DLI Update – May-June 2016

Spring has sprung right into summer, and although the weather may not reflect it, the crush of activities in Brussels has made it clear that the yearly exodus to warmer climes is imminent. Besides carrying out several awesome hands-on events around digital skills for girls and women, in this timeframe, DLI also launched the Digital Leadership Academy on 21 June with a seminar on “the Cloud” with Amazon Web Services, organised in the context of the first-ever Digital Festival in Brussels.

At GE‘s 14 June Minds+Machines event in Paris, DLI Cofounder, Ms. Cheryl Miller, also had the unique opportunity to interview Miss Niamh Scanlon (13 years old from Ireland), who is our Ada Awards 2016 European Digital Girl of the Year.  Check out the conversation they enjoyed here — and be sure to watch till the end to hear Niamh’s insightful advice for digital industry leaders!

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-Lfud7LKM4&feature=youtu.be

The DLI Board and Executive Team are actively involved in initiatives with partners and stakeholders around the world that promote ESTEAM* leadership by girls and women. Find out below about our work in May and June 2016, learn here about future activities we are involved in, and visit our calendar for upcoming events that DLI is organising.

*entrepreneurship, science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics


womenandtechgoogle3 May – Google “Women and Technology” Event (Brussels): On 3 May, Ms. Rosanna Kurrer, DLI Cofounder,  organised a hands-on workshop on “Android Coding with MIT App Inventor” for girls, and Ms. Cheryl Miller, DLI Coounder,  contributed to a high-level panel discussion at an event on “Women and Tech” organised by Google and Politico in Brussels.


bxlsmartcity3 May – Brussels Smart City (Brussels): On 3 May, DLI Cofounder, Ms. Cheryl Miller gave a keynote intervention on the subject of “Smart Citizens Make Smart Cities” as part of the Brussels Region “Brussels Smart City” event, organised under the auspices of Ms. Bianca Debaets, State Secretary of the Brussels Capital Region responsible for Digital Transition.


makerstown24 May – Makerstown (Brussels): On 24 May, Ms. Cheryl Miller, DLI Cofounder, spoke on the topic of “We Can Make It: Women Entrepreneurship,” as part of the first-ever Makerstown event in Brussels.


inspiringfifty25 May – Inspiring Perspectives (The Hague & Amsterdam): Ms. Cheryl Miller, DLI Cofounder, joined Inspiring Perspectives, a high-level event attended by her Majesty Queen Maxima of Holland and Mr. Mark Rutte, Prime Minister of the Netherlands, recognising top women in technology from around the world. The event was organised by InspiringFifty and StartupDelta special envoy Ms. Neelie Kroes, former Vice President of the European Commission responsible for the Digital Agenda.


smeepp2 June – Female Entrepreneurs and Digital Business (Brussels): On 2 June, Ms. Cheryl Miller, DLI Cofounder, contributed to an expert panel on “Female Entrepreneurs and Digital Business,” for SME Europe of the EPP in Brussels.


ge14 June – GE Minds and Machines (Paris): On 13 and 14 June,   Ms. Cheryl Miller, DLI Cofounder, joined the inauguration of the GE Digital Foundry and contributed to “Minds + Machines Europe 2016” with an interview of Miss Niamh Scanlon (13 years old from Ireland), the DLI Ada Awards 2016 European Digital Girl of the Year!


ey15 June – EY: Women. Fast forward Global Planning Session (Paris): On 15 June, DLI Cofounder, Ms. Cheryl Miller, contributed to a global planning session on harnessing digital disruption to promote leadership by women, at EY headquarters in Paris.


digitalfestivallogo221 June – Digital Festival 2016 (Brussels): Ms. Cheryl Miller, DLI Cofounder, joined the opening plenary panel of the first-ever Digital Festival in Brussels on 21 June, at which DLI also organized two official side-events:

  1. Digital Leadership Seminar on “The Cloud” with Amazon Web Services – for women decision-makers by invitation; and
  2. Coding for Young People Expert Roundtable and Android Coding Workshop with Ms. Rosanna Kurrer, DLI Cofounder.

youthspeak27 June – AIESEC Youth Speak Forum (Brussels): On 27 June, Ms. Cheryl Miller, DLI Founder, delivered a keynote presentation on the gender gap in technology sectors, and she and the DLI team facilitate a workshop on building educational programs to address this gap, as part of the AIESEC Youth Speak Forum in Brussels.


28 June – Women and the New Economy: The Future of Work (Brussels): Ms. Cheryl Miller, DLI Founder, contributed to a panel on “Women and the New Economy” as part of a conference organized by the Gender Equality Committee of European Commission trainees, on 28 June in Brussels.


dsi4eu29 June – CAPS Policy Workshop on Digital Social Innovation (Brussels): Ms. Cheryl Miller, DLI Founder,  joined a panel on “digital social innovation” as part of a Collective Awareness Platform Workshop at the European Commission on 29 June in Brussels.


Be sure to visit our Calendar, Upcoming Activities page, and sign up for the DLI Newsletter in order to keep up with DLI events and activities!

DLI.jpg

Looking forward to a new year of learning!

A New Year’s message from Rosanna Kurrer, DLI Cofounder, Digital Literacy Lead & g-Hive Community Manager:

Hi girl-techies!

This year was a year of firsts for our organisation, and for our community. We got our own space in March, and started doing workshops on coding and electronics, using Scratch and Processing, as well as using interactive electronics and electric paint with the Bare Conductive Touch Board.

In the coming year, we plan on rolling up our sleeves and getting more active in organising a workshop series, for those of you who would like to take their learning experience to the next level. We will be introducing project-based learning workshops in coding and app development.  They will be taking place bi-weekly (every two weeks) on Wednesday afternoons. More information on these workshop series will be shared in January. If you have a preference for time and day, please don’t hesitate to send me an email with your requests.

I am also preparing a series of morning workshops for those of you who would like to learn basic coding skills, while enjoying a morning coffee with like-minded ladies. This will be a series of informal workshops called the “Techie Brekky Tuesdays”. You got it, we will be meeting on Tuesday mornings (every two weeks) for a couple of hours of group coding, coffee-sipping and croissant-munching techie-gigs. Again, more info on this on my next blogpost in January.

In the meantime, our female digital starter weekend “Move It Forward – tackling Cyberviolence and Online Hate Speech” has been moved to January 23-24, 2016. We have a line-up of great workshops scheduled for these two days, including a host of inspiring coaches who will help you with your projects and start-up ideas!

One more event that you might want to know about, we are teaming up with the IBM Bluemix team to organise a Bluemix Girls Night at inQube and offer a hands-on tutorial on their Bluemix Cloud Platform. Their team of engineers will be coming to our space and will lead hands-on exercises on real-world Internet of Things applications that could be deployed on the cloud. These tutorials will help us understand how cloud computing works, what the Internet of Things is, and how we can use “the cloud” to bring our start-up ideas to the next level. Visit here for more information, and to register for this event.

Here’s wishing all of you relaxing days during the holidays with your loved ones!

And let’s all stay techie-curious, and greet the new year with renewed energy to learn!

All the best,

Rosanna :)

Christmas Baubles with young Spruce tree branch. This file is cleaned, retouched and contains clipping path.

*Originally posted to g-hive.org on 21 December 2015

2015 European Ada Award-winners

On 14 December in Luxembourg, the Digital Leadership Institute and its partners – the Council for European Professional Informatics Societies, DIGITALEUROPE, the European Centre for Women and Technology, and European SchoolNetannounced winners of the 2015 European Ada Awards, recognising outstanding girls and women in digital studies and careers in Europe, and the organisations who support them.  The 2015 Ada Awards ceremony took place at the opening for a high-level eskills and entrepreneurship event as part of the Luxembourg presidency of the Council of the European Union.

2015 European Ada Award winners and finalists were recognised in the following categories:

NiamhScanlonWinner – 13 years old:  Niamh from Ireland

Niamh, 13, learned to code at CoderDojo when she was nine and she loves to build websites and apps that help people. When she was 11 she developed an award-winning app to help the drivers of electric cars. For three years Niamh has mentored at CoderDojo in Dublin City University, where she helps other young people – and particularly girls – to learn how to create with technology. She is a member of the Digital Youth Council in Ireland and she would like to see more coding and technology taught in schools.

Winner – 14 years old:  Yasmin from England

Yasmin is a fourteen year old who has been programming for six years. She regularly builds projects with the Raspberry Pi computer, and volunteers to run workshops for young people to learn how to code using the Pi. As well as this, she runs a programming club during her school lunch breaks for younger pupils, to hopefully increase the uptake of Computer Science at her school.

Winner:  Janneke Niessen, Improve Digital, from the Netherlands

Janneke is a female serial technology entrepreneur who, next to her role of Chief Innovation Officer at Improve Digital, also makes big efforts to help other entrepreneurs and is a strong advocate for women in tech. She is mentor for startups, angel investor and regularly speaks at events to share her experience in building a high-growth international technology company. She is co-initiator of Inspiring Fifty, that makes female role models in technology more visible. She recently published a novel for young girls (10-14) to create a role model for them and show them how great and fun technology is and how many possibilities it offers.

First Runner-Up:  Monique Morrow, Cisco, from Switzerland

Monique Morrow is the Chief Technology Officer for New Frontiers at Cisco that uniquely focuses on empowering women through the intersection of research, economics and technology execution.  Her current focus is spearheading an Internet of Women movement as an opportunity for women worldwide to collectively shape the future of the Internet powered by a SHE (Supercritical Human Elevated) technology platform.

Second Runner-Up:  Nicole Wajer, Cisco, from the Netherlands

In her work, Nicole supports account teams and partners that need her technical expertise.  She is passionate about the Internet of Things (IoT), IPv6 and Security, and is currently playing with new technology e.g Sensors in her own home.  Nicole is a Champion of Change for her passionate work in the Industrial Automation space, and is a frequent blogger and attendee at the four annual Dutch Hacker Conferences.

Winner:  VHTO, The Netherlands:
VHTO, the Dutch national expert organisation on girls/women and science/technology, makes an effort in many different ways to increase the involvement of women and girls in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). Every year VHTO organises the Dutch Girlsday together with 300 IT and technical companies. In 2015, 9,525 girls participated! To increase the participation of girls in Computer Science specifically, VHTO created the Digivita program for girls (age 8-18) which took place in in six cities in 2014, and carried out the Digivita Summer Camp in 2015. In 2014 VHTO reached 55,210 Dutch children through projects in primary and secondary education.

Runner-Up:  Travis FoundationRailsgirls Summer of Code, Germany: 

Travis Foundation runs Rails Girls Summer of Code for the third year in a row now – providing stipends for women all over the world to work on Open Source projects. The grassroots initiative is a hands-on solution for the problem of women being underrepresented in Open Source and Tech in general. With Rails Girls Summer of Code we are not only changing women’s careers, diversifying Tech Communities and building safer environments for women in Tech – we are also creating the much-needed role models in IT, so that future generations can follow suit.

Congratulations to all the 2015 European Ada Awards nominees, finalists and winners in every category, and thank you to our Award Partners and supporters of the 2015 European Ada AwardsAmazon Web Services, Facebook, Google, HP and SAP!  Please contact us with questions or inquiries on how to  support the Ada Awards and the larger mission of the Digital Leadership Institute.eskills logo_final2015