Amazing She's Geeky #5! Bay Area #3.

Last weekend was amazing. It was the first time She’s Geeky was three full days, Friday January 29th to Sunday January 31st.  We chose to extend it to three days because women who were technical asked us to, because many of them could not get off work for Friday and wanted 2 days of unconference time.   We had one women who was at our NYC event and one from our DC event fly out for this conference.

We are still working on getting sessions into our wiki. Several women covered the conference on their blogs:

Yahoo! Developer Network folks attended Havi and Erin along with Erin’s daughters Cady and Grace. Lynn Langit, a developer evangelist at MSFT, led a session on teaching kids to program that her kids attended and loved .

At our session, we showed participants how to play the Social Mania Game, a social patterns card game that allows you to build products, gain points for great features, and eventually ‘pitch’ your completed product to the player representing a VC. The game was fun, of course, but the feedback we got was the great benefit. Erin and Christian Crumlish created Social Mania to teach people about social patterns and as a complement to their book, Designing Social Interfaces. Since the game is still in beta, some of the suggestions made at She’s Geeky may make it into future revisions.

Wanda Henning has an extensive post explaining the process:

Let me describe, in brief, the format.

You arrive. You get your biodegradable name tag. You sit on one of the chairs arranged several rows deep in a circle. You order coffee or mocha of your choice (from the only man in the place) and help yourself to bagels, muffins and other breakfast snacks (sponsored).

Then Hamlin does the rounds with her mic and you introduce yourself with the words “I’m geeky because ….

Vabulus writes:

Unlike most conferences, guess that’ s why it’s called an “un-conference,” Kaliya Hamlin invited us to share our names, twitter handles, professions, and “Why we’re geeky.”  It was so awesome to realize that boys were not the only ones messing around in their rooms trying to develop video games or software, most of these women were doing the very same thing.

….

The next day, Saturday, I was asked by my fellow carpool geeks if I was going to present.  I hadn’t thought about it, but I wasn’t really sure what I would talk about.  I kept thinking about it until we arrived in Mountain View.  After we went around the circle introducing ourselves again that Saturday morning at She’s Geeky, and Kaliya made the announcement to rush to the middle to write a discussion topic, I did it.  I wrote something, then announced it, then put it on the board, then freaked out the entire day.  First one woman came, then there were two, and at the end there were five of us.  Small, but cool, because I don’t know if I could have handled a larger crowd, although more experts would have been cool to bounce ideas off each other.

TechBunny Writes:

Not only was this event filled with a collection of fantastic women with a variety of tech interests that I can’t even begin to list, it was a great opportunity to learn new tips and tricks for soft skills that aren’t always high on the “geekdom” list! Practicing the “elevator pitch”, improving your speaking skills and discussing how to manage transition as tech roles evolve were some of the sessions on agenda wall today.

Sunshine did a podcast from She’s Geeky with organizer Kaliya Hamlin.

and posted on her blog.

She’s Geeky is part of a larger “unconference” movement, in which folks are thinking about how to tap into human ways of relating that yield new and energizing results.

…

What struck me about this was how similar this “offline” event was to the way that my online life now functions. I went to a meeting or panel, and then if I met someone with whom I clicked in some way, we took our conversation over to a table, sat down and chatted further. Then we stood up and joined the larger stream. It worked beautifully, and it made me wonder if our culture’s obsession with structure, leadership, and climbing the ladder may be crumbling in the face of these more natural and creative ways of connecting with others.

Cootie Catcher by banane:

The more I thought of it, the more things started to make sense. Games are great introductions into programming, as they’re fun and interesting, interactive, and a great career option. Anything that shows the “genie behind the curtain” is useful, but games where the overall architecture and construct is simple and well-known helps. The girls told me the rules quickly and easily, almost as if I was stupid.

View from the Cubicle Farm:

I usually avoid all-women events, for reasons I haven’t clearly understood myself.  However, this event exceeded my expectations.    The conference was completely user-generated and fairly unscheduled, yet we covered a broad variety of intriguing topics.  Everyone came to the table with a different piece of information and different perspective to add to the conversation, yet we all had technology geekiness in common.  We created a worthwhile event based on our own experiences and research.  In that sense, it was almost as if the whole unconference was the embodiment of a wiki.

More posts will be coming with feedback from She’s Geeky and notes updates