Geek Girls Allowed

Hi All,

Couple of events coming up that might be of interest.

(1) South Yorkshire Girl Geek Dinners organised by Mel Kanarek, happening in Barnsley sometime February will post when I have more info!

(2) Not a Girl Geek event but organised by a Geek Girl Warrior Princess, Twitter Jokes On Trial Benefit Gig in March, contact Erica Packington for more info.

Thanks,

Hannah

What: A blinking marvellous craft and electronics one day extravaganza
When: Saturday 23rd October, 11am – 5pm
Where: GIST Lab
Cost: £10

In the first of our “Making/Doing” Geek Girls Allowed sessions, we’d like to invite you to a day of technology, crafting and creativity. We’ll be using LEDs, fabrics, imagination and new skills to create cool stuff to amaze and inspire. We might even take to the streets of Sheffield to do a bit of Guerilla Illumination afterwards, if you fancy it.

Never knitted a stitch or soldered a wire before? Not a problem – we’ll have a range of activities, loads of support and a friendly expert or two to help us out.

There will a choice of projects ranging from very crafty to very electronic – and something in between. We’ll make sure there’s a mix to meet a variety of skills and interests. What’s more, we’ll provide all the equipment you need to create your very own electronic craft masterpiece, lunch* and lots of sustaining of tea and biscuits to aid inspiration.

As we will need equipment and materials to produce our blinking marvellous fancy fripperies, we are asking for £10 to cover costs – there’s a tip jar if you want to pitch a few pennies into the Geek Girls Allowed pot too.

So, if you are feeling inspired and ready to go, sign up with EventBrite.

Looking forward to seeing you there!

GGA

p.s. Legal disclaimer alert: We will be using power tools, so we’ll need to get you to sign a waiver when you arrive so everyone knows what’s what and agrees to safe behaviours. Do come prepared to sign, or we can’t let you near the fun stuff.

*let us know your dietary preferences when you SIGN UP

Generally as a group we agree on most things – which is always good to hear. I think making some decisions without the full group being invovled felt risky but actually it was a good thing to do. So the edited highlights are:

• The majority of us…
  • would be happy to pay for some events
  • are interested as much by all things digital media as we are by how things work
  • are concerned about issues facing women in the work place
  • sit somewhere between liking and being indifferent about the name of the group

• More than half …
  • are prepared to hand over a donation to support the group (average of £10)
  • want to get stuck in with the organisation of the group
  • are interested in networking, music, science, craft and communications

• More of us are interested in G&T than Tea (only actually by 4.2% but who’s counting?)
• Quite a lot of us are interested in doing something practical or using our time toward helping the community as a whole
• Two of us are interested in us having a uniform (if you had’t worked it out one of them is me)
• One of us really likes Zac Efron

The issue that has confused me the most is that of the groups name. Most of us are indifferent or actually quite positive about it. But for those of us (far less than half) that really do have an issue with the group’s name their feelings are so strong that initially looking at the responses I’d assumed there would be need to discuss a name change. Now I’m not so sure. An suggestions greatly accepted. The full results can be found here.

And here you can find a calendar of events, some are nailed down some are pencilled in but we promise to keep you informed.

I’m working on the October meeting and will post more info about that soon but if you fancy getting some geeky crafting done watch this space!

Em

In my haste to post about last night’s event (I’m a bad blogger), I forgot to mention the interactive art work presented by Barnsley artist Jo Pearson.

Jo based her work on the iChing – instructions at the table told us how to cast an iChing hexagram relating to a question we had in mind. We then matched the number of the hexagram to a set of QR codes displayed around the walls and – get this – used the bar code readers on our phones to translate the QR code into a web link. Connecting to the link took you to a reading and gave you the opportunity to post your reaction to the reading – reactions were displayed on the large screen in the DMC foyer.

As always with interesting art, it’s hard to do it justice in words. But I don’t think any of us ever expected to use the bar code reader on our smartphone to read our fortunes!

You can follow Jo @jopersona. If you don’t know what QR codes are all about, have a look here: http://2d-code.co.uk . And you can make your own codes here: http://www.mobile-barcodes.com/qr-code/generator .

Had a most marvelous evening yesterday at the Barnsley Digital Media Centre and the first ever South Yorkshire Geek Girls Dinner. To those GGals who didn’t make it, you missed an excellent evening, two impressive speakers and some epic chocolate cake. Kudos to Tracey Johnson (@cre8tvebarnsley) for organising.

I didn’t get the opportunity to meet everyone there but, judging by the questions being asked, there was a high geekery quotient. I’m hoping that Tracey will circulate a list of attendees so that we can get to know each other a bit more.

So, speakers: Silvia Novak from publishers Faber & Faber and Rain Ashford from the BBC.

Silvia told us all about the social media initiatives that she is working on – everything from tweeting to helping authors to blog. There was loads more than that but two things really stuck with me: the way that social media is allowing F&F to really engage with its audiences and the amazingly creative things that authors are doing with the web. You can follow Silvia @silviakn and @Faberbooks.

Rain works on BBC Connect (which it would be really interesting to know more about another day) but she came to tell us about her geek passion – Lilypad Arduino. Rain uses Lilypad to make interactive textile creations – she showed us a T-shirt that played a tune and a noughts and crosses game that made noises to show if you were winning or losing. My truly non-technical description doesn’t even begin to do this justice – it was an impressive mash-up of electronics, coding and fabric art. You can see more here: http://rainycatz.wordpress and follow Rain @rainycat.

All in all, an auspicions kick-off to girl geekery in the SoYo region – here’s to the next installment.

Geek Girls Allowed in Sheffield has been puttering along now for 5 months or so. There’s been a lot of attendees to some events and not so many to others. There’s a core group who seem to show up regardless of event and we’ve been starting to wonder a few things.

What it is that we’re doing as a group? Why do we exist? Is there really a need? How can we make this better?

What we were able to come up with between those who were there last night is

• We’re all women who work in (or are interested by) technology, creative and scientific industries
• We take no issue with men, we just spend a lot of our working lives surrounded by men and sometimes its nice to be in a group of women
• We like talking, learning, making and doing

So out of that we identified we 3 types of events we’d like to put on/attend/get involved with and we’re going to try and alternate them on a monthly basis.

1. Listening/Learning
   Will probably be held at the GIST Lab we invite speakers to come and talk to us about a subject of interest.
2. Talking/Drinking
   Evenings that are purely social that provide us with opportunities to network, be supportive and communicate.
3. Doing/Solving
   Practical events, if needs be these will be day time events at the weekend, where we learn a skill and make something. Or we take a problem and solve it in an awesome A-Team Girl Geek Think Tank Stylee.

( I have put in several requests for a uniform and will continue to do so until we get one!)

Depending on what the event is, we are going to incur costs. We were thinking of asking you to make a donation to the group to help get the ball rolling but also making sure there’s a good balance of free and charged for events. As we all know anything worth doing costs money and or time.

It’s obvious that for someone to take on the job of organising the group alone is not going to work we’re all far too busy, so we need to be self organising, share the load. Last night we looked at what’s coming up over the next 6 months made a plan and divided up who was doing what so the next 6 months is covered. Your part in this is to join in, come to some or all of the events and to have your say. What do you want us to do? Do you know someone doing something fascination that might want to come talk to us?

Please answer the questions in this survey – all input will help us decide what our next move(s) are.

Most dates for the next 6 months aren’t set in stone yet but to give you an idea of whats coming up here’s a vague Google Calendar

If you aren’t a member of the GIST Hub then I recommend you join pronto as this is the easiest way for us to organise ourselves without hitting everyone’s mail boxes with relentless round the houses emails. We’ll get event dates to you as soon as we can so you can plan them in to your very busy lives and I hope to see you very soon!