talks
Gender and tech
Trans Technology Symposium at Rutgers next Tuesday, 3/5
My friend Christina Dunbar-Hester and her colleague Bryce Renninger are guest curators of a pretty eclectic and awesome exhibit of gender-subversive art and artifacts which runs through June 3, 2013 at Rutgers University Institute for Women and Art in the Douglass Library. In their words, “Trans Technology focuses on technological art and artifacts that engage in trans, queer and feminist projects that help to trans (to use the word as a verb: spanning; interrogating; crossing; fusing) conceptions of the heterosexual matrix in technology.” A bunch of the featured creators will be at a symposium this Tuesday, March 5, 2013.
I was asked to contribute a jokey tee shirt with a series of (fallopian) tubes (Senator Stevens, don’t tie our tubes!) that I made back in 2006. Click here for the back story. My friend and frequent collaborator, Georgia Guthrie, is showing a piece that she knit from network … Read the rest
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Hacking The Gender Gap this Thursday
“Hacking the Gender Gap” is a hands-on workshop for understanding and defeating the gender gap in tech. I helped develop it last March for the Women In Tech Summit with my good friend and Hacktory powerhouse, Georgia Guthrie. Amy Guthrie (no relation, another awesome Hacktory organizer) and I will be facilitating it this Thursday evening at our new space at 3711 Market St. for Girl Geek Dinners. We’ve done it at Adacamp, HOPE9, and HacDC, and if you’ve heard of it, it might have been as “that timeline thing.” In a nutshell, participants share their experiences with technology–both positive and negative–on a physical timeline; identify patterns in the assembled experiences; and discuss ways to make tech communities more inclusive, and ways that awesome people already have. (Many thanks to Katie Bechtold who, I think, wrote that description for HacDC.)
Check out the Meetup … Read the rest
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Uncategorized
Hacking the Gender Gap at the Women In Tech Summit
Tomorrow, The Hacktory is excited to present a workshop at the Women In Tech Summit called Hacking the Gender Gap: A Hands-On Workshop for Boosting Gender Diversity in Tech. Georgia, Sarah, and Steph will facilitate activities to pull from people’s positive and negative experiences in tech as well as some of the research on the gender gap in STEM. We’ll work through strategies for combating sexist behavior and building a more diverse tech community. We hope to use this workshop as a first step in gathering data and stories that women, girls, and their allies can use in their organizations.
Check back here for a resource list and some of the outcomes from the session. And if you haven’t signed up for the summit they may still be taking some last minute registrations!
Happy Tech Week, everyone!… Read the rest
Read MoreGeekery
Chaos Communication Camp reportback Friday, 7-8:30pm
This Friday evening, BernieS, Far McKon and I will be at The Hacktory at 1524 Brandywine St. to share pictures, short videos, and stories from the absolutely awesome Chaos Communication Camp in Berlin last month. Come join us! It’s BYOB, The Hacktory will provide popcorn.
Announcement on The Hacktory blog
Write-up in Technically Philly
Open data slides, open data video
Thanks to my favorite Shiva for reminding me to include links to the slides and videos. :-)
Read MoreE-Waste
Tech Culture
Area Treehugger Speaks at German Hacker Conference
Updated with concise list of links, 10/12/2011.
I recently got home from 9 days in and around Berlin for the Chaos Communication Camp, organized by the Chaos Computer Club. The Camp happens every 4 years and on a lark I submitted 2 talk proposals. To my happy bewilderment, both were accepted. I gave “There’s Gold In Them Circuit Boards: Why E-Waste Recycling is Smart and How to Make it Smarter” based on my thesis work on e-waste, and “Data Mining Your City: Early Lessons in Open City Data from Philadelphia, USA”. On the train from Berlin to the airfield where the camp took place, I met Florian Stoller who helped me give the city data talk. Besides being on the board of his local Pirate Party in Fribourg, Switzerland, he also helps run Be-Cause , a company that makes e-gov forms. He filled in the European perspective, … Read the rest
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Tech Culture
Gender, Technology and UN Pants
It took a minute, but I found decent pants to wear to the UN. Yeah, that UN. This Thursday, March 3, 2011, I’m part of a panel about “Women in Technology: The Past, Present, and Strategies for the Futureâ€, which will happen alongside the United Nations 55th Committee on the Status of Women Annual Conference. The topic of the big conference is access and participation of women and girls in education, training, science and technology, including for the promotion of women’s equal access to full employment and decent work. This event is organized by the Foundation for the Support of the United Nations (FSUN) and co-sponsored by United Nations Association, New York (UNA-NY); World Diversity Leadership Summit (WDLS) and Hitachi Data Systems. More info from the UN Association and the Foundation for the Support of the UN. It’s open to the public, so stop by if you like!… Read the rest
Read MoreMaking stuff
Up On The Roof: The Legalese of Green Roofs and Rooftop Farming
On Saturday Feb 12, I gave a talk with Zhenya Fomin of the Energy Coordinating Agency and a former green roofer, on the zoning, permitting, and engineering realities of green roofs and rooftop farms, at the Horticulture Center in Fairmount Park. The talk was part of the Second Saturday Gardening series, and you can check out the other great offerings here and by clicking around the Extension website here. To register for future events, call the Penn State Philadelphia Extension office at 215- 471-2200 Ext 100 or just show up. The event is $10 and the funds go back to the Philadelphia Master Gardener program.
- Here’s a copy of the talk including a bunch of resources and links to tax incentives, how-to guides, and rooftop farms around North America.
- Here’s a copy of Community Design Collaborative’s work for PRooF.
- Finally, here’s a fantastic article about rooftop farming by Phil Forsyth
E-Waste
Environmental Studies
E-waste Talk from The Next HOPE
In July, 2010 I presented a talk on my thesis topic, electronic waste, at the Hackers On Planet Earth, or HOPE conference in NYC. My main interests around the topic are environmental justice, externalized costs, and transboundary movement of commodities. Sounds a little dry, but it’s plenty juicy. Here’s a link to the presentation.
Electronic Waste: What’s Here and What’s Next.… Read the rest