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.