Picture Me in Computing Day

In the past few years we've seen a few different initiatives set up to help encourage women in STEM (or to enter STEM) fields, most notably the Ada Lovelace Day initiative, where people around the world blog about women in tech to increase their visibility.

Recently I came across "Picture Me in Computing Day", an initiative to encourage young women to imagine themselves in technology and computing.  The idea is simple: bombard the internet with information and images of women in these fields to raise awareness and bring role models to the forefront.

Here's how you can participate (lifted directly from their site):

How to ParticipateTo participate, all you have to do is bombard every social networking site that you know of with information on women in computer science during the day of Nov 10, 2011.  Including: 

• Upload a picture of yourself with technology to Picasa Record a video blog and upload it to YouTube with the tag "picmecomp"

• Tag all of your tweets for the day with #picmecomp

• Blog about picmecomp and what it means to you. 

Our goal is to get the entire tech world to take over every social networking site on the same day (11-10-10) in solidarity of women in computer science.  The first step to creating more female computer scientists is to introduce them to the craft while they're still in their formative years.  That's why we're coming to them!  We're going to introduce ourselves to them using a medium that they already frequent...The INTERNET!

It's fortuitous that this will be happening right in the middle of this year's Grace Hopper Conference, so there will be a large number of women in one place mobilized to participate!  I'll kick things off with an older photo of me 'computing'... How will you get involved?