in tech, gitpdx, Ivo Lukas, mentorship programs, oregon, OSCON, oscon data, oscon java, OSCON2011, Portland, women in technology, women leadership
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