Steering Committee Meeting 12/4/2009

Attending:

Ellen McClatchey (Symantec)

Anne Hardy (SAP)

Kenny Spade (Microsoft)

Nina Bhatti (HP Labs)

Ruth Stergiou (Invent Your Future)

Tammy Baker

Martin Stein [Notes]

 

MSBLocalActs@listserv.acm.org is the mailing list.

We have a contact at Pixar. Keynote.

TODO: MS: Parent education lady @ SacState.

Kenny has a talk for security & privacy online. Plus privacy talk. Can make content available.

Symantec has talks for parents.

TODO: MS: David Calkins (Lego) contact again! Ask for team to show off their robots!

Logistics: Tammy got the budget.

Wow – that’s engineering – Disney show in LA. Ellen mentioned video.

Marketing

Ruth has a list of contacts.

Nina mentions ads for local newspapers.

Contact schoolloop? TODO: MS

Contact Outlets –schools, girlscouts, private schools. TODO: MS: talk to Anne Hipkins

There will be a follow up call with Chris and Michelle.

Sponsorship

Still pondering: Microsoft, Rambus, Northrup-G, Intuit.

Symantec, yes

Workshops

 

Keynote

I do this cool thing.

I did this real helpful thing.

Time?

 

Raffle at the end

put number on evaluation form. Use for drawing.

Certificate of Completion

pick up at end. Cheap to produce. Many people treasure them.

TODO: MS: Facebook fans or group page. Decide which one to do, set up. Upcoming.org etc sites set up.

http://www.mitcnc.org

TODO: MS: ask Dawn Fritz if they do background checks.

If you need volunteers go to Kenny.

D2BD Kickoff Meeting minutes

Attending:

Kenny (Microsoft) phone
Anna () phone
Katharina Rock (SAP)
Laura Deck (IYF)
Martin Stein
Anne Hardy (SAP)
Diana
(Intuit)

ACM-W – not directly important for the conference, but important for their marketing.

Underserved commmunities: Contra-costa county (arrange busses), E-PA. Appoint one volunteer of the steering commitee. Anna will look into it. We have to set up: chaperone on busses, rent bus, insurance, logistics. Laura D will take it on.

Sponsorship commited: SAP, Cisco,

Sponsorship under discussion: Google,  Intuit, Symantec,  Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Adobe.

Fee: $20 - idea: add a  fee waiver.

Production: web site. (TODO Laura)

How many volunteers? 1 per 10 girls for chaperon. 50 total?

Colleges for volunteers: foothill, de anza (Kenny talked to them), SJ state (MIS dep, Kenny), Stanford?,  -- problem only 20% women in student body.

High schools: hire girls in science and math from high school. $500 for college?

ACM student chapters! (TODO MS)

Academy of information technology: San Francisco group of schools.

Guidelines:

Hands-on workshops

Movement

Keynotes - upto 1h, entertaining: Pixar, Facebook

Train the trainer: Lynn Langit, Michelle

Schedule:

Keynote

Pixar, Microsoft/Milo,

Ignite talk format? See here or here

One in the morning and one at the end.

Have to decide how many workshops per day (2  or 3).

Surprising inventions women have done?

Length of workshops? 60 – 90 minutes.

Hand out a book funded from donations.

Possible topics:

* Pervasive computing (computers everywhere). Nokia! (TODO: MS, AH). Take pictures and post to a server.

* Robotics, Sun-spots from sun labs?

* Social networking

Workshops fill in the blanks in a existing program.

* Tina Seelig – infectious action – problem is that high-school girls are somewhat shy and inhibited in groups.

* Google Earth – street view – microsoft touch?

Parent track:

Security

Teachers – how collaborate in the classroom

TTT – train the trainer session

Raising girls without preconceived notions.

ACM participation? Career prospects. (TODO MS). STEM program. (TODO AH)

Gifts:

meaningful giveaway, desirable.

Backpack? Bag?

Sponsorship

Max $5000, less possible.

$20k bare minimum (Laura)

Martin

Web sites for women and girls

 

http://userpages.umbc.edu/~korenman/wmst/links_girls.html

 

 

Women-Related Web Sites in Science/Technology

http://userpages.umbc.edu/~korenman/wmst/links_sci.html

Speaker Proposal

We will need around 30 sessions, some may be held twice during the day, but that’s a lot. We also need to be careful in picking speakers so we get the perfect mix of talks – inspiring and calling to action, instructive and hands-on. We will have to recruit a number of speakers ideally out of a larger group. So the idea is to ask potential speakers for proposals about their talk or hands-on session they want to give.

Below a try to come up with a form we could use for speakers session proposals:

Speaker name:

Location:

Company/affiliation:

web sites:

Other useful things to know:

Title of the session proposed:

Description of session:

Time frame for session (30-90 min?):

Ideal age:

Prerequisites to attend:

Space requirements (open floor, desks, computers, outside):

Other equipment needed (PCs, etc) and cost:

Is there someone else who can hold the session in case speaker is unable?

What are the projected expenses for the talk (travel required? transportation, lodging) – guesstimate items:

Have you held the session before? Are there descriptions/recordings?

Phone Meeting - October 16

Anne, Khalia, Martin

Topic areas: arts, games, science, robotics, life sciences, environments, social media, movies, music, security (Symantec), finance (Intuit)

3 slots for workshops. 30 seats per workshop. 10-15 workshops happening at one time. 30-45 workshops. Girls sign up ahead of time for workshop.

Lynn giving train the trainer session before.

We need a speaker signup questionnaire proposal TODO/M. (abstract, bio, travel, housing, time for ttt, …)

Put out an RFP for speakers?

Recording sessions? Legal implications.

Speakers from startup community?

Open source speakers?

What do we want? Teach programming.

Need to define speaker profile! TODO/M! Age, looks, mental state, --- ask daughters!

Sign-up website. Ask Elizabeth F. TODO/M! Define requ. Pick tracks, download legal papers.

Parent track: share what happened at Sacramento.

Have new web site: http://sites.google.com/site/dare2bdigitalconf/

Ruth back Monday. Anne back Nov 2.

Dawn – website? organize? volunteer recruiting? Mike M.

Expanding Your Horizons – Oct 10 – Trip Report

I took my daughter to this conference on the Sacramento state campus. We signed up online and paid $20 per person attending.
They had a parking structure reserved for the attendees right next to the student union where the conference was held in a large conference room. There was a checkin-area for the kids with 3 lines for name ranges, and another line for kids, one for mentors and a room for the volunteers. The kids received a little backpack filled with schwag and papers, the adults an ATT plastic bag with a notebook. You also got a conference badge in plastic on a string.

They had a lot of volunteers! Each attendee was assigned to a table. Each table had a volunteer. There were other volunteers for handing out food and just standing around and managing the crowds. The table group volunteers took their group through the conference sessions and lunch.

There was a short introduction by one of the organizers who is currently attending college there and then a keynote speech by a professor who is investigating healing various conditions using stem cells. She was talking about her career, how she got to lead the institute and showed short movies of her research and pictures from the new  institute they were building. Attendees asked some questions about stem cells and they were hard to hear because there were no microphones in the room. 

 

The parents had their own tables in the back of the room. We listened to the keynote and then went to one of the lecture rooms upstairs. I attended both lectures that were offered: an introduction on how to prepare for college (“start at birth”) that was very informative and one about gender bias and how to overcome  it when talking to your daughter. At the second lecture there was even a prize: a day-use ticket for a state park. The speakers were an admissions/outreach person and biology professors from the university there.
Lunch was a choice of three different wraps and water and iced tea. Quite simple. I heard no one complain.
Katarina had picked two sessions, one where you were experimenting with artificial blood – identifying blood groups and one where they were shown non-vegetarian plants. She said she liked another conference at the college of San Mateo better that she attended with her school. She said the difference was that they had more sessions.

 

The conference was sponsored by “women of AT&T”. I talked to one of the organizers, Dawn Fritz, also from AT&T who was of course interested in D2BD and even said they might sponsor us. I also talked to the main event organizer and left my card with her. They have done this event three times now and the level of organization is evident. There were few lines and always a  volunteer close by. I did not see anything that not handled perfectly.
At the end of the sessions the students were dropping off their evaluation sheets and received a raffle ticket. I did not see what the prizes were. At the ending session the same student that did the introductions asked students about their experiences.

I think the whole conference was a good experience. It was well organized and informative. I am considering going to the next one in San Francisco November 21.

Meeting with Microsoft kids/college

Anne and me had a great meeting with Lynn, Llewlyn (Falco) and Kenny today. This was very productive, and a bit scary.

Lynn has a lot of experience doing workshops with children and running events like we are planning to do. I got so much information it is overwhelming so I am trying to put it down here for posterity.

1h sessions are the maximum. Much longer and people will wonder out. You need to make sure there is some movement during or between sessions.

‘Job shadows’ were an especially successful type of session – a professional has a question and answer meeting with a not-too-large number of girls, asking questions.

The best speakers are young, and cool. No suits. The girls have to be able to relate to the women and picture themselves in their shoes.

Lecture style sessions work only for a short time, it is good to have interactivity mixed in. One idea was to have kids give interviews. The instructors can be males and females mixed, but the females should be in the ‘boss’ role. This sends a clear message to the girls that they can achieve something in this profession.

Lynn has taught a number of programming classes to kids before:

Small basic – is a language like Logo. It has simple statements that control a graphical ‘turtle’ that draws on the screen.

Alice – is a children’s programming language that is now also being used in 10% of university classes.

Storytelling Alice – is a simplified Alice build by Caitlin Kelleher during her thesis work. Caitlin is a great resource, she is studying how children learn and know a lot of people. Lynn will make a connection for us.

Kodu – a graphical/visual programming language that uses an Xbox controller. Kenny says he could borrow a number of Xboxes for a class!

XA games, robotics. Kodu is made up from objects that have properties and one can specify when-do action responses.

Lynn also has great contacts: Thomas Müller, a Lego instructor, who could give mindstorm classes. Robert Rasmussen from Denmark, who also works in robotics. Kahlia Hewlin who is running “She’s Geeky” at the CHM every year.

It would also be possible to have a competition either with robots or with code (robocode, e.g) but that has to be handled carefully to not bring out undesirable fights.

 

An interesting visualization experiment is having the girls close their eyes, have them think of a programmer, a geek, a technical person, visualize them. After some time tell them to open their eyes, introduce a group of women on the stage announce they are those people (“we are technical women”)

Another successful session is using unified communications (an MS technology) to connect the classroom to another classroom on campus, in another state or around the world! Check out this video AT 1:00 min!

She also suggested a journalist group touring the conference and publishing what’s going on on social networking sites. This includes video interviews with successful girls ideally in the age group.

Each 1h session is split up in 3 concepts 1) why and what 2) show 3) do it! During hands-on sessions you need at least 1 procter per 10 attendees that hover around and help out – university students for example. They keep faster students challenged and help stragglers move forward. The teacher has to be a high-energy person – it is okay to yell! The unexpected should happen and the teaching style should be loud and varied. Llewellyn mentioned the pomodore teaching technique.

How to prepare for the conference hands-on sessions? Ideally use some remote-desktop solution, like EC2 or Terminal Server using remote desktop (RDP). This way you can set up the software development environment before and only have to make sure it is accessible from the workstations. Or build a thumb-drive image for the workstations. Lynn wrote a paper about this…

Microsoft has a Dreamsparks program that allows anyone to get all the Microsoft development tools for free before college. It would be great for them to spread knowledge about that program.

The next Digigirlz program is in April 3, but Lynn is working on a more community-oriented program where teaching is supported and done by the local community.

Lynn proposes a ‘train the trainer’ session before the conference. She would be able to teach and make the TTT session happen.

Other ideas:

· Speed dating. Having professional women and girls rotate seats after a certain time. Show/tell/ask.

· Demo fest: show lego robots, Windows 7 multi-touch, ‘song smith’ music program

Lynn and Kenny will try to help sponsor the event with support from Microsoft.

Other links:

· Alan Kay TED talk http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/alan_kay_shares_a_powerful_idea_about_ideas.html

· The web site needs to have resource available for download. Videos of the event.

· UN imagine cup – help the UN reach millennium goals.

Lego!

Lego’s mindstorm is a very cool line of robots, sensors and software to run them. They are not cheap, but very versatile. We think that having a workshop where girls can program their own robot would be a satisfying experience.

David from Lego showed his robots at a meeting today. There are many sensors and motors available.

The main thing is that these robots are not only machines with some software that you put together and program. You use them the monitor the environment, make repetitive tasks easier and so on. You need them for biology, gardening – experiments with light sensors, pH sensors for plant growth. Even for ESL classes they are useful – when kids cooperate on a robot building job, they have to communicate. First you learn “wheel”, …

Interesting Article

The Washington Post has an article that mentions Microsoft's DigiGirlz.

The comments contain one disheartening entry

Having spent 40 years in high-tech fields from radar systems to financial systema and everything in between, not many girls have that much interest in tech as a career. At least none of my girls nor their girlfriends did. The motivation is just simply not there.

and one good one regarding CMU's Alice:

Caitlin Kelleher, a graduate student at CMU who had Dr. Randy Pausch as her thesis adviser states, "As my thesis work, I created and evaluated a programming system for middle school girls called Storytelling Alice that presents programming as a means to the end of storytelling,"

Planning meeting in San Carlos, Aug/6

Laura, Ruth, Anne and Martin met in SC on August 6, 2009.

Laura and Ruth showed a sample sponsorship matrix. They are going to put together a sponsorship package in the next couple days. This package will have to be presented to Intel, Microsoft, SAP, Cisco, Apple,  IBM etc real soon. They’ll send the result to Martin for publishing on the web site. The next step will be to approach sponsor companies.

Naming  and ownership of the conference came up again. Apparently SAP would not sponsor an ACM conference. Laura and Ruth are going to go over names again. We need the name for the sponsors and for an upcoming web site.

As for locations we think that foothill college is probably the best choice. It has one 200+ conference room and one 940 seat theater. The theater is only available in the morning.

Foothill College: Mike Murphy

Mike made Anne and me very welcome at our visit today. Foothill college is in a beautiful location in the foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains near Los Altos. The buildings are mostly single-story shingle-covered with rooms for 30 students on tables or 50 people on chairs. There are two or more 200-person auditoriums and one 940-person theatre that will be occupied on February 27 in the afternoon. There is also a cafeteria that could do catering and boxed lunches in a central location. This location would be a safe and spacious environment for the conference. The only drawbacks may be that it’s either 200 or 900 people…. but then we could have two 200-person keynote rooms.

Cost is a minor issue, and may run in the low 1000s.

There is also the Kraus center for innovation with a very nice interior architecture and nice workspaces for group projects.

Mike also has contacts at Apple and Cisco and will try to get us in touch.

Intel

Bev Bachmeyer, Intel, International. Academic relations, ACM. Used to run Intel/SAP lab in Walldorf.

Sat Feb 27 2010.

Open to local school districts, girls scouts get seats.

Held event for young girls (13-17) in Germany, 5 days, building a PC. Installed windows, “moodle” programming, how world looks in 20 years. Effective listening classes, presentation skills. Friday presented their projects. Most successful: women engineers sat at tables during lunch.

Bev has a lot of interest in the subject. Could do sponsoring. Needs package from Ruth. $5k for Platinum quickly, because budget is in the works.

Speakers: have multitude of women in the subject.

Will set up meeting with global group Thursday how they could help out. We can even use her as a contact. Might move support to corporate technology group.

Intel has a lot of experience with that – modeled it after Google.

Girls were very interested, and was a big success. Main thing is giving young girls opportunity to meet engineers working in the field. Role models.

Bev needs:

• specifics on sponsorships.
• speakers they can provide. February is not so far away.

Bev is interested in attending meetings by phone until 1pm or after 9pm PST. Can even get someone from the US team to help out.

Lots of help from Microsoft

Kenny Spade from Microsoft is helping us to connect to the people that organize DigiGirlz a travelling conference. He is also getting us in touch with Lego  - who make the amazing Mindstorm robots, which would make a really nice breakout session. He had great ideas for doing breakouts on other topics, like building video games for the XBox. We have to start working on the speaker roster and the program.

Kenny did a lot of work with Foothill college, who seem to be interested in working with us. We will meet Mike Murphy soon.

Community Leadership Summit

At the CSL unconference in San Jose today I met Rikki Kite, author of the rose blog about women in open source. She would be a great source for speakers and would also promote the event on her blog.

Updates

So we found someone who will organize the conference for us, recruit sponsors, etc.

We also pushed the date back to February to make it easier to find speakers.

Where?

This is going to be a very cool conference. It will be inspiring and may even change a life or two. The speakers and their talks will make sure this happens.

But also the place where this happens will be inspiring. We are talking to some major companies in the valley with great meeting places: IBM, Microsoft, Google and the Computer History Museum are in the race. If you work in any of those places let us know if you want to help us lobby the event at your company.

Ideas for names

Girls go computing
Computing for girls

Girls gone wired

WiredGirls
Scouting the digital world

Girly careers in computing
My future in computing

Wired day for girls

Scouting computing careers

Possible Speakers

Sonal Shah has been appointed to President-Elect Barack Obama’s Advisory Board. There was another woman mentioned in the Merc.

I wrote to Tina Seelig and Bob Sutton. Tina wrote a book about lessons learned. She hasn’t replied yet.

Phone conference April 28

Today I had a phone conference with Jean Fahy from the Girlscouts and the new Girlscouts in Computing seminar leader, Anne Hardy. Anne works at SAP and is heavily involved in the women-in-computing effort there. I am very happy to have won her for this. She already proved to be very well organized, going through the list of questions.

Here some notes from today's meeting:

• the conference will be in November
• the location has to be determined. It should be at a hi-tech company. I am contacting Google and Microsoft, Anne SAP and the Computer History Museum.
• we want to limit attendance at ~300! We need to define minimum attendance.
• Financing may be a problem: Feeding 300 people will cost more than the $600 we have from Max. We need to augment from our funds, sponsorships or an attendance fee.
• Legally we are good: the GS have insurance, and we can ask for additional ACM insurance if required.
• GS can also provide first-aid on site.
• By the end of May, we need: description, date, cost, venue and a name!
• speakers: according to Anne not a problem. We are looking for students, practitioners and older, experienced leaders.
• There should be keynotes and workshops. If you know someone who can teach a workshop, or who has achieved happiness or impressive results, please try to recruite her.

We will have another phone call organized by Anne before May 9 or after May 15.

Jean will check for dates in November.

Martin contacts Microsoft and Google.

Anne contacts SAP and CHM.

Startup

We work on organizing a joint event between the Girlscouts of Northern California and the bay area chapter of the ACM . We want to make a career in  computing attractive to middle and high-school age girls. The one-day event will take place in November and we are aiming for about 300 attendees. The format of the event will be like a conference: speakers will talk about their work in the field. We are planning to have a keynote, topic tracks and workshops.

This blog is to be used as a diary to keep track of things loosely.