How to Get Funding to Attend GHC: Don't Be Afraid to Ask!

Each year, I hear again and again from people who struggle to get funding to attend the Grace Hopper Conference.  It can be hard for students if their university doesn't support them to attend, or if they are given the choice between using student travel awards to attend a technical conference in their field or GHC.  It can also be hard for those in industry, especially more junior employees who don't feel empowered to ask for funding to attend.

I've attended the conference four times now, and each time I was able to get some level of support to go.  I'll share what I did each year and hopefully if you are in a similar situation, you will find it useful when preparing for GHC13!

2007
The first year I attended, I applied to our CS department for an Undergraduate Travel Scholarship.  Since I was also participating in the Richard Tapia Conference Robotics Competition, it was easy to justify my attendance.  The Women in Machine Learning workshop was also held in the same location, so I was able to sell attending GHC and miss a week of work on my Undergraduate Research Assistantship.

I was also a Hopper (volunteer), which meant I could use the travel award to fund flights/hotel rather than conference fees.

Key Takeaways:

1. Find out if there are technical talks, workshops or events happening during the conference time that will help you learn and grow as a student or employee through your participation in them.
2. Be a Hopper or find some way to get involved with the conference (i.e. be an Official Blogger, Official Tweeter, or Community Evangelist - applications will open soon!).  Conference involvement can also help you get funding from your school or company.

2008
The second year I attended, I won a Google Global Community Scholarship to attend the conference.  I think one thing that helped my application was that I was participating in the conference as a Blogger and I had a talk proposal accepted.  Since I knew our CS department could give the travel award money, I organized a group of CS women to attend and helped them apply for funding.  Our CS department had a rule that graduate students had to use their travel award for GHC travel, and I campaigned against this as well, getting an exemption and separate GHC funds made available for grad students. 

Key Takeaways:

1. Policies that make grad students use limited travel funds for all conference travel make them reluctant to attend GHC.  Lobby your department for a separate GHC travel award to help ensure grad students don't have to make that choice.
2. Submit conference proposals!  Whether in academia or industry, getting a proposal accepted makes it much easier to justify attending.  Even when your company is heavily supportive of GHC efforts like mine is, knowing I'll be contributing to the conference gives me that much more reason to take time out of regular work to attend, and helps me set an example to others too!

2011
This was my first year attending from industry.  Even though my company is hugely supportive of GHC, I was a little hesitant to ask to attend during my first two years working.  In 2011 I got my nerve up and asked to go, requesting only that I not have to take time off.  I funded most of the trip myself.  I was still an Official Blogger and tweeted many of the sessions.  I also helped out at our recruiting booth.

Key Takeaways:

1. For attendees: Had I known what I know now, I would have made a proposal to attend using my training budget.  The lesson here is to prepare a strong justification of why you should go and don't be afraid to ask!
2. For managers: new employees who will probably benefit the most from a conference like GHC may be reluctant to ask.  If there is a training budget or group that can help these employees attend, don't forget to suggest it to them.

2012
Last year I was determined to get funding to go.  I got a proposal accepted at the conference, was sitting on a conference committee, planned to be an official blogger again, and was also helping with our company's GHC efforts.  I also wanted to find a way to help others attend and evangelize the product I work on.  I found some good connections and a great partner in Developer Evangelist Ed Donahue and got a proposal together detailing a workshop we could provide right at our recruiting booth.  Long story short, I was able to get funding not just for myself but for 10 other technical women from my org.  AND we had an awesome recruiting booth!

Key Takeaways:
Get organized, get involved, and involve others.  We gathered stats and data pointing to benefits not just for the attendees professionally, but for the company as well.  Make it easy for your managers to support you going by making strong, detailed arguments.  And don't be afraid to ask!

Short URLs, Big Data: Learning about the World in Realtime

This session was presented by Hilary Mason, who is the Chief Scientist of bitly. She is the cofounder of a non-profit called Hack New York as well. If you've read Freakonomics I think you will really enjoy learning about Hilary's work. Also, in my opinion this was easily one of the best talks at GHC this year. Be sure to read all about it!

Hilary studies data, and gets to work with scientists from fields like sociology, physics, biology, etc to do it! She gave a quote that describes her philosophy:

"The purpose of computing is insight, not numbers. ~ Richard Hamming, 1961

Building on this, Hilary talked about how her work is really about learning about humanity and to increase our ability to make better decisions about the world. I could really relate to thinking about CS as a means to an end, or as a way to model and think about the world, rather than focusing only on code itself.  She also talked about a shift in our thinking from thinking about naive data (single pieces of information, which is interesting on its own), to data that is interesting in the human context.

There have been advances in the field of Big Data recently: scalability/clustering, algorithms, data storage/analysis. Some fascinating examples of recent Big Data applications are:

• Using heat maps to identify restaurants that were illegally disposing of used oil/grease (an organized crime problem) in New York. Using this data, the City of New York set up their own grease disposal company and approached the restaurants to sell their grease to them, eliminating the problem.
• Using ambulance response data to find out why ambulance drivers parked in non-optimal locations (it turned out there were coffee shops there). Using this data resulted in making deals with coffee shops to entice ambulance drivers to park in better locations!

There are plenty of apps/startups using Big Data, like the "Dark Sky" app for iPhone, DataKind, and PatientsLikeMe. Hilary also highly recommends the OKCupid blog.

What are Data Scientists?
Data science is a mix of disciplines like math, comp sci, engineering, and curiousity. Hilary showed us how the overlaps of these disciplines contain nerds, but the intersection of all of them contains awesome nerds! It was quite funny.  Data scientists are concerned with building mathematical models for the right questions. It's important to find the questions that matter.

Bitly is actually a spinoff from a failed product. It's first year was consumed mostly with building scalable systems. They now see 10's of millions of URLs per day and 100s of millions of clicks per day. Its research goal is: Can we understand human social attention in real time?  A few things they've learned are:

• social experience in a given social environment varies by individual
• attention is fickle
• data needs to be normalized for it to be truthful and accurate
• the frame changes the way we consume content
• new geographies matter (i.e. best time to get clicks on twitter is different from facebook)
• the internet IS the real world (i.e. look at network data during the Arab Spring, one reflects the other)

What people share on the internet is not what people read. An interesting insight Hilary shared was that what people share is part of a persona they would like to present, not what they actually are. People actually have a mix of identities that they combine for presentation to the world.

Engineering Process at Bitly
The process is as follows:

1. Research offline
2. Do fancy math - find the shortcut
3. Design infrastructure
4. Re-design to run at scale and speed

As a startup, Hilary explained that it's important to understand 'when you've won' - startups don't have two years to do academic research, so they need to iterate quickly and not allow themselves to go 'down a rabbit hole'. I think this is important for other business environments as well - I can certainly see it applying to some of my work.

Steps two and three are generally done in Python, while steps three and four often involve C and Go.

Another interesting problem they are working on is Realtime Search. Rankings are done dynamically and can vary by the second! That's amazing.

They have a @GHCBot which tweets about items of interest to the GHC community, so be sure to check it out! For those of us fans out there, there is also a Star Trek bot, which you'll have to let me know about if you find it. :-)

How Can Research Optimize the Advertising World?

Ana Radovanovic of Google gave this talk on optimizing advertising.  She started off by giving some background on the advertising ecosystem at Google.

Background
The goal of Google is to organize the world's info and make it universally accessible and useful.  An example of this is their ad system: ads are displayed on the right side of the search page.  Why put ads on the side?  It's actually the result of common sense thinking: hundreds of millions of users every day, in 190 countries and 41 languages click on ads, so it makes sense to offer relevant ads there.  Google also provides the ability to do contextual advertising on any webpage:

The google ad network ecosystem is set up to give users ony relevant ads, provide publishers with maximal revenue per ad shonw, and allow advertisers to maximize the return on money spent on advertising.  Note that it's easy to trade off the interests of users, advertisers, and publishers, but through clever technologies it's also possible improve the overall efficiency without trading off interests.  Such technology can make the network extremely efficient.

Ana also talked about targeting criteria: the advertiser's belief of where the ad is the most profitable.  This criteria includes:

• keywords
• networks
• industry verticals
• sites
• language
• geo targets
• ad schedule

In machine learning terms, this is the 'prior information'.

Optimization: how can ads be targeted efficiently?
One important aspect of optimization is click-through rate prediction: or trying to learn what ads will result in a click by a user.  If we know in advance how often this will happen, we can estimate the ad ranking function.  There are some challenges though, i.e. getting really real-time prediction, doing online learning, and executing a parallel learning algorithm.

Google's ad auction is a sort of middle ground between the three interested parties (users, publishers, advertisers).  But there are some machine learning problems related to it:

• Budget optimization: predicitng the rate at which to show the ad throughout the day to spend the budget in the most efficient way
• Spam detection: detecting spammy impressions/clicks
• Smart pricing: how to adjust the price of an ad to equalize ROI between sites that perform differently

Ana showed some of the formulas used to determine how to maximize an advertiser's profit (I won't show those here as her slides will be posted on the wiki). Once ads are displayed, they are also ranked by relevance to benefit the user.

One interesting idea Ana mentioned is that some advertisers aren't buying ads to actually sell products (she used Coca Cola as an example).  This is brand marketing, and the idea is just to get the brand in your mind, not necessarily for you to make an immediate purchase.  How should advertising be priced/displayed to satisfy these advertisers?

Are we ready for the next On-Ramp? Big Data, Analytics, and Human-Centric Computing

This session consisted of a panel with speakers from Intel, Cisco, Facebook, and Georgia Tech.  The session started with an overview, then each presenter gave a 'TED-like' short presentation.

Overview
To start off with, what is meant by Big Data?  Some definitions are:

• more than 100 TB
• anything that doesn't fit on your servers
• received at ultra-high speed streaming (i.e. twitter, fb, etc)
• growing at > 60% per year
• deployed on scale-out infrastructure
• two or more data formats and/or sources

These all contribute to a characterization of Big Data:

• huge variety
• volume is huge
• value is heterogeneous
• velocity is quite high

Two additional features are viscosity and variability (inherent uncertainty in the data, look at errors in analysis)

Now that we know what Big Data is, what do we mean when we talk about analytics?  Some examples include: social network analysis, it infrastructure optimization, weather forecasting, life sciences research, fraud detection.  All of these impact humans, human society, and our relationships, especially with how we use/engage with data.  For example, 750 million photos uploaded to Facebook in just two days.

Janet Ramey
The first 'TED' speaker was Janet Ramey, who works at Cisco.  She was part of the early building of 'the Web' - moving data and organizing it.

Janet talked about Technical Assistance Center Engineers - not call center agents as you might expect.  These engineers have BSc or MSc degrees in CS, speak over 17 languages, and deal with problems related to everything from your website being down, your company being down, or even your entire country being down.  They value timely, accurate issue resolution from highly qualified experts with a rich history of innovation.

How is this related to Big Data?  Cisco uses Big Data to improve their engineering; they forecast ad schedule TAC engineer resources as well as continuously measure and adjust the schedule and simulate new models using data from customer profiles, case data, and the profiles of their engineers.

Janet closed by telling us that she thinks that to be technical leaders we just need a lot of curiosity, then training and building knowledge.

Moira Burke
Moira is a data scientist at Facebook.  She spoke about her experience running usability studies at Facebook that ask 'what's the relationship between Facebook use and well-being?"

There are three classes of FB use: directed communication, passive consumption, and broadcasting.  It turns out that the first of these is associated with increases in social support.  However, there was no improvement in well-being outcomes with passive consumption or broadcasting.

How big are the increases?  Really big!  With major life events, the only non-negligable increase in feelings of well-being is when there is a death  in the family.  This is the only life event that is matched by directed communication on Facebook.

There are design implications of this research for Facebook, too.  They are now encouraging direct communication through their UI by moving comments on feed items to be inline rather than making you navigate to a different page.  There are friend recommendations to help you engage more with people close to you too.

Eva K. Lee
Eva has a background in mathematics.  Although she works in theory and computation, she is very application-driven.  She works with homeland security on vaccine development, disaster response, epidemics and pandemics, and response to biological/nuclear/chemical/terrorist attacks.  She develops predictive models, optimization models, pattern recognition, and machine learning.  She stresses building models that are realistic and deal with real scenarios, helping users in the real world.

I found the Facebook talk the most interesting because the talk was short and focused on a single study and showed concrete methods and results rather than an array of problems to be solved.

Keynote: Nora Denzel

The day got off to an early start with a keynote by Nora Denzel.  Nora started at IBM and later worked for HP.  She was recently named one of the top 25 most powerful engineer by Business Insider, and spoke about this year's conference theme, "Are We There Yet?".

Nora told us how she decided to pursue computer science at 16, spurred on by her neighbour's purchase of the TRS80, one of the first computers.  It had a tape drive instead of a hard drive and had only 4 MB of storage.  It only had three upper case messages: "WHAT" (syntax error), "HOW" (arithmetic error) and "SORRY" (neither syntax or arithmetic), so it seemed like the computer was constantly yelling when it ran their programs.

This work with such early, limited machines must have made an impression on Nora, because she fell in love with computer storage and went on to work on it for about 15 years.  Nora's experience in technical management and business intelligence led her to work on 'Big Data' and find ways to answer business questions to provide customer insight and profound business insights.

Nora says when it comes to women in computing, we aren't there yet.  Women hold 25% of the jobs in computing, but in general in society the ratio is the other way - women generally hold more than 50% of jobs, make more than 50% of consumer purchases, and make up around 50% of the population.  Not only are we not there, we are going into reverse because of the pipeline problem - we aren't graduating enough women with CS degrees, so the population working in industry does not increase either.

So what should we do about it?  Nora says we should think about why should think about how we can stay in it ourselves as well as how to recruit more.  Something I've heard from friends and colleagues is, why not just let people major in whatever they want?  Nora has an answer: more diverse teams make better business decisions.  Perhaps not surprisingly, men and women think differently.  I would say that people from different backgrounds in general think differently, and so diversity of all kinds makes for better teams.

Nora gave some more examples of why gender diversity is important: voice recognition systems designed only for men, so women's voices weren't recognized, took off once fixed to recognize voices from a more diverse group.  Car air bags were only designed for male drivers, and killed women and children until calibrated differently.  Unreliable access to water was a big problem in third world countries.  When women were included in the teams making decisions about implementing solutions, they were more successful.  Why?  In most countries it's women who collect water and bring it back to their villages, and so it's the women who have the wealth of knowledge needed to make the right decisions.  Including women in these decisions actually improves both a company's competitiveness and society's competitiveness.

Nora asks that we simply commit to recruiting one woman per year into CS.  If we do so, we can change the direction from reverse to drive.  Here are her five tips for staying in the field:

1. It all starts with your attitude: the number one thing people attribute to their success over everything else (grad school, luck, etc) was their attitude.  Your career is like an obstacle course, not a linear progression, and things happen for you, rather than to you, and you need to learn from them and how to use those experiences to your advantage as you move through it.
2. For longevity you have to feel very comfortable with being uncomfortable: it isn't what you know in most of your jobs, it's how fast you can learn.
3. Act as if: Act as if you're confident, act as if you're a good speaker.  Don't overthink things, stay out of your head.  It will get you through those situations where you think you don't have the confidence to do what you need to do.
4. You are your own PR agent for your career: be careful and deliberate.  Shorten your press release, and learn to accept praise without adding comments regarding your lack of confidence, insecurities, etc.
5. It takes a village: don't be in your career alone.  Maintain a group of people both inside and outside your company all the time, your 'board of directors'.  It's not what you know or who you know, it's who knows what you know.

Here's Nora's list of great things about being a woman engineer:

• You can wear anything to work.
• They feed you all the time.  
• You get awesome swag!
• The money is good: on average it pays 30% more than other industries.  The wage gap between men and women is smaller.
• You have the chance to change the world!  (That's the number one reason)

I thought Nora's closing remarks were pretty cool: "Live in the land of what's possible, not in the land of what you're afraid of.".  Words to live by!

Leadership Workshop: Office Politics for People Who Don’t Like Politics

Last year I attended Jo Miller's excellent session on "Building Your Brand".  When I heard she had a session this year on office politics, I knew I had to attend!  Even though office politics is not a first-choice topic among many people, Jo found many ways to find it to the topic of leadership and career building in fun and engaging ways.

The session was three hours long so I won't go into excruciating detail here, but the structure was as follows:

• why you can't afford to ignore office politics
• two tools for navigating with savvy
• five quick wins
• table topic discussions
• q&a

Jo started with an anecdote about a friend she had who was not willing to 'network' and 'shmooze' to get ahead.  She saw two people promoted over her and described them as 'playing the game'.  However, by following some of Jo's strategies she ended up becoming a VP.  Now those fast-risers originally promoted over her report to her, and she is a master networker.

To answer why you can't afford to ignore office politics, Jo provided two quotes:

• "avoiding office politics altogether can be deadly for your career" and
• "every workplace has an intricate system of power, and you can - and should - work it ethically to your best advantage." ~Erin Burt, Seven Career Killers.

Two Tools
Jo gave two tools for navigating office politics:

1. "Work Less": She said the corporate workforce is full of hardworking people who are not getting ahead because they are waiting to be recognized.  She also said that 'work expands to fill the time given for completion'.  It's better to work smarter, using your time wisely to choose projects strategically and make sure they get noticed.  I totally agree but have found 'working less' a challenge in the past!  This also fits well with a piece of advice my supervisor in grad school gave me: "you need to take time to think".  Always working on small projects that don't move the big picture forward aren't always the most productive use of your time.
2. Transform 'office politics' to 'organizational awareness': be a savvy observer of the communication and relationships that surround you in your org.  This also struck a chord with me.

We did a great exercise individually, then sharing the results, with org charts.  We each drew an org chart for  our teams and groups at work, then drew influencing relationships superimposed on top between people, using arrows to identify directions of influence and grouping people in 'coalitions'.  This illustrated that the org chart doesn't necessarily tell you what you need to know to operate with savvy: often some low level people are the go to person!  There can be people at the top who aren't helpful either.  Using the 'shadow organization' visual shows you how those relationships actually work.  It was a very powerful exercise and made me think about some of the relationships in my own org in a new light.

So, what are some ways to gather information to map your shadow org for yourself?  For face-to-face interactions:

• 'friendship lunches' with people in your chain of command
• never miss a happy hour
• don't open laptops in meetings

However, in virtual teams people at our table discussed:

• knowing the 'gossip' guy/girl and use them to get information you might not have
• find out when they are available by checking their calendar
• set alerts on communicator/lync/etc to catch busy people when they are available
• find out the big picture from 1:1s with senior people - forecast the direction of your org and align yourself

Jo says that the most important asset you will build in your career: your network, 'aka your sphere of influence'.

• are people on your org chart missing?  go back and have some 1:1s to fill the gaps
• build relationships with people outside your org

It's also important to quickly identify the unwritten 'rules of the game' in your org and find ways to navigate them ethically and effectively.

One thing we talked about at our table during the discussion period was what do you do if you don't want to join a coalition's activity.  Jo answered this question by explaining that learning about this activity would empower us to make the right decisions and also understand what it meant to choose not to join in.

Here are Jo's five ways to generate a quick win:

1. enlist senior-level sponsors and advocates: find a good sponsor and recognize when they have those qualities
2. manage upward: understand your leaders goals and challenges as well as how they make decisions, and anticipate their needs.
3. if you don't like the rules of the game, become a game changer!
4. build an influential coalition: it's often quicker and easier to get great things done from the grass-roots.
5. in every organization, there is someone who is great at navigating.  find them and ask them for tips!

She also provided some useful tips on cultivating sponsorships:

1. outperform!
2. make your value visible
3. observe the protocols: how does sponsorship work in your organizations' culture?
4. ask who the leaders are with a strong track record of developing talent
5. network across your organization and beyond your direct management chain
6. look for exposure opportunities to work with or work for senior leaders
7. have clarity about your career goals
8. share your career goals with your leaders

I really enjoyed Jo's session again this year and found her strategies thought-provoking.  What did you think?  Do you have any insights of your own to share?  Will you be making your own 'shadow org chart' as a next step?

Mobile Investigators: Understanding How Children Use Touchscreens

Having a background in education and having worked with children from as young as six months old, I was very interested to learn more about the challenges they face when it comes to interacting with technology.  This talk detailed research focused on children using touchscreens, which children use differently from adults and with which children face unique challenges: they have difficulties with target sizes and location, have trouble making recognizable gestures, and find dragging hard (they find it hard to maintain contact with the device throughout the dragging motion).  This makes sense when you consider that small children are still developing fine motor skills in general.

The speakers talked about their experiments aimed at trying to understand how to design technology for children's learning applications.  Their studies ask, what's difficult for kids using touch screens?  It turns out that there are three things:

• target size and location
• making accurate, recognizable gestures
• dragging: kids have difficulty maintaining contact throughout the dragging gesture

Another goal was to understand the differences between kids and adults with respect to touch/gesture input. How can we help them be more successful in their interactions with technology?

The investigators conducted three studies using two touchscreen tasks for each, with interesting results: it turns out that children not only miss hitting more targets than adults, but that they are actually almost two times as bad as adults!  Also, while the smallest targets are the most challenging for both children and adults, children still do worse in general.  Incidentally, the smallest target used was smaller than the recommended size for the android devices employed in the study, so the findings support the recommended target size guidelines for that platform.

Some other interesting findings include the results of tests for hitting targets with edge padding - the miss rates were double for these.  The researchers also found a new phenomenon called holdovers, which are touches touches in the location of previous target as the screen is changing.  Kids do this more than adults.  I wondered, does this have an impact on games with moving targets?  Or educational applications with many animations or screen redraws?  Should animations be smaller for devices/applications/features aimed at children?

Kids also tend to make gestures differently; they are bigger and have more strokes.  For example, a square gesture made by an adult is one continuous line, while a child's would have 4.  This causes kids gestures to be less recognizable, with their accuracy differing by almost 50%.  The touch cloud shown by the investigators shows misses distributed irregularly around the target; adults have a much tighter spread of touches.

One idea suggested by the authors as a mitigation for these problems was to ignore touches made by children in the same location as a previously accepted target.  Machine learning could also be used to train for kids gestures.  As next steps, the researchers will try to conduct studies with younger kids and explore in-context applications.  They would also like to try some co-design exercises with children.

Are you ready for social networking at GHC12?

Any Grace Hopper is such a whirlwind, it's a good idea to prepare beforehand.  Whether you're new to our GHC Communities or an old hand returning this year, there are lots of useful resources to help make your experience as smooth as possible!

• Check out last year's blog posts: they'll give you a good idea of the topics, style, and content GHC attendees like to read about
• Take a look at the GHC LinkedIn page: there are a tonne of great posts by new and returning attendees as well as ways to get more involved with the conference
• Read notes on last year's sessions: If you're a note taker, get an idea of what kinds of information to record for our wiki
• If you're a photographer, check out last year's Flickr group and see what kinds of shots to get at this year's conference.

Finally, if you're an official blogger or note-taker for this year's conference and haven't signed up yet for your sessions, please do so now!  And while you don't need to go as crazy on details as I have, waiting until the conference will make it hard to plan your schedule.  Since GHC is so packed, you'll regret missing that fantastic session that's so relevant to your work/studies/career development.

Did I miss anything?  How are you preparing for GHC12?

Are we ready for our GHC 2012 BOF! Yes, almost!

As I've written about before, I am part of a BOF (Birds of a Feather) session at this year's GHC.  My co-presenters are Kerry Corrigall from Telus and Aakriti Agarwal from Deutche Bank.  Because of our multinational panel we had a very early (or for Aakriti, very late!) meeting the other morning to prepare, but now we need your help!

Some Background
We have been working for several years and are transitioning our roles from junior to mid-level technologists.  We noticed that at conferences like GHC, there was plenty of great advice for people looking to grow their careers, but that most of it came from more senior-level people.  The advice was often too general or high-level to be practical for us.  Junior level women could use some advice from other women just like them, and we aim to provide it in our talk.

Advice for and by junior-level women in tech!
We know we don't have all the answers, and we want the advice in our session to be relevant and useful to you, so we need your help!  We are planning to open the floor to questions/suggestions from the audience, so what questions would you most like answered?  What suggestions would you give other junior-level women in tech?  Leave your responses in the comments below, or tweet any of us!

Grace Hopper Scheduling

For the past few years, I've been making Visio visualizations of my schedule for GHC.  I really like that I can map out all the events (or at least, most of them!) and it helps me organize my time well.  The conference is really a whirlwind, so this helps me make sure I get to every session I wanted to!

Here's my plan so far for this year (of course it's subject to change):

I'm so excited for the many technical/leadership sessions relevant to me this year!  And of course, my own BOF session on Friday 10/5 at 5:15 (shameless plug)!

Volunteering @ Grace Hopper 2012

I'm starting to get really excited for this year's Grace Hopper Conference!  Everyone is busy planning; my friends and the co-presenters are making travel plans, there are planning groups at work for Microsoft employees, and the conference organizers are getting ready.  This last one is a special interest of mine, as I've been busy helping the GHC Communities Committee recruit bloggers, tweeters, and all-round social networkers to help make GHC a great experience for everyone!

I've now attended three GHCs and volunteered in some capacity at each:

• In 2007 where I was a Hopper.  I counted attendance at sessions, ran errands and messages for conference organizers, and helped register attendees.  It was a fantastic way to get to know people and was a gateway to further involvement!
• In 2008 I blogged; a great way to meet people through the online community and spread the word about the excellent talks I attended.
• In 2010 I served on the Communities Committee even though I could not attend the conference, mostly because of the wonderful experiences GHC gave me and the awesome people I got to work with on it.  
• In 2011 I was able to attend as a Hopper, again helped with the Committee, and blogged and tweeted my way through the conference.

This year, I'm once again helping with the Communities Committee and have committed to blogging and tweeting the conference, and I'd like you to as well!  As I've written before, here's why:

• The appreciation of your fellow attendees who can’t possibly attend every session but are dying to know what happened in the session you blogged!
• An extra boost to your networking ability at the conference: you’ll be highly visible as an official blog/wiki poster – other attendees will recognize you and seek you out to ask questions about the sessions you attended.  In past years, I’ve made valuable connections as an official blogger and am in contact with them to this day!
• The chance to see your blog’s name in lights!  There will be over 3000 attendees at GHC this year.  A great many of them will read your contributions to our communities and you’ll see a definite boost to your blog readership/Twitter activity/Klout score/etc.
• A cool GHC Communities ribbon for your badge (ribbons are highly coveted at GHC, and the more the better!)

Want to volunteer but don't have a blog?  Not to worry, you can take notes on three or more sessions for our wiki, or create a new blog!  Don't forget you can always tweet using #ghc12 to tag your posts, or you could join our Facebook group.  Any contribution, no matter how small, helps make our online communities richer.  Don't forget to sign up here!

And if you don't believe me about the ribbons, check this out:

Ribbons are awesome!

It's coming!

This year's Grace Hopper Conference is on it's way! Have you registered yet?  Don't miss out on early bird rates!

Whether you'll be attending or not, here are a few ways you can show your support for technical women, the conference, and the Anita Borg Institute:

• Post the official conference web banners on your Facebook, Google+ and Pinterest accounts. 
• Follow us on Facebook, Google+, and Pinterest. 
• Let everyone know you will be there! 
• RSVP to the Grace Hopper Celebration event on Facebook. 
• Tweet about the conference using #ghc12 and connect with us @ghc 
• Forward this email to your friends working in tech 
• Watch Sheryl Sandberg’s inspiring keynote at last year’s Grace Hopper Celebration 
• Learn more about our programs at http://www.gracehopper.org and http://www.anitaborg.org
• Blog like I just did! :-)

Hope to see you there!

GHC 2012 Submission Results

The results are in for two of the proposals I submitted to this year's Grace Hopper Conference (GHC12).  I'm happy to say that although the acceptance rate was especially low this year, so far one of my proposals has been accepted!

The proposal is a Birds of a Feather session with my two good friends Kerry Corrigall and Aakriti Agarwal and is titled "Are we ready for the next level yet? Perspectives from junior women in technology".  It's all about our experiences making our way through our respective companies as junior women and our thoughts on what junior women can do to make it to the mid-career stage.  

I went to school with Kerry, who is now working in the IT industry, and did a BOF on Women in Tech student groups at GHC 08 with Aakriti.  Interestingly, Aakriti lives in Singapore, Kerry lives in Canada, and I live in the US, making our panel truly international.  I am so excited to be presenting with them this fall!