Girl Geek Dinners Ottawa

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.

**update** This event is now sold out! Thanks everyone!

—————–

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!