Hi everyone,
We are currently unable to update this blog frequently, but rest-assured Girl Geek Dinners Melbourne is still a thriving community.
To join in the fun and find out about all the upcoming events please take the following steps:
1. Join the Meetup group: http://www.meetup.com/Girl-Geek-Dinners-Melbourne/
2. Join the Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/43957645218/
3. Follow us on Twitter: @GGDmelb
We look forward to sharing our love all things geek with you!
Achieving sustained improvement in performance and efficiency requires that organizations move beyond structures, processes, and systems to address individual and collective behaviour—including culture, mind-sets and capabilities, and team and group dynamics. A key aspect of creating transformational change involves co-creation and collaboration to design and implement interventions to build skills, shift mind-sets, develop leaders, and manage talent to ensure a successful and sustainable change in behaviours.
Dr Jenni Goricanec, is interested in working with others to enhance the sustainability of human systems. Her practice is to engage with people by drawing on their own ways of knowing and understanding. She orients people toward the “pull” of future intentions, rather than the blind “push” of past habits and “best practice”. She encourages people to break out of their cognitive silos, to think laterally and to focus on the whole problem systemically in all its inter-disciplinary complexity. Her practice works through the essential processes of innovation – mobilising resources, enrolling peers, engaging allies and building public support. This form of engineering practice is about manoeuvring, dissolving boundaries, always being in action, and recognising that function, congruence and transformation are emergent properties generated through active learning by doing.
Judy Pridmore, has worked in the digital space for the past 17 years in a number of high profile consumer and media organisation. She recently joined the Joval Group (which incorporates Casama wines and Valcorp) in the role of Digital Strategy and Development Manager. Her previous roles include CEO of Golf Link, Australia’s number 1 golf website, Online Transformation Program Director at Westpac and Director of Marketing Services at Southcorp. She has also worked in a number of businesses across News Corporation including Truelocal and Career One as GM and at Harper Collins Publishers where she launched on the online start-up Winepros International.
Angela Ferguson currently serves ThoughtWorks Australia as a member of the management team, with a particular focus on geographically distributed client engagements.
Ange has successfully managed large, multi-disciplinary programmes of work and has experience in organisation transformation, both from a strategic design and implementation perspective. She has also served as a member of the Australian, Asia Pacific and India Management teams. Angela is an accomplished coach, trainer and workshop facilitator. Her career history includes industry experience in: retail marketing & loyalty; publishing; financial services; warehousing, maintenance and distribution; military, and; agriculture.
Jacinta Carboon, is the Senior Sponsorship Manager, Arts & Community at NAB. She is a highly experienced Sponsorship & Events Manager with a strong background in Corporate Sales, Marketing & Brand stewardship gained in two of Australia’s largest companies.
It is with great pleasure and much fanfare that Girl Geek Dinners Melbourne announces the first instalment of a new mentoring series. Imagine if you could attend a dinner party with fascinating women who have achieved notoriety and succeeded highly in their field. What would you want to know about them? What questions would you ask them?
In 2012, we’re inviting women in leadership roles who have excelled in their area of expertise. These women work in corporations, agencies and across multiple industries including education. They will have lots of stories to share about their experiences and career. The agenda is relaxed to allow for natural, flowing conversations amongst guests and Girl Geek Dinner Members.
Limited tickets are on sale at EventBrite for non-members
Members can book tickets on Meetup
MitchelLake is a progressive, passionate and experienced provider of Executive Search, Specialist Recruitment, Jobs + Managed Recruitment & RPO for ventures and individuals that are leading the convergence of technology, media & marketing.
Over the past decade our team has helped build leadership teams for some of the most exciting companies on the planet. We work with entrepreneur driven start-up ventures through to emerging and global brands in online business & eCommerce, convergent media, enterprise & mobile technology, multi-channel marketing, digital advertising and entertainment.
MitchelLake services clients across Asia Pacific and North America with established offices in Sydney Melbourne San Francisco & London
The Ada Initiative is planning to hold an “Ada Camp” in mid January in Melbourne (See http://adainitiative…. ). This means there will be lots of open-tech geeky women in town, a good opportunity for a GGD!
NOTE: This venue requires that we pay up-front, so we are selling tickets through Eventbrite. RSVPing here is not enough! You must purchase a ticket through Eventbrite to attend! See http://ggdmelb-jan2012.eventbrite.com.au/ for all the info.
Got an idea for a website? Who hasn’t, from a personal PR piece, to a missing community niche, or a fan’s tribute, or your business on the side. Many of us would have some experience in starting, maintaining, sysadminning or fixing a website in one area or another – design, features, security, usability, backups. (And the dirty words – SEO…)
But there’s no shortage of technologies and platforms to keep current with. What have you worked on? What would you like to work on? “In the cloud” or self-hosted? Embrace an all-encompassing CMS or go the Unixy piecemeal way? What do you look for in a piece of technology before you adopt it? Come and share your tips and tricks over a tasty meal.
Mentors provide expertise to less experienced individuals to help them advance their careers, enhance their education, and build their networks.
In essence, a mentor should be:
Someone to be accountable to. It is often too easy to neglect priorities through recurring postponement of tasks. Sharing of your goals with your Mentor means that if you don’t complete them; your mentor wants to know why.
Someone to help you refine your ideas into practice. You have great ideas… some you will be able to put into practice easily, but others will be raw and need refinement to implement. Your coach has a vast knowledge of almost every strategy, what makes them work and what confounds their effectiveness.
Someone that has a wealth of ideas. For when you’ve just ‘run out of ideas’. But at all times, your coach will endeavor to make your contact educational, so that you understand the principals and can apply them for the rest of your life. Someone that has the contacts you need. When you need contacts for your business, equipment, investment advice, or just growing your library, your mentor has the contacts and knows where to find the information.
Someone outside, looking in. After a while, you find that you don’t see the same clarity that you used to. Like living next to a busy road; after a while you don’t hear the traffic. Your mentor is there to take a fresh look at you. He or she knows what to look for and most importantly, sees what your others see. And your mentor will always give you feedback.
Another important element to discuss is whether women in business need both female AND male mentors.
Have you ever felt like you were treated differently because you’re a woman? Or perhaps maybe you felt the need to change the way you acted in front of your male peers? Have you mastered the ability to not let such external factors affect the way you act or make decisions. Either way, we’d like to hear your thoughts!!
Join us for an evening at ThoughtWorks office in the CBD to chat about gender roles in the workplace.
We’ll cover topics similar to those above as well ones around: etiquette, salary negotiations, communication, dress, the proper way to shake hands, and much more.
We will be inviting 3 panellists to lead us, but will be looking to the room (and Twitter) to be involved in the discussion.
*Food and Drinks will be provided.
For event updates follow us on twitter:
url: http://twitter.com/GGDMelb/
tag: #GGDmelb
Jenni Goricanec is interested in working with others to enhance the sustainability of human systems. Jenni Goricanec is Director of The *Wicked* Innovation Practice.
She has worked for notable companies, including: Ericsson, RMIT, Telstra, and The University of Melbourne
In 2010, Jenni earned a PhD in Sustaining Futures and began her schoolastic career by earning a Bachelor in Electrical Engineering
Her practice is to engage with people by drawing on their own ways of knowing and understanding. She orients people toward the “pull” of future intentions, rather than the blind “push” of past habits and “best practice”.
She encourages people to break out of their cognitive silos, to think laterally and to focus on the whole problem in all its inter-disciplinary complexity. Her practice works through the essential processes of innovation – mobilising resources, enrolling peers, engaging allies and building public support.
This form of engineering is about manoeuvring, dissolving boundaries, always being in action, and recognising that function, congruence and transformation are emergent properties generated through active learning by doing.
About The Wicked Innovation Practice:
We support our clients through the hardest part of innovation: the translation of ideas into actions that produce a tangible solution, while retaining the integrity of your original thoughts, producing winning solutions.
From this role we address activities as diverse as: project & program management, strategic management, rational cost management, product R&D, information system design and organisation change. Further, the benefits of our approach are maximised in high tech, “solution” design and development situations, where what is required is a technologically rich, total answer to a client’s business priorities, not the latest, off-the-shelf, black box.
Our market focus is large, complex, “wicked” problems/issues in private, public and community sector organisations. We have industry experience with a strong network of senior contacts across many of Australia’s premier organisations. We are connected into state-of-the-art research in this arena.
When: Wednesday, May 25, 2011
Where: The Honey Bar, 2nd Floor
Dr. Christy Dena specializes in the design and execution of trans/cross-media projects. As Director of Universe Creation 101, she consults on the design of projects, now produces as well, and is developing her own creative projects and web services.
Her clients include Nokia, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Wieden + Kennedy, Australia Council for the Arts, Australian Film Festival, Australian Film, Television and Radio School.
Christy has given keynotes at Power to the Pixel, London Film Festival and the First International Conference on Cross-Media Interaction Design in Sweden.
She has been featured in ABC’s 7.30 Tonight, The Guardian, Christian Science Monitor, The Sacramento Bee, Vancouver Sun, Filmmaker Magazine, Australian Financial Review, The Age, Herald Sun, Encore, and others.
She co-wrote the Australian Literature Board’s Writers’ Guide to Making a Digital Living. Christy has published chapters or been quoted in numerous books, including Cross-Media Communications: an Introduction to the Art of Creating Integrated Media Experiences; Pervasive Games: Theory and Design; Think Outside the Box Office: The Ultimate Guide to Film Distribution and Marketing in the Digital Era; Space, Time Play; New Perspectives on Narrative and Multimodality.
Christy is a skilled educator who is an in demand speaker and mentor. She has given presentations on the design of cross-media projects to companies and organisations worldwide such as Nokia Finland; Microsoft Research; O’Reilly Media; Australia Council for the Arts; AIMIA; Film Australia; Australian Film, Television and Radio School; Australian Broadcasting Corporation and many more. She has spoken at numerous industry festivals and events worldwide, including Whistler Film Festival; Cartoons on the Bay; Power to the Pixel (London Film Festival); Slamdance; Documentary Organisation of Canada’s Reboot; DIYDays; Destination Film Festival; Revelations Film Festival and Australasian Conference on Interactive Entertainment.
Follow Christy on Twitter @christydena
We are so excited to host Christy and hope to pick her brain about her incredible breath of work, and the woman behind it all.
Learn more about transmedia and Christy’s work:
All info @ www.christydena.com
The Honey Bar
345 Clarendon Street South Melbourne
RSVP: Meetup
We have some pretty incredible women showing up to our monthly dinners. Our discussions are always intelligent, courageous, humorous, insightful and most of all show off the range of personalities and professions amongst us.
There used to be a stigma around anyone working in technology. Digital media has helped break down a lot of barriers because of the range of new progressive roles. From software engineering to online marketing we run the gamete of the technology industry.
On March 8th, the world will celebrate 100 years of progress towards gender equality. International Women’s Day, however, is both a day to celebrate and a day to draw attention to the challenges that remains before gender equality is truly realized.
GGDMelb will be celebrating this significant day by compiling a collection of our individual stories. It could be the story of how we became interested in tech. Or what happened on our first day at our first ‘real’ job. Or how a favourite teacher/professor was instrumental in our career. There are hundreds of moments that lead us on our journey through life, love and learning!
If you’d like more information or would like to submit your own story, please send an email to: ggdmelbourne@gmail.com
Couldn’t make it to SXSW Interactive this year? No worries, GGDMelb is going to review the programming, blog posts, event apps and general discussions about one of the most highly anticipated digital media conferences.
SXSW® Interactive features five days of compelling presentations from the brightest minds in emerging technology, scores of exciting networking events hosted by industry leaders, the incredible new SXSW Trade Show and an unbeatable lineup of special programs showcasing the best new digital works, video games and innovative ideas the international community has to offer. The most energetic, inspiring and creative event of the year, takes place March 11-15, 2011 in Austin, Texas.
We’ll also be reviewing all of the conferences coming up in Melbourne and Sydney that you might like to attend. And we’ll discuss what you should expect from a professional conference. How to know what type of conference you should attend, present at or host on your own.
Follow the 2011 Speakers on Twitter
Join us Wednesday, March 30th at 6:30pm
Honey Bar, 345 Clarendon Street
Girl Geek Dinners Melbourne 