Connect with Toronto Girl Geeks after work on Monday November 15. Our featured speakers are Heather Leson and Jenny Bullough. Heather and Jenny are both having incredible times working in two fascinating areas of technology. Heather is working within the CrisisCommons community – both locally and globally. CrisisCommons is an incredible community using knowledge and technology to change aid in times of crisis and emergency. Jenny is leading work on digital content and mobile platforms for Harlequin. Harlequin is a global publisher of books for women in a variety of genres in print and digital formats.

Our veteran TGGD members will recognize Jenny and Heather. Jenny is co-founder and organizer and Heather as a member of the organizing team.Given how busy they are these days, I’m pleased to be able to have them share their insights and facilitate a great discussion.

Founded with the goal to make technology accessible and interesting to all age groups and all people, particularly women, Toronto Girl Geek Dinners is an inclusive community of 400+ women who work in the Toronto technology sector. Our members work for large enterprises, government, non-profits, SMBs, start-ups and as sole proprietors. They work as developers, user experience designers, technical writers, marketers, and engineers. We are proud to have members who are starting out in their careers and those who are twenty-year tech veterans. We place special emphasis on students looking to provide women entering the technology field with the opportunity to share their perspective while networking and establishing connections.

More TGGD Event Details:

The formal portion of the program kicks off at 7:00. Folks usually gather between 6:30 and 7:00. Meals/drinks are cash & carry. We charge a $10.00 fee to sign up for the event. This money will be directly allocated to your first drink. If you sign up to attend, please come. Our events frequently sell out and we have many people on the wait list. If you can’t attend, please change your RSVP so that it opens your spot to others who want to join us.

On Saturday October 23, 2010 Free Geek Toronto will be hosting SocialTechCampToronto on the 7th floor of the OISE building at 252 Bloor Street West, Toronto. Ontario.

The event is a gathering of individuals and groups who are implementing technology to solve social issues such as the digital divide including computer and Internet access for everyone.

•    Heather Leson (TGGD organizer and all-around awesome person) will be speaking about Crisis Commons, using your technology and social media skills to help NGOs during emergencies.

•    Douglas Pickett will be speaking on Asterisk, comparing it to the traditional world of telephony.

•    Gabe Sawhney will be speaking about Wireless Toronto, a not-for-profit community group dedicated to bringing no-fee wireless Internet access to public and publicly-accessible spaces in Toronto.

•    Khalid Baheyeldin making a career of out Free/Open Source Software (FOSS) •    Myles Braithwaite will be speaking on Apache CouchDB

•    Matt Price will speak briefly about the relationship between emancipation and free software.

•    Dan King will speak on Using New Technology and New Media to Reduce Poverty in Public Housing

•    Iain Calder will be speaking about Toronto FreeNet Toronto’s oldest and free Internet Service Provider.

•    Ushnish Sengupta will be presenting Free Geek Toronto. Toronto’s newest start-up in the social technology space. There are a number of great Social Technology projects underway in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) as well as a number of groups who are working on international Social Technology projects. All of these projects have an Open Source component. In conjunction with Open Source Week Toronto, Free Geek Toronto is hosting SocialTechCampToronto that will open and enable dialogue and collaboration between projects, ideas and individuals.

The morning will feature stellar speakers from the social innovation, computer science, information technology and open source technology fields. The afternoon is designated for break-out sessions where you can propose your own topics in an “unCONFERENCE” format. Topics can include, just to mention a few:

TOPICS
1)    Providing computers to nonprofits
2)    Setting up computer centres in low income apartment complexes
3)    Providing Linux Ubuntu desktops and training to individuals
4)    Public access hot spots in parks
5)    Free wireless networks
6)    International projects such as the World Computer Exchange, and One Laptop Per Child
7)    Design for people with disabilities

PROGRAM 9:00 am – Registration 
 9:15 am – Opening Remarks 
 9:30 am – Conference – Various speakers holding talks on a variety of topics. 
12:30 pm – Lunch 1:30 pm – Unconference Opening Remarks 
 2:00 pm – Unconference – Various participants holding talks on a variety of topics. 
 5:00 pm – End of Event

The 1st Social Technology unCONFERENCE and its web link: stcu.freegeektoronto.org will be an excellent platform to open conversations between the many technologically savvy individuals, as well as, individuals or groups that are looking to solve social problems in an accessible, innovational and highly effective way!

Please RSVP on the following web link and site: stcu.freegeektoronto.org See you at SocialTechCampToronto!

About the event hosting organization: Free Geek Toronto, is a new grass roots community technology non-profit that ‘Helps the NEEDY get NERDY!’ by offering volunteerism in exchange for knowledge and hardware. Volunteers learn new computer skills and various Open Source software applications through free training/workshops that include building, testing and repairing computers, and enable them to participate fully in the information economy, as well as, local and global communities through computer and Internet access.

For more information click on www.freegeektoronto.org

Maggie, Jenny, Heather and I hooked up for breakfast a few Fridays ago to catch up and talk about the future of Toronto Girl Geek Dinners. It was amazing to hear about the work Heather is doing to organize communities of people in technology to help with projects being done by CrisisCommons and catch up with Jenny who is working on the bleeding edge of publishing at Harlequin. Maggie and I are having an incredible time working with the team at Social Media Group on social media marketing projects with our clients.

We are super busy and have not had a Toronto Girl Geek Dinner since April. While we each care deeply about Toronto Girl Geek Dinners and want to continue to participate, it is quite obvious we can longer dedicate the time and energy needed to organize events.

Toronto Girl Geek Dinners needs help and new energy.

Maggie, Heather and Jenny are going to assume advisor and mentor roles with Toronto Girl Geek Dinners. They have offered to leverage their networks and to help advise and mentor the next group of organizers. I’m going to stay involved and help transition the events to the new organizers.

I’m really looking forward to our first event this fall and working with a great team of volunteers.

We had hosting issues over the summer, so I migrated  our website to WordPress. Unfortunately, the import didn’t pull through the names of the authors with the posts. In fact, they all came across with my name.

I am certainly not the author of all the posts preceding this one. I’d like to acknowledge each and every contributor to our website over the years. You are all excellent Girl Geeks, and we appreciate your time and contributions to our website and our community.

Today we honour you: each of our presenters and our attendees. This community shines because of your effort to share your knowledge and experience.

Happy Ada Lovelace Day!

Looking forward to our next conversations.

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TGGD #18: Leigh Honeywell on Disclosure Matters: Learning to Listen to Security Researchers

Leigh Honeywell is a jane of many trades. She works as a Malware Operations Engineer at Symantec while finishing up a degree at the University of Toronto. By night (and sometimes over lunch) she is a co-founder and director of HackLab.TO, Toronto’s hacker space. She also serves on the board of advisors of the SECtor security conference, is a Google Summer of Code mentor, as well as an avid cyclist, book nerd, and traveller. (Bio via: Pycon 2010)

Leigh will give us a brief overview of her career thus far, and offer some insights into success, failure and lessons learned. Then she’s going to give us a talk relevant to any company or organization which produces software or has a public-facing website. When security researchers discover bugs which impact the confidentiality, availability, or integrity of data, they are faced with a tough challenge: how to get information to the right people, and ensure that things get fixed or mitigated so that users are protected. Drawing on lessons from the free and open source software communities, Leigh will talk about how hackers (the good kind!) wish you’d deal with security vulnerability disclosure.

More TGGD Details:

The formal portion of the program kicks off at 7:00. Folks usually gather between 6:00 and 7:00. Meals/drinks are cash & carry. We charge a $10.00 fee to sign up for the event. This money will be directly allocated to your first drink at dinner. If you sign up to attend, please come. Our events frequently sell out and we have many people on the wait list. If you can’t attend, please change your RSVP asap so that it opens the door to others who might want to join us.

More TGGD Details:

The formal portion of the program kicks off at 7:00. Folks usually gather between 6:00 and 7:00. Meals/drinks are cash & carry. We charge a $10.00 fee to sign up for the event. This money will be directly allocated to your first drink at dinner. If you sign up to attend, please come. Our events frequently sell out and we have many people on the wait list. If you can’t attend, please change your RSVP asap so that it opens the door to others who might want to join us.

Thanks to all those who participated. Here’s to more great events.