[okfn-discuss] Women comfortable at speaking at events...

[Marieke Guy]

I agree that getting children interested in technology early on is an 
important part of this jigsaw.

I don't know of any initiatives at the Open Knowledge Foundation looking 
at this in particular - please do shout if I've missed anything - but I 
came across some really exciting activity when attending MozFest (an 
event the Open Knowledge Foundation are heavily involved with) last month.

My favourites were:

  * Code Club <https://www.codeclub.org.uk>- nationwide (UK) network of
    free volunteer-led after-school coding clubs for children aged 9-11.
  * Hive Learning Network
    <https://mozillalabs.com/en-US/mozilla-hive-nyc/> - learning lab
    that engages youth around innovation, digital media and web-making -
    lots of projects and resources
  * Hackosaurus <http://hackasaurus.org/en-US/> - using tools tools that
    make it easy for kids to remix, create and share on the web.
  * Using Minecraft for teaching (quite a few independent activities
    around this)
  * Teaching computing offline (with logic puzzles and games)
  * Scratch <http://scratch.mit.edu>- coding for beginners

There was also a 'girls into technology' session.

As well as including children Mozilla has worked hard at getting a good 
gender balance at its events and it's really starting to pay off. There 
is a different feel to the event and it's a very positive buzz.

I'd like to echo other people's comments - diversity is an important 
part of open knowledge. If this means that we need to be proactive for a 
while then let's do it!

Marieke





On 25/11/2013 19:20, William Waites wrote:
> This is worthwhile. I suspect that the lack of women speaking at
> technology related events is effect rather than cause though. By all
> means find everyone that you can for speaking engagements, but the
> cause might be addressed much earlier. Primary school, say, or at
> least secondary school. Schools in general are pretty poor at teaching
> about technology and maybe if that can be done better and not
> introduce a subtle bias early on, maybe in a generation we'll start to
> see substantial change.
>
> Are there any initiatives within the OKF specifically for
> schoolchildren?
>
> -w
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Marieke Guy
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