Johanna by jdlasica. Johanna Werther, product marketing manager for admob.

Saturday October 10 was the inaugural Girls in Tech Managing Directors Retreat. The retreat was held at the University Center on the campus of UCSC. Seana Norvell planned and executed the retreat with the grace and efficiency of a seasoned event coordinator. From the casual mixer at Cafe Mare the evening before to the little bags of saltwater taffys and mini steno pads for note taking at our seats, Seana manged to make each participant feel welcome and included.

The speakers and workshops were excellent and the highlight of the day was resoundingly the public speaking course taught by Kristin Schaefer and Bronwyn Saglimbeni. Another fave was the VP of New Business Development at Google and General Manager of Google.Org Megan Smith, Megan gave an inspiring talk surrounding the web, interconnectedness and online activism. I was pleased to have the opportunity to catch Megan afterward for some one on one time in which we shared our passion for helping people and discovered a common influence  – our activist mothers. Not least was the fireside chat with the newly annointed VP of Innovation for Plantronics Joyce Shimizu and Priya Ganapati of WIRED. I have a soft spot for Plantronics as they are both a local Santa Cruz company and a former client of mine. I really enjoyed listening to Joyce discourse on motherhood, product launches and successfully navaigating a 26 year long career in a tech related field. Her secret? A short priority list consisting of work, health and family. I could indeed learn a lot from her.

I really enjoyed meeting all of the managing directors from other chapters as well as the founder Adriana Gascoigne. One take away that I had is that GIT needs more women who are building the tech to get involved.

So here’s a challenge to my super geeky girlfriends: Show the world that girls build cool things and are innovators to society’s needs by becoming active in a group that promotes women in non traditional fields such as GIT.

What do you have to lose? Perhaps only the impression that girls simply like to play with tech, rather than create it.

Photo provided courtesy of http://www.carliestatsky.com

NextSpace Lets Local Startups Stay in Santa Cruz – Santa Cruz News

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Members sitting in the Cafe at NextSpace actively blogging.

One of my favorite things about our community at NextSpace is watching the users define the experience. Today we kicked-off a community blogging event that many hope will spread across the globe. Spawned from a conversation between members Mahesh Grossman and Margaret Rosas, the idea is to provide a forum for people to get a weekly blog post out. By providing an incentive (breakfast), a goal (hitting the “update post” button) and a sense of belonging (many people gathered with an in kind goal) this event will serve to ease the self-induced pressure many people feel about getting their blog posts out.

While this version is local to NextSpace, the idea clearly has legs. A global “Blog and Tweet Thursday” movement just might take off. While the official Twitter hashtag has not actually been set, the two most popular are #babt (Blog and Breakfast Thursday) and #batt (Blog and Tweet Thursday). Mahesh thinks that it would be most powerful if people across the world were blogging and retweeting each others’ blogs at the same time and prefers the pure #babt. Margaret suggested the more global #batt. After all 8 am PST might be breakfast time here in California but it could be an early lunch in Maine and supper time in Tanzania. Looks like it might be a while before we get this one worked out. In the meantime it will be great to see people supported in posting regular web log updates. For instance this is my first one ever!

If you would like to join us, pop on up at 8 am on a Thursday morning. We’ll go till 9:30 officially, but you can stay as long as it takes to hit that update post button. As always, non-members are welcome to join us by purchasing a $10 day pass.

Ciao peeps, but only for now.