A panel debate took place on the morning of 21 September 2010 to discuss the results of  a landmark research report commissioned by BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT.  The report, ‘The Information Dividend: Why IT makes you happier’ shows that women gain more, more quickly than other groups in society when given access to the internet and technologies and that they tend to benefit more than men from technology.  For the first time, too, researchers have proven a statistically significant link between access and use of technology and the internet and life satisfaction or happiness.

A full copy of the report can be found at www.bcs.org/infodividend

A video of the debate can be found below. The panel included the following,

• Elizabeth Sparrow, President, BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT (Chair)
• Ken Olisa OBE, Vice President Policy & Public Affairs, BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT
• Dr Ellen Helsper, academic at the LSE (specialism: digital exclusion)
• Helen Milner, MD, UK online centres
• Paul Flatters, Trajectory Partnership who conducted the research

Slides from Paul Flatters presentation on the research findings can be viewed here: http://www.slideshare.net/InformationDividend/the-information-dividend-why-it-makes-you-happier

About BCS Pioneers

BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT, is sharing the stories of five Information Pioneers who truly enabled the information society. Videos coming soon!

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Digital Exclusion:

Women have most to gain from solving internet & IT deficit

British women are losing most from the digital exclusion crisis, according to a new research from BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT.  The landmark report ‘The Information Dividend: why IT makes you happier’ shows women benefit more than other groups when given access to the internet and other technologies.

A panel debate will be taking place on Tuesday 21^st September from 9.30am – 11.30am at BCS, Covent Garden 1^st Floor, The Davidson Building, 5 Southampton Street, London, WC2E 7HA. You can watch it live at: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/information-dividend from 10am.

The panel will be chaired by Elizabeth Sparrow, President, BCS, The Charted Institute for IT and will include Ken Olisa OBE, Vice President Policy & Public Affairs, BCS, The Charted Institute for IT, Dr Ellen Helsper, academic at the LSE (specialism: digital exclusion), Helen Milner, MD, UK online centres and Paul Flatters, Trajectory Partnership who conducted the research.

If you are interested in attending please contact: lauras@glasshousepartnership.com or 020 7079 9212

About BCS Pioneers

BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT, is sharing the stories of five Information Pioneers who truly enabled the information society. Videos coming soon!

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Register now and enter a competition that could change your life. The incredible prize is to win a “money can’t buy” trip around the world.  Millions of people want to travel the world and return with new skills.  But how would you like to do it for free?

A competition to win a 12-month, round-the-world trip will be launched on July 1st, 2010.  Your Big Year is seeking enthusiastic, adventurous and enterprising individuals who are free to explore the globe from January 2011.

The competition, which is free to enter and open to all adults worldwide, will test entrants’ skills in communication, charity fund-raising and entrepreneurial spirit. The best 24 people will spend a week in Liverpool, UK, where they will undertake a series of tasks as part of Global Entrepreneurship Week (15th – 21st November).  The two who perform best will win the prize and explore the world together. Travel, accommodation
and living costs will be covered.

It will be the trip of a lifetime but be warned: this is not a holiday.

Our two winners will be expected to volunteer on a variety of projects on all five continents – from teaching children in South America. to conservation work in Asia.  They will act as ambassadors for Your Big Year, as they meet inspirational people from all walks of life – from the entrepreneurs of the Developing World, to global leaders and business icons.  They will also be expected to document their experiences on film and in blogs. Full media training and kit will be provided.

Your Big Year is being organised by leadership development firm Smaller Earth, in partnership with
numerous agencies, universities and businesses.

For more details – and to register your interest – visit www.yourbigyear.com.

Chris Arnold, CEO of Smaller Earth, said: “This is truly a prize that money can’t buy, and we anticipate huge interest from across the globe. Not only will our two winners experience the trip of a lifetime, but we hope they will have the opportunity to fulfill their potential, develop their enterprise skills and stimulate their entrepreneurial spirit. The competition process has been designed with similar aims in mind, so that even the thousands of people who do not win the prize will still benefit from honing key skills.”

All you have to do is Register Here and begin your journey to discover the earth, and yourself.

Your Big Year from Smaller Earth on Vimeo.

Notes:
Smaller Earth, based in Liverpool, UK, is the host company behind Your Big Year with support from Global Entrepreneurship Week and Enterprise UK.

Your Big Year is open for pre-registrations now and the competition will be launched on July 1st, 2010.

Entrants must be18 years or over and be available to attend the finals week in Liverpool, UK, from 13-21 November 2010. Travel, accommodation and living expenses will be paid.

Website: www.yourbigyear.com

For further information, contact Smaller Earth on 0151 702 6808

PS don’t forget to vote GirlyGeekdom for Cosmo Blog Awards Top Tech/Gadget Blog!

About Sarah Lamb

Sarah is the founder of the Girl Geek Dinners & GirlyGeekdom. She is a lover of gadgets, geeky things and sport! Find out more about her on her website.

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Breaking Gender Stereotypes – Calling professional women who have left the corporate world and are now entrepreneurs!

Whether in Melbourne, Singapore, Bangalore or Paris, we want to hear the voices of women worldwide who have made the transition from their corporate professions to become entrepreneurs or run a portfolio career.

Please share your views on this survey, which aims to shed light on:

1. Why women are leaving the security of their full-time jobs to either become entrepreneurs or run a portfolio career
2. What are the pull factors that drive women into entrepreneurship
3. Any cultural and structural challenges in the corporate world that make caring obligations and career development incompatible
4. What companies can learn from their former female talent to make their cultures more engaging.

Take the survey here:
http://www.bidiversity.com/survey/index.php?sid=78591

And in return for your time… there is a fantastic prize to be won; to be a part of the Athena Mutual Mentoring Programme, which usually costs £2,000. http://www.aquitude.com/2009/athena-mentoring-program

For more information please visit: http://www.breakinggenderstereotypes.com/latest-news/

About Sarah Lamb

Sarah is the founder of the Girl Geek Dinners & GirlyGeekdom. She is a lover of gadgets, geeky things and sport! Find out more about her on her website.

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Happy? with the Web I mean. Because it strikes me we are not.

The social web, or as its latest incantation with Charles Leadbeater’s optimistically pitched ‘cloud collaboration’, encourages; speed, sharing, communication, views, discussions… So far, so happy.

And yet this week I share much with Hadely Freeman’s frustrations in The Guardian who has grappled with the social density (heavy on the dense) of Facebook Groups that invite you to support: The Sausage Roll!, or Cheryl Cole!, or Reading with your eyes open! (OK that last one I made up, but I bet if I launched such a group…)  these groups are distinct from the Web 1.0 newsgroup forums, but invite the same styled FlameWar mentality.  I am unconvinced (unless truly radical) that the Group/s you may/may not belong on social networks really maketh the wo/man.  What is ‘new’ is the eagerness, nay almost glee, with which individuals will make their opinions Known. With a capital ‘K’. Some responses are short of hysterical outbursts, others are tempered with less than subtle threats (if you must just view any of the Jon Venables Facebook Groups that have been doing the rounds this week).  Perhaps such outbursts have something to do with the instantaneous need for gratification and/or frustration felt when encountering ‘difficulty’ or another opinion.

The latest research from bizreport speculates that individuals are experiencing increasing levels of ‘web stress’ and that concentration levels drop by 50% during ‘negative consumer’ choices.  Whilst the run of social networks will have it that everyone knows everything about everybody and this IS a good thing. It seems that such networking could have the run of us.  We can easily lose composure and stare agog, open-mouthed which only adds to our aggravation that we MUST level not only at the screen, but broadcast this to others – hence the Join my Group invites.  In terms of decision-making process things appear to be getting more stressful. More social platforms to log into, more data to recall, more people to connect, lead to a more frenetic lifestyle?…

Currently I’m talking to the Digital Isolates, those who have made the choice to log-out, switch –off and opt-out. Permanently. ‘So I don’t have a mobile phone; what of it?!’ is just one response that I have come across.  Does such a re-social ordering to deliberately distance integration to the point of not ‘being networked’ reveal a personal ‘failure’ or represent a distinct ‘accomplishment’?…

According to James Harkin (who he? Author of Cybubia: the dangerous idea that’s changing how we live and who we are) things can easily spiral downwards into a negative loop; with individuals happy to shout out reactive comments, roll their digital sleeves up and get into the scrum of mocking and sardonic tweets.  They, the non-digital are outside of ‘web-stress’, are they living the easy life. They never experience the negative feedback of a disappointed online consumer purchase, or re-acquaintance with a ‘long-lost’ friend, or flippance to the point of rudeness.  Instead, we scrabble around for attention in the increasing noise of riotous information.  The same ‘noise’ has emerged as a breeding ground for vicious lynch mob mentality.  The brevity required for ‘proper’ engagement to Join a Group on Facebook and post comment, or to send an update to Twitter have revealed an unrestrained almost goading sting in the tail of collaboration cheerfulness.

At this point we could turn from the ‘good’ and helpful approach, to pushback with bad and unpleasant feedback.  The anger spewed by those wanting to ‘lynch’ Venables or ‘ram a fist’ at the Facebook Killer are just two examples of this kind of appalling engagement.  Being pulled by others to enjoy the freedom of choice and speech is just one of the wonders of the web. To use it for backbiting and viciousness feels like a bad use of time that shades into over-punctuated nonsense(!)!!!! Oh, and it makes you unhappy.

image: elena_kalis_alice_in_wonderland_series_yatzer

About Dr Mariann Hardey

I hold the position of Lecturer in Social Media Marketing at Durham Business School. I also spend too much time enjoying social technologies, media+ stuff. That'll make me a Geek then. And a gal.

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Since everyone has been doing their decade blog posts I thought it might be a good idea to look back through the last 10 years of women in technology and see how the industry has changed during this time.

Many of you already know that I tend to keep an eye on what’s in the news in the Women Tech arena well here’s a nice way to see the last decade’s worth of news and a whole lot more on Women and Technology. As such today I went in search of a useful tool to show the last 10 years of news around the subject. I started off looking for the Google Search in the old style views and then gave up on that. It was just too slow, so I went onto Google Labs and found Google News Timeline! It’s so handy! Here’s the Timeline for Women Technology from this past year going back through the last week, month, year, decade and so on! (click on the image below!)

Amazingly back in 1999 some of the top news stories were similar to those of today with people stating Women are good at Technology and so on… but yet there were articles about MIT stating they were tough on women in their tech courses. There were calls for more women to come into technology, film requests for student females in on tech courses and so on! The shortage of women in technology was identified and a call for more women to join the industry was also made!

When you start looking through the time line you can see there is a more general positive trend towards women in the technology industry, however despite role models being identified in national and international news papers as well as lots of groups and organizations trying to make a difference there are still comments about the declining numbers entering the profession in 2008. There are many yearly awards given out to those in top senior management slots who are women in the technology industry, however this too doesn’t lead to additional people. Many are arguing that these sort of awards are hindering rather than helping the industry. Meanwhile there are efforts by large corporates to invest money in their own centres for women in technology which to date haven’t seen any hard and fast results. In the meantime groups like Girl Geek Dinners, Women in Technology and Girls in Tech have been built up by the technology community for the community as a result of members of the community feeling a need for it.

After doing the search for Women and Technology I decided to see what came up when looking for Women Technology relate grants. Now that brought up a very interesting pattern. The news suggested that whilst numbers were declining there have been more and more funds being put into the industry to help combat the problem over the years.

So over all assuming that the news articles and the general upward trend towards positive press for the technology industry and support for those in it, you would anticipate 2010 being the year that women and technology became normal! Well here’s hoping!

Bonus Note: If you know of any funds for women who wish to re-skill in terms of grants and funds then please can you get in touch and let us know. We’re looking to help those who want to retrain to find a job in the IT industry and we need your help doing so!

About Sarah Lamb

Sarah is the founder of the Girl Geek Dinners & GirlyGeekdom. She is a lover of gadgets, geeky things and sport! Find out more about her on her website.

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There are few opportunities for women to progress to the highest levels in IT Management. True or false?

This was the question I decided to pose, after much delibertation with my tutor, as the focal point for a 3000 word research report I had to complete for one of my year 3 degree modules. Full report here

It’s quite a question and was likely to raise a few strong points. Doing research on this topic turned out to be a rather large learning curve that I hadn’t really anticipated and it exposed me to so many different thoughts and ideas.

I arranged to interview three different subjects, all involved with the technology industry in a large way but in a variety of different roles. All of the interviews highlighted some points I’d never really considered and have posed questions that I’d like to find some answers to. Such questions as, “What are we doing to make all domains of IT exposed?” and  “If women are doing HE in a technology related subject and have seen and dealt with the fact there has been a lack of information available and that the sector is dominated predominately by males why do they then take a different career path?”

My report conclusion states that the results indicated the originally posed question to be false. There are no fewer opportunities for women in the higher levels of IT management than there are for men. On interviewing Alan Dean. He brought up that

“There are few opportunities for anyone, male or female, to progress to the highest levels of IT Management in my experience. This is largely because the top of any ladder is usually attained via dead shoes and IT management is relatively youthful”

I believe this to be true. It is not a gender based problem, the reason you see fewer women in higher levels of management in IT is simply because there are less of them to start with, it would be quite incredible to find a higher percentage of women in high level IT management roles than in the industry as a whole.

We are losing a lot of women between Higher Education and pursuing working in the sector and I am confused as to why this is happening, if they are doing HE and have seen and dealt with the fact there has been a lack of information available and that the sector is dominated predominately by males why do they then take a different career path?

Awareness of the different roles within IT is a large issue and I feel it needs to be addressed to entice females into IT. IT is perceived as being ‘Techy’ but that is not all it involves and there are some highly communicative roles within IT which until undertaking this report I myself was not aware of. So what are we doing to make all domains of IT exposed?

There does seem to be a underlying communication issue between the genders. This I believe is down to a number of attributing factors, the difference between the genders as a whole; males often perceive things differently to females and although this can create a positive impact on the productivity of a team it can cause communication issues to arise and as such I question “Do women need to be more direct when communicating or do men need to be more sympathetic in their approach to communicating with women?” “Is this just a cultural based issue or is this something that is a genetic trait of males and females?” “Do other countries have these issues?”. These would be areas I would be interested in researching further.

I think that the lack of confidence females appear to have could attribute to the communication barriers they are experiencing. The articles and interviews mentioned in this report relating to the confidence of females within the industry suggest that they feel less confident in themselves not their abilities and that they air on the side of caution, although it was interesting to find that when interviewing a male on the topic he felt women were more confident. So is this an example of communication failure or has the research just not been done on a wide enough scale?

If you are interested in reading the full report with statistics and graphs you will find it here.

About Sara Stephens

I'm a Web Developer. I work for a media company in London while I study in my spare time at Essex University for a BSc(Hons) degree in Computing Solutions. I enjoy most aspects of development and I am always on the look-out for new technologies to experiment with and master.

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I am re-publishing the below by kind permission of the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP), as it was written for the May issue of their Update magazine.
[Image Source: Qwantz]

Research findings released late last year by the University of Illinois suggest that when conducting cardiopulmonary resuscitation on those who have suffered a cardiac arrest, even medical practitioners benefit from singing a song with a tempo of 100 beats per minute (bpm) to match the optimum 100 compressions per minute required to revive a patient. Songs matching the 100bpm rate include, appropriately enough, ‘Staying Alive’ by the Bee Gees, less appropriately ‘Another One Bites the Dust’ by Queen, and ‘Connected’ by Stereo MCs, with a tempo of 100.7bpm, lyrics of which go something like this:

‘If you make sure you’re connected, the writing’s on the wall, but if your mind’s neglected, stumble you might fall, stumble you might fall…’

One can only presume that those in command at the Guardian and BBC came across this research and decided that the approach applied equally well to information stores as to human patients, for in the six months since, both institutions have opened up semi-public discussion around how best to set their valuable information free and get themselves connected.

The BeeBCamp 2.0 unconference, held at White City on 18 February 2009, brought together a diverse ‘digital’ group from around the BBC. I was privileged to attend, despite the event being primarily for internal BBC staff (GirlyGeekdom Note only: as was another ‘outsider’, Rachel Clarke, who wrote up some great notes on her blog). Conversations held at the various 20-minutes informal sessions covered such topics as harnessing user-generated content, encouraging the public to innovate, reviving the BBC Computer Literacy Project which popularised BBC Micro computers in the 1980s, and technical and bureaucratic issues around such changes.

For information practitioners, the session of most interest was entitled ‘Semantic BBC’. During this session, BBC insiders discussed:

• a proposed iFinder to help staff find multimedia content across BBC sites
• the possibility of incorporating the BBC Press Database which contains text transcript ‘scrapes’ from BBC news stories (obtained by converting interview recordings from audio to text), associates common keywords to such transcripts, and subsequently maps such keywords against the BBC ontology, enabling BBC staff to search for keywords/speakers’ names, etc. Access to the BBC Press Database isn’t available to the public for copyright reasons, but the BBC Programmes Ontology is published online
• semantic tagging trials within BBC Vision, the division responsible for broadcasting the content of BBC television channels
• ways the BBC online team might incorporate programme details stored in the BBC Programme Catalogue maintained by the BBC’s Information & Archives team. The BBC Programme Catalogue was created in the mid 1980s to replace their legacy card system, and trial public online access to the calogue was provided from 2006-2008, however this has been removed until further notice
• providing the public with information visualisations, visual representations of data, with such visualisations relating to searches made on www.bbc.co.uk, BBC iPlayer audience viewing patterns, and so on
• proposals to tag new BBC website content with GPS co-ordinates, where relevant
• the BBC field journalists’ content management systems and that group’s current migration across to their internally developed and maintained Content Production System (CPS)
• a proposed semi-closed taxonomy for the BBC audience to suggest new tags but with moderation
• the semedia.org online collaborative ‘crowdsourced’ project whereby users can play BBC archive films and tag the film in real-time, with such tags cross-referenced against those proposed by other users, as where tags are identical for the same section they will be considered more likely to be accurate.

For more information on BeeBCamp2 and to learn more about similar BBC initiatives, visit the BBC Internet Blog round-up.

BarCampLondon6 (GirlyGeekdom Note only: which was organised with military precision by the fabulous Emma Persky, Kevin Prince and co., thanks again!), held over the weekend of 28-29 March, was another ‘unconference’, open to those lucky enough to obtain a ticket via the online ticketing system. BarCamp6 was the first large conference held at the Guardian‘s new offices by Kings Cross, and as BarCamps traditionally involve ‘camping’ at the venue overnight, the new facilities were well and truly tested.

One session was run by Simon Willison, a software architect who joined the Guardian in late 2008 with the remit to ‘‘work with both the Guardian‘s existing data sources and third-party companies to prepare content for the [www.guardian.co.uk] platform, allowing the external development community to create applications using Guardian content’.

During his session, Willison shared objectives and technological underpinnings of the Guardian‘s Open Platform project. As part of this, the Guardian‘s technology team has developed an application programming interface (API) providing access to every piece of content on the Guardian‘s website for which the newspaper has enough relevant rights (c. 700,000 individual articles from the past 10 years), and the team intends to continue to share this content as it gradually brings other non-digital assets online. (Girlygeekdom Note only: this figure slightly differs from that on Simon’s personal blog however this is what he said at BarCamp a couple of weeks later, following the official launch, so I presume 700,000 is more accurate.)

The Open Platform project includes the API Explorer, a ‘Firebird-inspired’ console which enables those interested to connect their own web services to Guardian editorially chosen tags and rich metadata. The API content is largely shared through RSS, though JSON format is also supported, and Atom feeds are supported for tools such as Yahoo Pipes, to enable end-users to build on that.

Another fascinating project is the Guardian Data Store which shares raw Guardian research data which it hopes the public might cross-reference against other data, perhaps creating infographics and finding correlations. Distribution is the key focus for the Guardian, and provides the impetus for opening such content stores. Its paper weekday circulation is 400,000, while its website gets more than 33m hits per month: as the Guardian‘s revenue is largely derived from advertising, continuing to share their content makes a great deal of sense.

• Visit the Guardian‘s Open Platform project site (also visit this site to request an API key)

• Visit the Guardian‘s Data Store project site

Guardian and BBC information being set free in this way certainly makes my pulse quicken, and where practicable we might follow their example to keep our own content alive… ‘make sure you’re connected, the writing’s on the wall…’

About Nicole Mathison

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We like to bring a range of stories and commentaries to the GG blog. What follows is as much for your stomach as your social network. And could do damage to both…

In the light of Facebook’s fifth birthday (yesterday) have you heard that the ‘King’ of the burger giants has created an application for Facebook that allows users to delete 10 friends in exchange for a free Whopper. Is this a marketing promotion gone mad, a social signal that our friends are just our ‘friends’ (and therefore disposable in exchange of soggy bun and a pound of flesh), or a promotion of an unhealthy meal deal both for stomach and friendships alike?

Via the beef-cow King’s website there is also the social opportunity (suicide) to nominate friendships to ‘sacrifice’. On reflection, this has a disquieting effect. Increasingly mediated through a range of technologies friendships can be experienced as ‘quite different’ from those previous days when friends were made, sustained and broken across the playground.

Perhaps his majesty is making a valid point, where SNSs by their very nature have replaced the sanctity of friendship with a blatant disregard of their value and personal place in personal lives.

From its humble origins as a site to connect Harvard students as ‘The Facebook’, today 150 million registered users/friends occupy its social networking space and live out friendships in the full broadcast view of others.

On the flip side there are those (such as I can count on one hand) who doggedly dismiss, ignore and reject Facebook requests. Such persistence has to be admired. It would be hard to diversify as a Girl Geek without an accompanied (over) attachment to technology.

In the past there has been suspicion about purely ‘online’ connections – particularly if we recall the 1990s days of cyberspace full of chatrooms and online ‘dates’. At best such introductions represented exchanges that were ill advised and imprudent, at worst irrational and dangerous.

Where the Whopper wades back is acknowledgement of the level of participation. Friends cannot be ‘made’ unless both parties take action and accept the mutual invitation. However, it seems you can break friends all on your own and for the sake of a burger.

I’m tempted to conclude with ‘have it your way’, but then I’d think you would agree the marketing monkey’s have got me after all.

Image: Flickr unsureshot.

About Dr Mariann Hardey

I hold the position of Lecturer in Social Media Marketing at Durham Business School. I also spend too much time enjoying social technologies, media+ stuff. That'll make me a Geek then. And a gal.

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