Brussels Girl Geek Dinner

JUMP (“Empowering Women, Advancing in the Economy”) offers women practical tools to help them realise their professional aspirations and supports companies and organisations that wish to promote better gender diversity within their management. More at www.blogjump.eu, www.forumjump.eu, www.womansacademy.be, and www.jobdays.eu.

For Women’s day, JUMP is organizing an event on the 4th March, at 18.00 at Mirano, Brussels. It’s an occasion to meet another
audience and other women. Presentations of several women’s networks will be followed by a cocktail and by a styling session.

Entrance fee is 8 euros, but let me know if you’d like me to arrange free entrance for you.

European e-Skills Week highlights the growing demand for skilled ICT users and professionals to drive a competitive and innovative Europe. This exciting campaign seeks to inform students, young professionals and SMEs about the vast range of opportunities that ICT-related jobs present.

Throughout the coming months, public authorities, ICT companies, education institutions and students will engage in hundreds of activities, training events, competitions and much more.  The awareness campaign will culminate in a dedicated European e-Skills Week from 1 to 5 March 2010.

This ground breaking initiative of the European Commission’s DG Enterprise and Industry is coordinated by DIGITALEUROPE and European Schoolnet in conjunction with twenty national partners.

Want to know more?

• http://eskills-week.ec.europa.eu/
• Skills Week – Belgium (.pdf)

The Brussels Twestival is a party to raise money for Belgian charities. The Twestival team shortlisted a total of 15 Belgian charity projects for you to choose from. The 5 charity projects that receive the most votes will then go forward to the vote that takes place on 12 September at the Twestival.

Please encourage your friends to vote for their favourite cause and if you can come on 12 September buy your tickets today.  The line-up is looking great, btw:

Doors open at 8.00pm with music from @LaidBackRadio and Charity Pitches & Final Vote until 9.00pm

Live Bands

• Altamontt (Rock)
• K.O.S. (beatbox) @thomastesla
• Lydia Da Rocha (live housy)

DJs

• Patrick Balzat (selecta-beat, Noce Royale)
• DJ Psar (NRJ Mashup, MP Family) @djpsar
• Mr Amaury (Fun Radio) @amaury
• DJ Satanas (MP3Bar) @djsatanas

If you’re not able to make it on the night of the 12th you’ll miss one hell of a party. But you can still help with a donation.

On January 6th I signed the Ada Lovelace Day pledge:

I will publish a blog post on Tuesday 24th March about a woman in technology whom I admire but only if 1,000 other people will do the same.

The goal has been reached: so far 1.508 people signed the pledge.
I found the woman in technology I admire through Elise Huard: When I grow up, I want to be like Pattie Maes.
Belgian scientist Pattie Maes, currently an associate professor in MIT‘s Program in Media Arts and Sciences, was one of the speakers at this year’s TED conference and an expert in human-computer interaction, intelligent interfaces and ubiquitous computing.
One of her projects is Siftables, which “aims to enable people to interact with information and media in a physical, natural manner that approaches interactions with physical objects in our everyday lives.” But at TED, she demoed sixthsense, “a wearable gestural interface that augments the physical world around us with digital information and lets us use natural hand gestures to interact with that information.”
This quote from Pattie Maes explains what really drives her:

“We like to invent new disciplines or look at new problems, and invent bandwagons rather than jump on them.”

I’ve just signed the Ada Lovelace Day pledge and I invite you to do the same.

I will publish a blog post on Tuesday 24th March about a woman in technology whom I admire but only if 1,000 other people will do the same.

Ada Lovelace (1815-1852) was one of the world’s first computer programmers, and one of the first people to see computers as more than just a machine for doing sums.

She wrote programmes for Charles Babbage‘s Analytical Engine, a general-purpose computing machine, despite the fact that it was never built. She also wrote the very first description of a computer and of software.

So it’s safe to say she was the first Girl Geek.