Code is like a paintbrush, and the Internet is the world’s biggest art gallery. Invented just 20 years ago, the Web has changed everything. Less than 24% of humanity has access to the Internet; there is more change to come. What can we expect technology to change in the future?

Join us on June 29th when Cate Huston shares with us some of the highlights from her “Art, Life and Programming” lecture.

Cate is working on completing her Masters degree in Computer Science at the University of Ottawa and is also an Intern at IBM.   You may know her as @kittenthebad on Twitter, and if you don’t, well what are you waiting for? She is also the  Instigator of Awesome for Awesome Ottawa.

When: Tuesday, June 29 at 6 p.m.

Where: Biagio’s Italian Kitchen on 1394 Richmond Road (Get directions)

Register now!

**UPDATE**

We have TWO student spots available (it is summer after all!) courtesy of Thornley Fallis Communication. Leave a comment and you’ll get free admission and $25 of your dinner covered! Same routine as always-leave a comment and let us know what and where you study and why you want to attend.

Guest speaker Ellen Grove shares information on Agile principles and practices.

These Agile principles and practices is what our speaker, Ellen Grove, came to talk to us about….in 30 minutes. So here are some of the highlights and links for you to get the full story:

• Agile is highly collaborative in nature
• Work can get started with just enough information, there is no need  to predict all the changes up front
• Work is prioritized by the customer and priorities can change from one iteration to the next
• Openeness with the customer is not only OK, it is expected
• Agile is a rich method for collecting data and feeding it back into your processes
• When an iteration is two weeks, what’s the risk of trying something out?
• Agile methods are great at exposing impediments

Additional links:

• http://www.openagile.com
• http://wiki.openagile.org
• Scrum in 5 minutes
• InfoQ’s Agile Stream

All this being said, you’ve read our event summary, reviewed the above links and see the value Agile implementations offer.  The issue is you’re not in a position to change your company’s project delivery methodology.  How can you become more Agile as a team member? Ellen recommends two things:

1. Use a task board – it’s a great way to visualize work and expose bottlenecks.
2. Nothing beats a team face-to-face sanity check. Not an hour long status meeting, just a quick (15-minute time boxed) way to update one another on work accomplished, work coming up and to expose any roadblocks standing in the way of completing the work.

More questions? You can find Ellen on Twitter and LinkedIn, you can send her an email or you can access her bookmarks for more information.

So there you have it.  Go out and be Agile!

p.s.: We’re already planning our next event so stay tuned.  We plan these events for the GGD Ottawa community so please send any topic or speaker suggestions or general feedback our way.

** April 6 Update – we are having issues with the PayPal account so if you have been trying to register, we apologize! We are working on getting the issue resolved as soon as possible and will notify everyone that it is ready to go via this blog and Twitter. **

Algonquin College’s Public Relations students present this month’s Girl Geek Dinner (GGD) Ottawa event!

Women entrepreneurs and students across Ottawa are invited to a night of food, networking, and awareness. Co-owners of Victoire Boutique, Katie Frappier and Regine Paquette, will share their successes and struggles as female entrepreneurs. We’ll also learn about women entrepreneurs in Africa and the challenges they face in establishing economic independence through business ownership.

All proceeds for this event will help support ICAfrica (International Charity for Africa), a non-profit organization that helps fight poverty in Africa through enterprise development.

When: April 12, 2010 at 7 p.m.

Where: Vittoria Trattoria, 35 William St. (in the Market)

Registration: $15 for professionals and $10 for students. To purchase your ticket, click here.

More info about this event

Each year, the Algonquin College first year public relations (PR) class gets together and organizes a community relations project. This year, the class has paired up with ICAfrica, an international charity for entrepreneurs in Africa.

Last month, the PR students approached GGD Ottawa and asked to coordinate a networking event in April to help raise funds for ICAfrica. Kelly, Veronica and myself enthusiastically agreed, and we hope to see the GGD Ottawa community come out and show support for a great cause! More information about the PR students’ fundraising campaign is available at www.icafrica.com/algonquin.

March 4th marked the start of 2010 for GGD Ottawa. What better way to start than with another sold out event!  This time our topic was “Guerilla Usability for Girl Geeks”.

The majority of people in attendance were interested in Web Usability, so that’s what Laura Wesley (@resultsjunkie), our guest speaker, focused on. Quite a few attendees tweeted the event and you can find a capture of the tweet stream here.

Laura Wesley talks usability while an attendee looks on

Laura plans to make her presentation available via her blog, including a list of website resources related to usability, and we’ll update this post with a link to the presentation when it’s available.

In the meantime, here are some key points Laura shared:

• The sign of a really good product is a learnable product.  People don’t buy products they can’t (easily) figure out how to use.
• No door should need instructions.
• In the context of the government, there is a direct link between user centricity and user confidence and public trust.
• Usability helps you move the conversation towards evidence-based decision making.  e.g. “I know you like blue but he likes red.”  “This word might make sense, but the product or the service is not for you.”
• The way people process information is fairly similar.
• When conducting usability testing, five people is enough. You will start to see a trend if something works or not.
• Questions to ask during testing are: Did the users complete the task? How long did it take? Did they enjoy the experience?
• Brand loyalty is not the most important thing when it comes to usability.
• A/B testing and multi-variate testing – is a method of creating two versions of a page and presenting each to a different group of visitors. Which works best?
• whichtestwon.com – a site where you can see completed A/B tests and ‘guess’ which one works better.
• Track conversion rates – how many people did what you wanted them to do?
• Create ratios if you can.
• Usability isn’t a standalone process – you need to have search engine optimization, a proper business model, etc. You can have the most usable site in the world but if no one visits, it means nothing.
• Seven things that are most important for a web site to be: useful, desired, valuable, findable, credible, accessible (aside from Usability)

Thanks again to Laura for an interesting and engaging presentation, to our sponsors and to all who were able to attend.  As always we welcome your feedback.  Let us know if you have any suggestions on speakers or topics of interest.  We look forward to a great 2010 full of exciting people, topics, door prizes and of course dinners!

Door Prize Winners

Caitlin Kealey accepts wine kit prize courtesy of Randy Little of indyadvisor.ca

Cate Huston accepts her Corel Photo and Video Bundle door prize

Della Siemens wins two tickets to the performance "Elementos" at the NAC

Mary Mary Beth Baker with her eco-friendly lunch kit courtesy of Eco-Tav Creations

Laura will discuss:

1. What is usability
2. Why it’s important and why we should all be aware of it
3. Usability methods
4. Resources & takeaways

The event details!

Join us Thursday, March 4 at 6 p.m. at the Heart and Crown on Preston Street! Register now.

Heart & Crown
353 B Preston Street (at Aberdeen Street)

Tell us what you want to know about usability

To help Laura frame her discussion on usability, use the comments section to tell us what you’re most interested in learning more about.  Usability in the context of:

a) web design & online service delivery
b) the real world
c) continuous improvement
d) performance measurement
e) other?

A bit about Laura

Laura is part of a growing movement of professionals using Results-based Management and User-Centred Design principles to foster a results-focused culture in the Federal Public Service. Cynical idealist and overachieving public servant, this Girl Geek spends her free time Inter-webbing, snowshoeing, learning & knitting.

Laura is @resultsjunkie on Twitter and blogs at http://usability4government.wordpress.com

See you March 4th!

*UPDATE* Student spots available!

Once again, thanks to a gracious sponsorship by Thornley Fallis Communications, we’re offering five student spots for this event.

What this means, is if you’re a full-time student, and one of the first five students to comment on this post, you’ll get free admission to the event *and* your meal paid for (up to $25).

So if you’re a student and want to take advantage, leave a comment and let us know what you are taking in school and why you want to attend.

If there are already five comments, please go ahead and leave one anyway in case someone can’t make it or more spots become available.

In the spirit of building community around the Girl Geek Dinner Ottawa (GGD Ottawa) brand, last night also featured a networking game that Veronica, Kelly and I created as a way to ensure all attendees had a chance to mingle and get to know one another.

While my explanation of how the game works lacked some clarity (I’m a new mom so I blame it on sleep deprivation), attendees seemed to get the hang of it and really got into the spirit of seeking one another out. And that’s exactly what we hoped would happen!

The "girl geektini" cocktail

I can’t forget to acknowledge the special treat of the night – the “girl geektini” cocktail – which was delicious, sweet and just a little bit sassy.

Finally, we want to take this opportunity to once again thank our sponsors Well.ca, 3rdLife and the National Arts Centre for providing some great door prizes. As you can see from photos below, the prizes are greatly appreciated!

A full album of photos highlighting the event is available on Flickr and is tagged ggdottawa.

The next GGD Ottawa event will be held in the New Year with details posted to this blog as soon as they’re available. Until then, happy holidays!

Door Prize Winners

Christina Stefanski accepts her Well.ca door prize from Kelly Rusk, featuring Burt's Bees lip balm, Ballbuster hand cream, Cold-FX 1st Day and Gylsomed foot balm

Terri Oda accepts her handmade makeup bag and pin made from vintage and recycled garments, courtesy of 3rdLife.

Caitlin Lafleche accepts her NAC door prize of two tickets to the "Guys and Dolls" performance.

While we’ll have no formal speaker, this will be an Open Mic night–everyone will have the chance to jump up on the mic and engage the crowd with a 30-second pitch. Tell us all about yourself, your business, a cause you believe in, whatever you like really, but you’ve only got 30 seconds to do so.

As always you can win some fabulous door prizes *and* don’t forget to order yourself a ‘girl geektini‘– our featured cocktail for the night!

Register now…

This month’s Door prize donors:

• National Arts Centre
• 3rd Life – handmade eco-friendly designs
• Well.ca – Canada’s online health, beauty and skin care store

This is pretty short notice, so I hope most of you caught this news on Twitter.  Just in case, we’d like to bring your attention to a different kind of networking event taking place in Ottawa on November 12th and 13th.

Connect the Dots is THE women’s networking event of the year! It is designed to connect all leading women’s networking groups in the Ottawa Region and provide an opportunity to NETWORK, COLLABORATE, BE INSPIRED and GET MOTIVATED.

This fantastic event is brought to you by Ignite Potentials Training Inc. and the leading Women’s networking groups.

It’s taking place on at the Crowne Plaza Hotel (map) on November 12th and 13th

Girl Geek Natasha D’Souza is one of the speakers and if you hop on over to her blog you might get to attend the event for free!!

Our venue of choice this time was The Empire Grill, the room was setup in a single, and very long table.  Turns out this was the perfect setup for the exercise our speaker, Maureen McCann, had in mind.  This exercise is a personal favourite of mind, the driving force behind it is that sometimes we get so caught up in our disappointments that we forget how many great things we have to offer.  It’s a game of first impressions. You are given a colored index card and asked to write your name and a word that you feel describes you.   We were then asked to pass our card to our left, take a look at the person to our right and write on their card the car that would best describe them.  This is the first impression part.  We passed the cards to the left again and are asked to write a beverage that best describes the person a couple chairs to the right.  And so we went for a couple more descriptions.  You then receive your card back and get to read how other people perceive you (at least for that night).  Most of us found our descriptions were pretty bang on!  I guess this is good news, since HR people and recruiters are forced to make decisions based on first impressions.

But enough games.  Did you know that a US survey showed 50-60% of respondents were unhappy with their current jobs?  How about that just in the same way you perform maintenance on your car, you should be performing maintenance on your career?

Maureen self describes herself as the Simon Cowell of career coaches and says the biggest challenge people face in their careers is themselves.  Best way to save ourselves from ourselves?   3 steps:

1. Know who you are and what you have to offer.
2. Understand the local labor market.
3. Have the ability to sell yourself.  Take a look at yourself from the employer’s perspective and articulate the value you bring to the table.

Some more practical advice:

1. Don’t use Time New Roman font for cover letters and resumes.
2. Don’t use Word or Office templates…stand out.
3. Are you a designer? Why don’t you flaunt your stuff on your resume?
4. If you have 60% of the job requirements, go for it!  Don’t screen yourself out of the competition.
5. If you are looking for a senior level position and have 7 LinkedIn connection, step it up.
6. What goes online, stays online.  You’re on 24 hours, don’t leave half filled profiles.
7. Go beyond Googling yourself, setup a Google alert for your name.
8. Check out your Google Quotient (there’s a small cost for the tool, you’ll have to enter your email)

Whether you are searching for a job or looking to move up within your current company.  Don’t forget to celebrate your successes along the way.  An interview, a follow-up are all things to be proud of.  This builds up your confidence and you can tie that back to those first impressions.

Great night. Great speaker. Great company, so we are happy to call this event another huge success.  Thanks for attending, we hope we see you again before the holidays.

—————–

Registration for the next Girl Geek Dinners Ottawa (#ggdOttawa) event with career coach Maureen McCann is now open!

Please join us by registering here.

When:

Monday, October 26 at 6 p.m.

Where:

Empire Grill, in the Market
47 Clarence St
Ottawa, ON K1N 9K1
(613) 241-1343

Don’t forget to participate in the event poll so we can find out which career topic you’re most interested in discussing with Maureen.

Then join the discussion on why you selected that response by leaving a comment on our original post for the event. We hope to see you next Monday night!