I’m geeky, you’re geeky, she’s geeky

Everyone knows a girl or two who’s a little geeky.  Maybe that girl watches Star Trek or is an avid player of Halo.  Maybe she majored in engineering, or types l1k3 th15.

She’s Geeky is an organization that hosts get-togethers, called “unconferences,”  for geeky women to network and share ideas.  This weekend, I wrangled a group of ladies from the HP Young Employee Network to attend one of these unconferences in Mountain View, at the Computer History Museum, a paragon of Silicon Valley geekiness.

This conference attracted about 80 women from a diverse array of STEM fields –  Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics, and from a broad range of IT companies, like Adobe, Google, and, of course, HP.  To kick off the day, each woman introduced herself and gave a reason that she was geeky, such as owning the complete series of Battlestar Galactica or preferring to code software on a Saturday night rather than go out.  I consider myself fairly geeky, but I was definitely out-geeked by many of the women there.  For example, one of the woman was using what she called a Hackintosh to take notes – a Dell netbook that she had hacked to run the Mac operating system.

The rest of the day was spent in five break-out sessions.  Reflecting the technology-oriented nature of the event, the break-out sessions were all “user-generated.”  At the beginning of the day in round-table setting, women attending the conference proposed topics they wanted to discuss and would schedule sessions around these topics.   Other attendents would visit the different conversations.   These sessions covered a variety of topics: coding, female empowerment, bee-keeping, how to shop for perscription glasses, how to set-up your own blog, and more.  On a lark, I jumped into the fray and hosted my own break-out session: Girls & Grad School.

The organizer of this event, Kaliya Hamlin, said she selected this format because she had once attended a conference where the most interesting part was the coffee break.  During coffee breaks, ideas are exchanged and flow freely.  Hamlin said wanted to emulate that feeling with this conference.  Hamlin emphasized taking advantage of the Law of Two Feet  If any woman wanted to visit more than one session during a given time slot, she was free to use her own two feet to walk over to do so, rather than feeeling obligated to remain at a particular session.  She also recommended using Twitter to stay in contact during and after the event, encouraging women to write their Twitter handles on their nametags.

I usually avoid all-women events, for reasons I haven’t clearly understood myself.  However, this event exceeded my expectations.    The conference was completely user-generated and fairly unscheduled, yet we covered a broad variety of intriguing topics.  Everyone came to the table with a different piece of information and different perspective to add to the conversation, yet we all had technology geekiness in common.  We created a worthwhile event based on our own experiences and research.  In that sense, it was almost as if the whole unconference was the embodiment of a wiki.

Technology applications at their finest.