Girl Geek Dinners Ottawa

Last Wednesday, Serena Ngai of Girl Develop It Ottawa presented her case about the revolution of women in technology. From Mattel’s Barbie career innovations to five-year old girls dreaming of being astronauts, Serena pointed out the large social gap between girls and boys in the field of computer science and everything related.

When you Google search “computer scientist”, what’s the first image that appears? Is it a guy with glasses and a plaid shirt? Trust us, we’re not being biased. In fact, research has shown the number of women with bachelor degrees in computer sciences has decreased rapidly over the past 20 years from 37 per cent to less than 20 per cent. Today, less than one per cent of women would be interested in studying computer science as an elective in university. But, there is hope!

In 2010, Mattel posted a public survey asking girls which career they would like Barbie to pursue. To everyone’s surprise, the number one career was computer engineer. Are women beginning to see technology as a fun, innovative, career savvy form of income?  Let’s hope so!

To help regain the number of women in computer sciences, Serena and Gail Carmichael founded Girl Develop It Ottawa to bring back the flare and fun of building websites in a supportive environment. Serena taught us how technical skills can be valuable for your career and any career, why this “women in technology” thing really matters, and how their upcoming workshops can help you become the next Marissa Mayer. Well, in part.

Girl Develop It is hosting their next workshop Intro to HTML and CSS on Nov. 29 and Dec. 6, from 6:30 – 9:30 p.m. They’re also looking for volunteers to help teach workshops and share technological skills with Ottawa women. If you or someone you know likes to teach and is tech savvy, contact Serena or Gail.

And lastly, congratulations to our Girl Geek prize winners who went home with fabulous gifts from our event sponsors – the National Arts Centre, Media Miser, UsedOttawa.com and Ingrid Aesthetics.

To read more about this month’s event, check out the following reviews from our Girl Geek attendees:

Amy Campsall (blog post)– @AmyCampsall

Alexandra Reid – @TechAlly

Mel Gallant – @MelGallant

Hana Abaza – @HanaAbaza

From mobile apps to social media technology and from open data to public policy, women are continually influencing the way information is being shared across the world.

On March 30, three women taught us that technology isn’t just an objective, it changes society and infrastructure as a whole.

Mary Beth Baker, Emily Daniels and Tracey Lauriault, were part of a technological revolution known as Open Data Ottawa. A few months back, they organized Hackfest, an opportunity for technology lovers to come together to create unique and innovative mobile apps with the purpose of helping Ottawa citizens to enjoy and easily access recreation and services the city has to offer.

Thanks to our wonderful speakers and guests, the event generated huge awareness on Twitter.  We highly encourage participation from everyone, male or female, and if you know someone that’s passionate about technology or has an idea for an event, please don’t hesitate to talk to us, we love questions and feedback!

What can we take away from this event? From creative ideas for new apps to learning resources you can take home with you,  Mary Beth, Tracey and Emily enlightened us with their passion for the pursuit of open data :

• If you’re not reading this, make sure to pick up The Real World of Technology by Ursula Franklin and also check out Datalibre.ca.
• Remember Erin Brockovich? Well, she’s back in the spotlight and working on passing an open data bill about disease clusters being mapped and made public. Does this mean a sequel?!
• Another great quote is from the lovely Jane Jacobs, “Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.”
• If you loved the past Hackfest and want to take part again, Mary Beth is hoping to start a Mother’s Day Hackfest in May. Feel free to contact her for more information, maribethbaker <at> gmail.com. You can also check out photos from the last Hackfest on behalf of Edward  Ocampo-Gooding.
• And last, but not least, open data is not about sharing personal information with the public.  In order to share public information we have the right to know and to answer public policy issues that affect us and our communities.

Thanks again to our sponsors for their continued support.  We hope all the door prize winners enjoy their prizes!

CIRA .CA

Thornley Fallis

Open Data Ottawa

The Lemon Kitchen

Media Miser

The National Arts Centre

Swing Dynamite

Join us Wednesday, January 26th at The Black Tomato for a panel discussion featuring three female business leaders, representing both the public and private sector. The panelists are:

• Jennifer MacKinnon – Founder and CEO of Fenix Solutions Inc.
• Sherry Noble – Senior VP, Business Development at Export Development Canada
• Janet Harris-Campbell – Chief Information Officer, IM-IT, Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions Canada

Our panelists will share their career journey to the top, including lessons learned in striving for work-life balance, setting career goals, mentorship and more. Please join us for an insightful and engaging discussion on leadership and coaching in the workplace!

What: Panel discussion on career journey, leadership and coaching

Where: The Black Tomato, 11 George Street at Sussex (get directions)

When: 6 p.m.

Register now: To register, please visit our event registration page.

More About Our Speakers

Sherry L. Noble

A native of Waterloo, Ontario, Sherry Noble joined Export Development Canada (EDC) in 1977. Since joining EDC, Sherry has held positions of increasing responsibility in the Corporate Communications, Treasury and Business Development & Operations groups. Effective July 2003, she was appointed Senior Vice President, Business Solutions & Technology, a newly created group.

With oversight of the information technology function at EDC, Sherry is responsible for ensuring alignment of the corporate IT strategy and architecture with business objectives; reliability of the technical and communications infrastructure for clients and employees; and effective project management and application development.  Her Group is also looked to for leadership in the areas of Business Process Management, and Enterprise Information Management.

Ms. Noble has an undergraduate degree in Science in Language (French and Spanish) and a Master’s degree in Business Administration from the University of Ottawa. Travelling is something Sherry has always enjoyed, and working at EDC has given her the opportunity to visit interesting cities around the world.

Jennifer MacKinnon

Jennifer is the founder and CEO of Fenix Solutions Inc. a web software development company specializing in online application development and the use of emerging technologies & trends.

A previous Top Forty Under 40 win ner, Jennifer is a businesswoman who counts her role as mom the most rewarding.

Janet Harris-Campbell

Janet is CIO for The Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions Canada (OSFI). Janet joined this federal government agency, which is responsible for regulating Canada’s banks, insurance companies and federally regulated private pension funds, in 2009. As the organization’s first CIO, Janet established and is now leading a five-year information and technology renewal program that supports the agency’s ability to respond to the increasingly complex regulatory environment.

Previously, Janet had been the CIO at the City of Ottawa for five years. Under her leadership, in 2008, the City’s IT Services team won four GTEC awards for technology innovation in the public sector. Janet focused her career on IM/IT ten years ago; before then her management experience with the municipal government had been in areas outside the IT field.

Aside from work, Janet is mom to a competitive soccer playing daughter, and enjoys golf, yoga, skiing and volunteering.

Our Event Sponsors

Logistics and door prizes for our January GGD Ottawa event  is made possible by the generous contribution of our sponsors – a big thank you to the following organizations.

Beyond Events

Blend Creations

The National Arts Centre

Sara McConnell Photography

The Lemon Kitchen

ThornleyFallis

Join us Monday, November 29th for a night of networking and a discussion about the Girl Geek Dinners (GGD) Ottawa 2011 season. Share your topic and speaker suggestions (yourself perhaps?) for future events while connecting with other fabulous ‘geeky’ women in our city.

We’ll be hosting our networking event at Lilac Lingerie, which if you haven’t heard is a lingerie boutique in Westboro that features stylish, classy lingerie for every woman. Come ready to shop because boutique owner Emilia Kutrovska is offering a 10% discount for the evening, which we think is a divine plus.

We hope you’ll join us in kick-starting our 2011 season!

What: Networking Cocktail Event
When: Monday, November 29th at 7 p.m.
Where: Lilac Lingerie, 307B Richmond Rd, near Churchill (get directions)

Register now!

One of the things that sets Girl Geek Dinners Ottawa (#GGDOttawa) apart from other events that happen in the city is our awesome door prizes, and every event they seem to get better and better. We are so lucky to have an enthusiastic community of supporters both attending the events and contributing via sponsorships and door prizes.

We usually include info about the door prizes and photos of the winners in our recap post for each event we hold, but since our May 25 event had so many amazing prizes we felt this month’s sponsors deserved their own acknowledgement.

National Arts Centre

The people of the National Arts Centre (NAC) have been great supporters of Girl Geek Dinners Ottawa. Not only do many of them come out to our events regularly, but they’ve donated NAC event tickets as a door prize to almost every single dinner we’ve held! This month the voucher for two tickets to Bronfman & Brahms performance went to Della Siemens. Congrats Della!

Essence Catering

A new supporter and one I am personally extremely excited about, Essence Catering, is a catering company based in the Hintonburg/Wellington West area of Ottawa. In October, the company I work for (MediaMiser) hosted an Open House event to celebrate our new office and it was catered by Essence Catering. The food was delicious, beautifully presented and received tons of compliments! I know winner Mar Warrender will not be disappointed, especially with an amazing $250 gift certificate!

Shanti Consulting

Dr. Hema Murty is a personal trainer and Yoga consultant who attended our December Open Mic event and has been a #GGDOttawa fan ever since! She runs Shanti Consulting–and donated a free personal training session valued at $90. Congratulations to prize winner Cameron Wilson!

Swing Dynamite

Yet another new supporter, Claudia from Swing Dynamite attended an event earlier this year and soon after offered to donate a prize.

Claudia was generous enough to donate two gift certificates for a six-week swing dance course! I like to think that along with this dance company’s awesome skill, their generosity and good will helped them out a little at the Canadian Swing Championship where they took home tons of awards. Congrats!

Hope to see some Girl Geeks (perhaps winners Brigitte Van Aert and Cassandra Wilson?) competing in future years!

Randy Little

Anyone in Ottawa on Twitter knows @littlerandy, a financial advisor who has quickly established himself as a pillar in the Ottawa  social media community.

In fact, he’s even offered (on television) to help his Twitter friends get unstuck in a snowy driveway if needed! We’re also grateful of his support, donating rosewood wine boxes (with accessories) as door prizes for several of our events. Tanya Snook is this month’s lucky recipient!

Thornley Fallis Communications

We also need to offer our appreciation and thanks to Joseph Thornley and Thornley Fallis Communications, now our longest running sponsor! Each event, Thornley Fallis provides financial support that enables us to offer 5-10 students the opportunity to attend our Girl Geek dinners at no cost. We appreciate this support and know our student attendees do too. Thanks so much!

Virtual Eye See

And finally, a huge thanks to Natasha D’Souza of  Virtual Eye See for providing domain and hosting support for Girl Geek Dinners Ottawa blog!

We are always appreciative of the support we receive from the Ottawa business community. If you’re interested in sponsoring or donating a prize for future Girl Geek Dinners, please contact us: info@girlgeekdinnersottawa.com

Truthfulness, consultative decision-making and constant learning.  Simple concepts to understand but so hard to implement! Who doesn’t want to work in an environment where opportunities and challenges are always out in the open, where challenges are overcome as a team and where lessons are  applied the next time around?

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.

Join us Tuesday, May 25 as our guest speaker Ellen Grove, an experienced Agile coach and software tester, discusses how to apply Agile principles and practices to all kinds of endeavours, from software development to social change.

Ellen will present OpenAgile, a non-software-focused approach to Agile work that emphasizes truthfulness, consultative decision-making and constant learning. OpenAgile enhances the ability of individuals, teams, and organizations to deliver value to their stakeholders by developing human capacity, improving processes, and, most importantly, encouraging rapid and deep learning.

Event Details

• When: Tuesday, May 25 at 6 p.m.
• Where: Johnny Farina – 216 Elgin Street, between Lisgar and Cooper

To join us, please register here.

Hey students!

Thanks again to generous sponsorship from Joe Thornley of Thornley Fallis, we can offer six student spots to this event. If you are a student wishing to attend, please leave a comment below indicating why or what you want to learn about Agile. The first six students to respond will receive complimentary registration and dinner (up to $25).

A little bit about Ellen

Ellen Grove helps teams make better software through coaching them to create the circumstances in which they can work most productively and effectively. Her Agile coaching practice is founded in over 10 years experience leading software testing, development and implementation teams in global enterprises, a passion for exploratory software testing and user-centered design, and a background in community organization.

She uses team-building and facilitation approaches to support the transition to collaborative Agile work practices at the team, managerial and corporate level, and has conquered the challenges of extending Scrum roll-outs to off-shore development partners and multi-site project teams.

Outside the office, Ellen applies her coaching talents and creativity to keeping her household menagerie of husband, children, dogs, cats, goats, snakes, spiders and birds happy and healthy. Ellen blogs at Mastering the Obvious.

** April 6 Update 5:50 p.m. – the issue with PayPal has been resolved! Thanks to everyone for their patience. You can now go ahead and purchase your ticket for this fundraising-networking event! **

** 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.

For our next Girl Geek Dinner (GGD), we are pleased to have Laura Wesley, a Business Analyst specializing in performance measurement, lead a discussion on usability and why it’s important to your website, products and bottom line.

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.

Someone suggested that we post all the Girl Geek’s Twitter addresses on the blog so we can all connect with each other. I had started this list a few weeks ago, but as you’ll notice never got around to finishing it and posting it here…

Well sometimes procrastination pays off because since that happened Twitter has released its ‘Lists’ feature. Mel has put together a GGDOttawa list on Twitter. Here you can find all the women interested in #GGDOttawa.

If you’re not already on the list, leave a comment here, or contact @MelGallant to get included.