Premiere screening of Geek Girls a documentary film by Gina Hara.
The hidden half of nerd culture.
Geek Girls is the first feature-length documentary exploring the hidden half of fan culture: nerdy women. Although geeky communities have recently risen to prominence as major cultural contributors, very little attention has been directed towards the women who live and work with nerd culture on a daily basis.
Filmmaker Gina Hara addresses this oversight by delving into a world of professional gamers, cute dresses, fake names, and death threats; she follows her subjects through the exhilaration of newfound community and the ennui of ostracization while also exploring her own struggles with her geek identity.
Gina Hara was born in Budapest, Hungary. She is an acclaimed filmmaker and artist with a background in art & technology, interested in the experimental aspects and transmedial forms of visual culture.
For the first time in Auckland, Gina Hara will attend a screening of her documentary Geek Girls for a Q&A after the session.
WITcon is a conference designed to bring students and industry together to discuss technical and social topics surrounding STEM.
VUWWIT (Victoria University of Wellington Women in Tech) exists to create a space for women and non-binary voices in STEM. We connect students to industry by running networking events and sharing job and internship opportunities. We also organise social events to build our community.
Programme:
9:30am Check in
10:00am Welcome
10:15am Keynote – Valerie Chan: Exploring the environment for female students in the Victoria University School of Engineering and Computer Science | Twitter: @Valerie_Chan_
10:45am Diana Siwiak: What the Heck is Music Engineering Technology? | https://twitter.com/DianaSMuzyka
11:10am Chris Cormack: He waka eke noa? | https://twitter.com/ranginui
11:35am Lena Plaksina: From Mentee to Mentor | https://twitter.com/plaksina_lena
12:00pm Lunch
1:00pm Grant McLean: So You Want To Be A Developer? | https://twitter.com/grantmnz
1:25pm Karen Pratt: Tech at 23m Deep | https://www.projectreeflife.org
1:50pm Kate Pearce: Adversarial Engineering – What I Didn’t Learn About Cybersecurity in my Studies | https://twitter.com/secvalve
2:15pm Panel with keynote speaker and sponsors
2:45pm Closing words
3:00pm Drinks at the Hunter Lounge
Ticket sponsorship
We have a limited number of tickets available for those who need financial assistance, thanks to our sponsors. We never want money to be a barrier for learning and engaging in this industry. Please email us at vuwwit@gmail.com if this applies to you.
PechaKucha Night Christchurch is teaming up with Christchurch City Council to celebrate the 125th anniversary of Women’s Suffrage and Conservation Week with a night of quick-fire talks by some amazing women!
We are proud to bring you a collection of local women including a marine biologist working with the world’s rarest and smallest dolphins, an adventurer who returned from a 29-day expedition across the Greenland Icecap, a young musician speaking on the power of rest and creativity, an entrepreneur starting a podcast focused on women change-makers, a writer working on a book about women and World II and more.
Line-up include:
María Jesús Valdés Hernández // Marine Biologist // Working with the world’s rarest and smallest dolphins
Amy Johnston Bray // Interpretation and Exhibition Designer // Conversation is about conservation-engaging the public to act
Victoria Metcalf // Scientist // Celebrating the unlovable and the unseen
Jo Bailey // Writer, Author and Editor // Writing, Women and World II
Rebecca(Bek) Tavete// Founder ARGO beach Co-working Limited // A Contribution to Sustainability
Hollie Woodhouse // Adventurer, Designer + Daydreamer // Be your own Movement Maker and more.
When and Where
Wednesday 19 September 2018
Doors open 6:30pm, event starts 7:30pm
(Ilex café open for drinks and snacks)
Botanic Garden’s Visitor Centre Rolleston Ave, Christchurch
Join us for the next Wāhine in Tech Wellington event for an engaging discussion about careers in tech.
We have gathered a group of kick ass women for the discussion panel, all of whom have had really interesting journeys in the tech industry. Come armed with your own questions or discussion points, and let’s get the conversation started.
Is the tech industry a welcoming place for women? What kind of treatment should be expected? What does success look like? How do we make it a better space in which to progress and flourish? How do we make it more inclusive for underrepresented people?
About our panellists:
aurynn shaw
aurynn is the founder of Eiara, a DevOps consultancy based out of Wellington, New Zealand, focussing on helping clients develop technical DevOps capability, and the cultural knowledge to use it.
With over a decade as a professional software developer, aurynn’s expertise ranges from modern cloud deployments to massively parallel supercomputer environments.
As the defining voice of the ideas of “contempt culture”, aurynn is working to change the very nature of how we create new technologies, and the questions that we must answer as we do.
Hiria Te Rangi
Hiria loves her community and loves technology, so Kaiwhakahaere (CEO) for WhareHauora was a natural role for her.
With 15 years in tech with numerous technical and business roles in open data, open source, digital technologies and infrastructure, Hiria relishes the middle ground that Whare Hauora holds for Aotearoa.
Whare Hauora’s ability to go into a Marae, Community centres or schools to teach low income families about Whare Sensors, how to build them and how they can help whānau make informed decisions about how their home affects their health, brilliantly marries Hiria’s two loves and she is very happy to talk to you about them.
Tamara Buckland
Tamara is a passionate people and culture consultant in the tech industry with a background in entrepreneurship, service design and delivery, and people leadership. She balances consulting with working part time for CoLiberate, a local business delivering Mental Health First Aid training. Tamara brings a mental health and wellbeing focus to her work in the tech industry, and is particularly interested in how we can support people in marginalised groups
Refactor has an amazing international line-up for August. We’re so excited to welcome Lara Hogan and Deepa Subramaniam all the way from New York, and they will be joined by HYPR’s Gillian Clark. We’re back at the amazing Warren & Mahoney studio in Wynyard Quarter.
Speaker Profiles
Lara Hogan
Lara Callender Hogan (@lara_hogan) is an engineering leader, coach, and consultant at Wherewithall. She is also the author of Designing for Performance (O’Reilly, 2014), Building a Device Lab (Five Simple Steps, 2015), and Demystifying Public Speaking (A Book Apart, 2016). Lara champions engineering management as a practice, having built and led engineering organizations as an Engineering Director at Etsy and VP of Engineering at Kickstarter. In her world tour to advocate performance to designers and developers alike, Lara has keynoted the Velocity Conference, presented at Google I/O, and given talks at companies like The New York Times to help shift them toward a culture of performance. While at Etsy, Lara co-created the initial physical device labs, and co-authored a tutorial and book for companies interested in building their own lab. Lara also believes it’s important to celebrate career achievements with donuts.
Deepa Subramaniam
Deepa Subramaniam (@iamdeepa) has spent 15+ years leading large product teams to collaboratively build innovative digital products with mass reach. She is the co-founder of Wherewithall, an advising company dedicated to helping tech startups and non-profits strategize, grow and execute with ease. Deepa is on the Board of Directors for DonorDrive which has helped worthy causes raise over $1 billion. Prior to Wherewithall, Deepa was Vice President of Product and Design at Kickstarter. Before Kickstarter, she was the Director of Product at Hillary for America where she helped lead product for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign focusing on online fundraising, hillaryclinton.com and bespoke policy and rapid response digital products. Before Hillary for America, Deepa led product at charity: water, a non-profit dedicated to bringing clean water to the developing world. She started her career at Adobe, first as a Computer Scientist and later as a principle product manager on Creative Cloud. She champions data-driven design iteration, achieving high-velocity team output in fast-paced environments, and building collaboration and joy into company culture.
Gillian Clark
Gillian Clark (@gillian_clark) is the CEO of HYPR Innovation. She has spent her entire career in IT after giving up on the idea of being a Flying Doctor in Australia after realising she couldn’t stand the sight of blood or vomit! She needed something that involved less bodily fluids, and IT sounded pretty safe. Little did she know the horrors of some projects felt like she really was metaphorically cleaning up messes!After completing a Computing Science degree (having the dubious honour of using a Hollerith Punch machine to write her Cobol code), her career path went through a traditional route of programmer to analyst to IT Manager then to CIO and then out to Consulting. Gillian has always been searching for a better way to do things. Those messes kept on turning up, and she wanted to find a way to make them smaller, more manageable, or even not happen. She began a journey of discovery of a Lean/Agile mindset, taking her to SAFe® (one of 50 SAFe® trainers in the world). This way of working was so inspiring that she formed HYPR so she could share her experience with others, and has now helped over 90 companies develop better software.
Women in Tech Auckland hosts regular events for our community, and our purpose is to create networks and amplify the voices of people from marginalised groups. We’re looking for speakers for our next event, on 31 July, which will be a series of short Lightning Talks.
This is a format where you get 5 minutes to speak, you provide 20 slides, which are set to advance automagically every 15 seconds. For people who want to practice their speaking skills, Lightning Talks give you the opportunity to present for the first time without having to create a formal presentation proposals, and its short so its a great intro to speaking in public. A good lightning talk is insightful, inspiring, thought-provoking, useful, humorous, controversial, or enlightening.
You do not have to be an experienced speaker! Your work and time are valuable even if you have never spoken before. We are happy to meet with you for coffee and brainstorm ideas, as well as attend a dry run of your talk and provide constructive feedback.
Let us know if you’d like to do a Lightning Talk using this form.
We value the participation of each member of our community and want all attendees to have an enjoyable and fulfilling experience. Please familiarise yourself with our Code of Conduct ahead of attending a Women in Tech meetup.
Please join us for drinks and nibbles (and maybe even a speech!) in a yet-to-be-confirmed inner city location and get your networking on! This is a great to meet some other great women and non-binary folk in Wellington, share some stories and laughs and do it in a low-stakes and casual environment.
Please consider bringing someone who is new to the industry, or who may not usually come along to meetup events – we’d love to see some new faces and help people feel really comfy within this group going forward.
Women in the technology industry are intelligent, passionate and knowledgeable. However, as a minority in both the sector and at tech-related events, the uneven ratio can make it difficult or unwelcoming for women.
We want to keep improving the New Zealand tech industry by inspiring women to not only stay in it but get to the top — running teams, in board positions, on the speaker line-ups at conferences, and as visible leaders to inspire an incoming generation of smart women.
Hear from inspiring women speakers four times a year.
We have an extraordinary line up as we welcome Dr Michelle Dickinson from Auckland, Marie Slako from Melbourne and Adeline Salked-Blears from Kaitaia.
First meeting for Wāhine in Tech (WIT) Wellington. The goal of this meeting is to get to know each other and gather ideas and topics for future events and activities for 2018. The outcomes we wish to create a culture of success for women in the tech industry.
This is event is to support humans, who identify as women, female, girl or non-binary. Men are also welcome, but we are focused on women and non-binary folk. Please familiarise yourself with our code of conduct
When and Where
Rabid Tech HQ
2/50 The Terrace, Wellington
5:30 – 6:00 – Arrive and mingle over drinks and nibbles*
6:00 – 7:00 – meeting
7:00 – 7:30 – Post chat tidy up and go on with our lives 🙂
*Drinks and Nibbles as well as hosting the event is provided by Rabid Technologies. (http://rabid.co.nz)
Attack On Geek proudly presents the inaugural women in tech and gaming meetup – let’s form the start of a positive local community!
There is little doubt that women are under-represented in the technology and gaming industry. Attack On Geek, an Auckland based pop-culture, gaming and entertainment brand is committed to challenging the misconceptions surrounding female tech enthusiasts and gamers, as well as building a positive and supportive community for local women in the industry.
This inaugural meetup will be the first, in hopefully a series of Attack On Geek meetups to allow local women in the industry to come together, share their thoughts and ideas, build friendships and support one another.
Tickets are free, and limited to 10 (we have a table booked). You will be responsible to pay for anything you want to eat and drink though!
When and Where
Sat 19 May 7 — 9pm
Johnny Bars American Restaurant,
142 Halsey St, Auckland, New Zealand
How Much
Tickets are free, and limited to 10 (we have a table booked). You will be responsible to pay for anything you want to eat and drink though!
