Geek Girls Allowed

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.