Last night was the 8th London Girl Geek Dinner and we filled the venue with lots fun interesting geeky girls and guys. For the first time in a long time I had to actually make sure that there were no gate crashers… there were some guys in the main bar area who were very curious and were desperate to come in… not a chance though, they had no invitations.

The event seemed to go really smoothly, I got there in plenty of time to set up the mic and chat to the speakers, and we even got a couple of extra speakers at the last minute with Katie Ledger and Melissa Cragshawy-Williams (below right) offering to speak as well as Veena, Kimi and I talking on our chosen subject areas.

Some photo’s from the evening can be found on my flickr pages.

The talks from all the speakers were great, although one or two were a little unexpected and dared to give it a go at the very last minute. I love it when people do that on an open mic night. Guage the audience and talk about something that they can see interests the people there and just go with it.

This was the first event that I have actually spoken at so it was interesting to see the event from the speakers perspective. When I do all the introductions I usually worry that I won’t get peoples names pronounced correctly or mis-title their talks… this time I introduced them and let them introduce their talks, and I think that worked a little better.

My talk was on how the events started and where I would like to see them go… It started off a bit waffley I think but after a while I got my direction and got into the swing of things. I hope that I got everything across to people well. After the talk we had a discussion on what a girl geek is and there was also a question and answer session. Nicole has podcast the event but it is yet to be uploaded… it will arrive and I will link to it on this site as soon as it is available.

(BTW that’s me talking introducing Veena)

I would go into the details of each of the talks but I think I will leave that until I have the podcast and then I will note down the content, speakers and such so that it puts it all into context.

I would like to just say thank you to Microsoft Cambridge Labs for sponsoring the event. It makes it so much nicer for people to not have to worry about finding nibbles and fighting for the bar.
Our next event will be on the 29th November, with some mystery guests… I know who they are but I’m not telling. It’s a surprise! Look out for the announcement for the sign up pages being opened up.
If anyone has feedback on the event who turned up then please feel free to give feedback here or on the wiki pages: http://londongirlgeekdinner.pbwiki.com/Ideas
If you would like to suggest a speaker, subject etc then feel free to do so here: http://londongirlgeekdinner.pbwiki.com/SpeakerRequests

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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This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 1st, 2006 at 11:00 pm and is filed under Women Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.