Dr Al James, Queen Mary Unniversity of London a.james@qmul.ac.uk has been doing a research project which explores the business benefits of IT firms (Dublin and Cambridge) providing flexible working arrangements to help workers juggle work, personal life and family.
Would you be able to spare a few minutes to complete a short, anonymised and confidential online survey about your everyday experiences of juggling home, work and family; your preferred flexible working arrangements; and the ways in which your employer gains from helping you achieve a better work-life balance. I’d be very grateful - all participants will be sent final copies of the final research report. You will also be entered for a prize draw hamper in the autumn!
The survey is linked off Dr Al James webpage here: http://www.aljames.org.uk
Thank you very much for your time.
We had a great Girl Geek Dinner with IT4Communities in June. The videos, slides and pictures from this event will be up here in the next few days. But in the meantime we’ve just launched our next event. This next event is all about Getting into IT so if you are toying with the idea of coming into the IT industry and want a few hints and tips then do sign up for the event. Also if you think you can help those looking for advice on how to get into the industry then do sign up.
We have some fantastic speakers for this event and it should be a lot of fun! The event is sponsored by OpenNETCF Consulting, where pizza and soft drinks will be served.
For more details on the event and to sign up take a look here!
Other important information for this month!
- Our Newsletter attachment can be found here!!! July 2008
- We are looking for a couple of people to take part in a panel discussion for our 3 year anniversary Girl Geek Dinner on the 28th August. What we are looking for in particular are two women, one who doesn’t have children but maybe has a busy social life and the other a mother who is still in the IT industry who has had children who are grown up and have moved away. If you think you could be what we are looking for and are available on the 28th August in the evening then do get in touch.
I look forward to seeing some of you at the next Girl Geek Dinner!
Date & Time: 11th July 2008 from 6:15pm
Venue: Central Foundation Girls’ School
Subject for the evening: Getting into Technology
This is the first Girl Geek Dinner ever to be done in a school and we’re looking forward to making it interesting and fun for everyone involved! We’re going to mix the students (past and present) with the teachers and the people from the tech industry as well!
How is the evening going to work… well we’ll have some pizza and soft drinks (kindly funded by OpenNETCF Consulting who offer mobile & embedded software consulting) whilst mixing and mingling with one another. Then we’ll get started with a brief introduction about the Girl Geek Dinners and how they work. And finally move onto our panel discussion on Getting into IT.
Subject: Getting into IT - hosted by Sarah Blow, Founder, Girl Geek Dinners
The Panel!
- Liz Sarginson Head of Web Operations -The Guardian
- Nicola Avery eLearning / Learning Technologies - Surrey University
- WeeWorld ?
- Lotte Nickel - IT Associate Morgan Stanley
- Alx Klive - CEO WorldTV
- Steve Lamb - IT Pro Evangelist Microsoft
It’s looking like a very fun and exciting event!
If you have any questions you would like to ask the panel about getting into IT then please submit your question when you sign up to the event and we will do our best to get it into the discussion!
Capacity 120:
Event Sponsors:
I’d like to extend the invitation to join Social Meeting Business School London on Friday, June 27th, 2008. Please register here as a VIP http://socialmediabizschoollon.eventbrite.com/?discount=VIP.
Bridging the gap between advertisers and developers is essential to the success of social media marketing. Social Media Business School brings together key experts from both sides of the coin to educate and express the needs of the developers to the advertiser, and vice versa.
Social Media Business School breaks down the jargon of the developer world for the advertiser looking to tap into social media, and addresses their concerns for brand image continuity and how to develop creative, innovate and engaging applications to appeal to the online consumer.
Developers at Social Media Business School learn how to properly monetize their applications and build profitable businesses, as well as what apps work, how to understand the audience and how to keep their interest.
A run down of classes:
• Analytics: How to measure application audiences
• Marketing: Best practices for marketing applications
• Hosting: What’s best, in-house or outsourcing?
• Advertisers: What do brand and performance advertisers want?
• Business Modeling: Tactics for managing and projecting revenues
If you are interested, please register here as a VIP http://socialmediabizschoollon.eventbrite.com/?discount=VIP. For more information: http://www.smbizschool.com/
This offer was brought to the London Girl Geek Dinners courtesy of Julia French
As a way of getting the Girl Geeks more involved with the Microsoft community we are opening up a competition that is running alongside DDD, with a prize donated by me.
Firstly; what is DDD? It’s FREE one day events, all about .NET developers learning, sharing and interacting with each other in an informal and relaxed atmosphere. There will be NO Microsoft speakers presenting, just speakers from the UK .NET developer community; although Microsoft kindly donate the space, breakfast and lunch and some of the Microsoft UK Developer Team on hand to help out and chat to attendees.
What’s the prize? An MSDN “Team Suite” premium subscription for 1 year; basically everything you need for Windows development; Visual Studio Team System, SQL Server, Windows Operating Systems, Office 2007, SDKs and even four support incidents; which, if you buy it, costs just over £8500. You can find out more details on the MSDN subscription pages.
So what do you need to do? Well if you have something you’re passionate about that you want to share with the DDD community submit an abstract. A few things to note;
- DDD only accepts speakers from UK residents, thus this competition is limited to UK residents.
- Only grok talks or 60 minute presentations will be acceptable for this competition
- Because this is to encourage girly geeks in the community you need to be a girl.
- Entering an abstract for the competition does not mean it will be accepted by DDD.
- I only have one subscription to give away.
- You acknowledge that this may be taxed and it is up to you to pay any taxes that may apply.
- This is not an official (or unofficial) competition from Microsoft or the DDD Event Organisers.
- Anyone that moans that it’s a subscription for Microsoft software; or comments that Microsoft are the devil or who uses M$ in a comment will be pointed and laughed at.
The prize will be awarded to a girl geek who has her session accepted and presents it at DDD7. In the event that more than one girly geek submissions are accepted I shall draw names randomly from a metaphorical hat. If no sessions are selected by the community I will draw a name from all session submissions from girl geeks. The winner will announced via the girlygeekdom blog just after DDD7, or if no-one had a talk selected by attendees the announcemen will take place after voting closes on the agenda.
In order to keep track of which submissions are from girl geeks please email the details of your talk to MSDNComp@londongirlgeekdinners.co.uk once you have submitted it on the DDD website.
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MSDN,
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Date & Time: 25th June 2008 from 7pm
Venue: The Information Technologists’ Hall
Hosted by iT4Communities with wine, snacks and refreshments provided. As iT4Ccommunities is a charity we would ask a £2 contribution per attendee collected on the evening but larger contributions always welcome!
Food & Drink: Light snacks and nibbles & wine
Subject for the evening: IT law, accessibility, and IT volunteering
Speakers:
Capacity 60 people
Based on some good feedback about the last newsletter I’ve moved the Girl Geek Dinners News out of the newsletter as it confused some people as they thought it finished were I signed off, so I’m hoping this fixes that. You will find the newsletter here.
Unfortunately, we didn’t have an event in May but you’ll all be happy to know that we are ready to announce our June event!
Details for this event can be found here: http://lggdwithit4c.eventbrite.com.
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Date & Time: 25th June 2008 from 7pm
Venue: The Information Technologists’ Hall
Hosted by iT4Communities with wine, snacks and refreshments provided. As iT4Ccommunities is a charity we would ask a £2 contribution per attendee collected on the evening but larger contributions always welcome!
Food & Drink: Light snacks and nibbles & wine
Subject for the evening: IT law, accessibility, and IT volunteering
Speakers:
Capacity 60 people tickets to be released as 2 rounds of 30 one round this evening and the other at 12:00 (lunchtime tomorrow – 12th June) |
The details will be posted up on the www.londongirlgeekdinners.co.uk website as well so that you can find the details without this e-mail. You can subscribe for updates to the site via its RSS feed for the latest news and information about London Girl Geek Dinners. We are looking to put all announcements via there in the near future with an integrated newsletter service for those who prefer the newsletter to the RSS feed. I’ll announce the move from this newsletter provider to the website hosted version when it’s been launched (and fully tested!!!). No one is going to be moved across until then! (too much risk of spam disasters otherwise!)
There’s a LOT of stuff in the newsletter this time from events, and speaker proposal offers through to details about how to get onto Dragons Den. We also have a new section for Jobs. We will aim to bring great jobs including those for student placements and so on! We also have something special for you too! If you are interested in speaking at a local school then there is the first of many opportunities to do so. The details are in the newsletter as an invitation to inspire!!! I do hope some of you might consider something like this if you can manage to spare an hour for a local school.
Also keep you’re diaries free for the 11th July for an event with a local school to inspire students and former students into the technology arena. And not to forget the 28th August as we will be doing our big 3 year anniversary event over at the Google office in London. More details about that will pop up closer to the event!
Please do keep an eye out for the Girl Geek Coffee events too! Melinda’s doing a great job with those and is aiming to do them roughly every couple of weeks. The details for them are also up on the London Girl Geek Dinners website, and with the frequency of then it’s definitely the quickest and easiest place to hear about them.
After a great coffee last week, we can now announce our next Girl Geek Coffee. A lot of girl geeks have asked for this, so for the first time the coffee will be on a Saturday (7th June). Now all of you have no excuses for not coming!
So where will the next coffee be?
When: Saturday, June 7th, 2008, 2:00 PM - 6:00 PM
Where: Starbucks County Hall near the London Eye [map]
Cost: attending is free, cost for coffee/food will be on a “buy your own” basis
Upcoming: [link]
Please email me at melinda@missgeeky.com to indicate your interest. If you have trouble finding the place or are running late, you can phone me (07521 294 391) or Twitter me directly (mseckington).
So we ended up in today’s Guardian. As soon as I manage to get a copy of the article I’ll put a pic up on here of it… However in the meantime you can also read it here: Geek Goddess. To be honest the start of this article comes across as a bit ra ra… but really we are all very geeky and down to earth. I don’t want Girl Geeks being put off by the tone of the article so I thought I’d mention that now.
And I also wanted to bring to light that it’s not just us adults that are being geeky online. There are youngsters too just starting out their journey into blogging! A great example of a student just starting out is: Whatever Things a student from a central London School. Her 2 poems there are great and well worth a read. Feel free to give her feedback and support her learning! The idea of getting students to blog as part of their coursework on this occasion was brough to you by DigitalMaverick, aka Drew Buddie. He’s one of a few teachers that are encouraging their students to get into technology and a great role model to other teachers!
As you read in the article we do have a couple of events coming up including our 3 year anniversary event at Google and we will announce the sign up details for that here on this website at the end of july (the anniversary event is towards the end of August) Before that we also have an event in planning on the 25th June. The details for that event will also be placed on this site.
If you are interested in speaking at one of our events or are intersted in sponsoring one of our events then please do get in contact with us. (all contact information is on our contact us page! )
Have a great day and keep being geeky!
