Dare 2B Digital Conference this week in Los Altos Hills
Dare 2B Digital, a conference produced by Invent your future Enterprises, will be held at Foothill College in Los Altos Hills this weekend, Saturday, February 27.
The one day conference is geared toward young women in grades 7-10. While the young women who attend will be able to select from a variety of workshops, inspirational speeches, and demonstrations; the parents will also benefit by attending discussions and workshops designed to help them support their daughter’s future endeavors in technology or engineering.
If I were younger and had an opportunity to go, these are just some of the workshops I would want to attend:
- Making your own Farmville Facebook Game
- Game and Story programming with Scratch
- Creating a video with the Flip hand-held camera
- Intro to programming using Python
- Social networks for companies
- Exploring Artificial Intelligence
While these workshops seem fun, they are also important in the sense that they create a supportive and open environment for girls to explore what the tech field has to offer. With the information from the workshops, they may be more inclined to hone in on one particular subject, or get a sense of everything they could do with technology. With training and support they may empower themselves to be better than their male counterparts and become women leaders in tech and engineering.
A recent article on TechCrunch emphasizes the lack of women as primary owners of tech firms, exclusion of women in management teams within large companies like Apple, and male-dominated Venture Capital firms.
It’s important to support women in tech and entrepreneurship, as can be seen from the TechCrunch article. That’s what I hope events like this accomplish. By introducing more women to technology, it may be possible to bridge the large gap in women owned technology and engineering firms.
Therefore, if you have a daughter, whether you’re a dad or mom, take your daughter to get some exposure to tech. Then continue to train, educate, and support them yourself, by using some of the information provided for the parents at the Dare 2B Digital Conference this weekend.
Don’t forget the children in refugee camps
A post I recently wrote for Greenlight Apparel about the dangers kids face in refugee camps everyday, titled “Children in refugee camps live in fear.”
Life is difficult in other countries devastated by wars and natural disasters, but life in refugee camps for kids that have lost their parents is even more harsh.
Read MoreThe key ingredients in social media
What is social media? Social media is the ability to use third-party platforms to engage different types of users in different ways.
People don’t want to listen to commercials; social media is not shameless self promotion. People want information, they want your opinions, they crave transparency. They want to know that you are honest with them, and they want what they want, not what you want them to want. If you want people to want your product, give them information, a peek inside your business. Give them something fun, give them something informative, give them facts, give them tips, give them quotes to live by (not too many though). Talk to them, join in on their conversations, contradict or share their opinions, let them know you are paying attention to them. Do all of these, not just one.
This is one of the reasons why social media has not only been a challenge for entrepreneurs, but also to large companies and marketers used to delivering messages via advertisements to the consumer, not for the consumer. Even with today’s ads, you can still be sure that marketers are still trying to sell you a product through visual aids, but the conversation continues to be uni-directional. Hence the need for the type of marketing that gives your supporters what they crave: Attention.
Read MoreShe's Geeky -Fifth Unconference
On Friday, January 29th, I woke up super early to drive with other geeky women to the Tech Museum in Mountainview, California for the first day of the She’s Geeky Unconference. The event was set up by entrepreneur Kaliya Hamlin in order to bring together women from the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) Fields. Luckily, IP Society sponsored me and was able to attend this awesome gathering of superbly intelligent and influential women this past weekend.
I really had no idea what to expect or that I was even going to lead a discussion, so I was enthralled with the outcome of the event, to say the least.
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.
I attended a few notable workshops, two of the first ones dealing with entrepreneurship, then social media for social change both led by Vicki Saunders, CEO of Zazengo. Later on, I went to a session titled “Uncommon Leadership” where we talked about using technology to empower women in refugee camps. Fact: Globally, according to USCRI, over 3 million refugees have been in camps for over 50 years. Additionally, over 1 million Afghanis have been in Pakistan for 26 years. Furthermore, in all refugee camps around the world, women are raped almost daily, a sad fate that many women face once they are moved into camps. We were hoping that if we come up with a solution that women can use regardless of language barriers, it would be perfect for this kind of situation.
Lunch was awesome! As was the coffee cart! I took notes for a talk from Chelsea Rustrum from Freemania.net, she’s been clipping coupons so long, she knows her stuff like the back of her hand.
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 Mountainview. After we went around the circle introducing ourselves again that Saturday morning at She’s Geeky, and Kalyia 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.
I chose to name my discussion, “Online Discussion Platforms: what works for business and non-profits,” because I wanted to see if anyone else out there had tried other platforms besides blogs, forums, twitter, and facebook, especially good private discussion platforms, that would help to engage readers and members. After I led the session, I realized I should have just called it: “Online community management using facebook and twitter,” because that’s what it was mostly about. Nevertheless, I learned that people still need to know about how to use these tools for business, and more importantly, how to use them correctly.
Anyway, I went onto my favorite site to try to find the latest tools on the web: go2web20.net and tried to look for something new, but what I mostly found where twitter tools. Sigh. Oh well, I will still continue to look. But what I had learned earlier that day whilst at a discussion titled, “Engaging your Audience,” is that content is king and stories allow us to relate, thereby allowing you to engage that percentage of the population that are not contributing or are not engaged by your topics, posts or stories.
Read MoreSan Francisco Fashion Feud Finals
Last Tuesday, Januray 26, at San Francisco’s at San Francisco’s “Mighty” Bar, EcoBold‘s Steffany Boldrini and I partied while Julia Meeks, Alexandria Von Bromssen, and Gail B. Shrive sewed, ironed, and fit their models for an hour.
At the beginning of the show they were given two different fabrics with which they had to work, one was a paisley print and the other a brocade pattern. Throughout the hour, we mingled and checked out the vendors at the event. Most were jewelry, but the ones that stood out were the make-up and organic chocolate vendors.
While Gail was shirring the top of a dress, Julia Meeks was fitting her model with an asymmetric wrap dress, and Alexandria was fitting her model with a deep V-neck top attached to a short skirt.
At the end of the hour, although Julia had a slew of fans cheering boisterously for her, Gail won the competition with her design – a cocktail dress with a shirred-top.
Photo by Owen Geronimo, SFFAMA, Inc.
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