Amsterdam Girl Geek Dinner

Vijfendertig girl (en enkele boy) geeks schuiven dinsdag 22 juni bij Setup aan tafel tijdens Utrechts eerste Girl Geek Dinner. Op het menu geen feministisch betoog over vrouwen die achterstanden moeten inhalen; spreker Marianne van den Boomen, bezig met een proefschrift over internetmetaforen, wil het vooral ‘leuk houden’. Dus laat ze zien hoe mannen met computers worden afgebeeld als jochies vergroeid met hun speelgoed, en doet ze voor hoe een als G. I. Joe gehackte Barbie klinkt.

Ondanks de ruime opkomst en geeky gespreksonderwerpen tijdens het diner – de nieuwste generatie iPhones bijvoorbeeld, en de vraag wanneer je precies kunt spreken van een game – is vanavond toch enige verontrusting te bespeuren. Na het buffet van nasi, bami en een scala aan bijgerechten vraagt Van den Boomen zich in haar presentatie af waarom er nog steeds zo weinig vrouwen in de ICT werken. En vooral: waarom het vrouwelijke aandeel sinds midden jaren tachtig – de periode waarin de pc ingeburgerd raakte – zelfs dalende is.

Roze laptop
De schuld van Barbie is het in elk geval niet, benadrukt Van den Boomen. Het duurde dan wel vijftig jaar voordat het anorectische popje de carrièremove naar ’software engineer’ maakte, inclusief roze laptop en nerdbril; zij is juist van onschatbare waarde voor de emancipatie. Barbie is namelijk geen baby of peuter die verschoond moet worden, maar een rolmodel waarop allerlei grote mensenrollen geprojecteerd kunnen worden. Haar variatie aan verschijningsvormen straalt uit dat ‘girls can be anything!’

Barbie’s nieuwste beroep werd anno 2010 gekozen via een poll op Twitter en Facebook. Wat veel mensen ook niet verwachten is dat Barbie World, de roze tegenhanger van World of Warcraft, in enkele jaren tijd 18 miljoen leden heeft opgebouwd (WoW heeft er 12 miljoen). Op internet worden door gebruiksters volop cheat codes uitgewisseld, waarin Van den Boomen de stelling bevestigd ziet dat Barbie minder soft en braaf is dan je denkt.

Toys versus tools
Een andere mogelijke verklaring van het relatief lage aantal vrouwelijke techneuten ligt in de manier waarop vrouwen met technologie omgaan. Waar mannen in hun vrije tijd graag mogen ‘klooien’ met hun technische toys, zien vrouwen technologie eerder als praktisch werkgereedschap. Een gadget of programma moet vooral gemakkelijk zijn en altijd doen wat je wil. Dat staat haaks op de houding van geeks die, zoals een GGD-bezoeker het verwoordt, ‘willen begrijpen hoe iets werkt en het willen verbeteren of veranderen.’

Van den Boomen is van deze verklaring niet overtuigd. Naar aanleiding van gesprekken die zij voerde met vrouwen en praktijken die ze observeerde, vermoedt de cyberantropoloog een tweede ’stille revolutie’. Anders dan de beeldvorming doet vermoeden, zijn vrouwen volgens haar helemaal niet bang voor technologie. De eerste ‘computers’, waarmee verwezen werd naar de personen die de apparatuur bedienden, waren zelfs vrouwen! Ook in het hacken van Barbies ziet zij een stap in de goede richting.

De recente ontwikkelingen zitten alleen niet mee. ‘Cloud computing’ zorgt ervoor dat steeds meer persoonlijke controle uit handen gegeven wordt. Gebruiksvriendelijke technologie noemt Van den Boomen dubbelzinnig; het gebruik ervan wordt voor veel groepen eenvoudiger, maar tegelijkertijd is moeilijker te achterhalen hoe het werkt en hoe je kunt ingrijpen. Ze beschouwt de computer als een taal, waarmee je iets kunt bewerkstelligen. Daarvoor is het nodig je die taal eigen te maken. Om de geekcultuur in stand te houden roept zij zowel mannen als vrouwen op vooral te blijven ‘klooien’.

Na deze avond vol ‘geekettes’ ligt voor Setup de vraag voor de hand hoe wenselijk het eigenlijk is een event speciaal voor vrouwen te organiseren. De geschiedenis van de Girl Geek Dinners laat zien dat technologie minnende vrouwen wel degelijk iets zoeken dat ze op door mannen gedomineerde bijeenkomsten niet vinden. Sinds de eerste editie in 2005 in Londen is het ’social event’ immers uitgegroeid tot een wereldwijd netwerk in meer dan 25 landen, waaraan in 2008 Amsterdam al werd toegevoegd. Het enthousiasme waarmee deze eerste Utrechtse editie werd ontvangen doet vermoeden dat Girl Geek Dinners gewoon heel gezellig zijn. Maar het gevarieerde gezelschap vrouwen met verschillende interesses, talenten en leeftijden laat vooral ook zien dat helemaal geen sprake is van een ‘categorie’.

Mariannes presentatie staat hier.

De foto’s zijn genomen door SETUP Utrecht.

De live-opname van de avond staat hier.

De link voor het eth0 geek fest staat hier.

Verslag geschreven door Suze Krijnen.

Our 7th Girl Geek Dinner was taken in the reign by the Queen of Sciences - Mathematics. As all participants could discover themselves during that evening, Mathematics is not an old rigid woman talking in Greek symbols, pressing her complicated formulas wherever she can and using theorems as her strongest argument. It turned out, she can be like a girl next door, a friend always happy to share tips with you on the complex issue of relationships. This friendly image of Maths was thanks to Ionica Smeets, the co-author of http://www.wiskundemeisjes.nl/.

Ionica made all the intricacies of maths, irrespectively of whether she was talking about game theory, optimization or differential equations, seem really simple. First, she explained how game theory and Nash equilibrium can be used to find the best strategy for a group of friends that want to hit on some girls in a bar. In brief, it would be unwise of them, if they all try to pick up the prettiest one. She would become stuck-up and none of the guys would have any success with her. What’s worse, her girl friends would hate to be the second-choice; the guys would leave the bar alone. Solution: leave the prettiest girl alone, and let each of the guys hit on one of her girl friends. This way, each of the man has a chance of getting a girl’s number. What happens with the prettiest girl then? Well, George Clooney always gets the prettiest one, doesn’t he?

If you are wondering whether your partner is the right one, mathematics can also be handy. As Ionica showed us, a little bit of probability calculus and optimization can help you estimate the number of the partners you should meet before you decide on settling down knowing that there are high chances that the chosen one is appropriate for you. The two most important slides to remember are: (1) Try twelve and keep the first one who is better than all the previous ones, (2) This strategy yields a 75% probability of a good partner.

With little help of mathematics it can also be modeled how strong a relationship is and who will be the first to break it up. As Ionica mentioned, John Gottman Institute created even a successful business around equation of marital interactions, that she presented during her talk. It looked like maths can be applied to almost any aspect of our romantic sphere of life and the dinner attendees were eager to hear more on the topic. So Ionica was forced to tell us about the peculiar behaviour of mating spiders. Apparently, male spiders of a particular species have found a strategy of giving presents that appeal to a female spider only if she likes the giver as well as the present. Sounds like a graph theory again? You’re correct.

It was a really interesting evening and we were very happy to have Ionica as our speaker of the evening. Ionica’s slides can be found here (as PPT) and here (as PDF).

Photos were taken by Arthur de Smidt.
Post written by Ania Chmielowiec.

It was great seeing you all at the Women Inc festival. Here are some photos. All photos can be found here and here.

On the 18th of February Karin Spaink was our guest. And we were very happy to have her!

By the month our privacy becomes more endangered. So many things are happening right now that constrain or violate our privacy, but the general public and the politicians don’t seem to care much. Karin shed some light on all that is happening right now and gave us all a good fright.

Information is stored digitally more and more. Because it hardly costs anything to store digital information, it’s saved longer. Before, no-one knew what you had seen on TV. When you are watching digital TV, Big Brother is watching right back at you.
Digitilization also makes it easier than ever before to piece together bits of information from different sources.
Karin and others hacked the Electronic Patient Dossier to demonstrate how unsafe it was. If she had wanted to, she could have easily killed people, simply by changing their blood type.

Centralization of data means that data is stored on more levels, every level vulnerable to unauthorized access. It also turns out that the higher up your information is stored, the more lax the security gets.
This development also means that more obsolete data about you is around, because the data always trickles upwards with some delay.

Function creep is the term Karin used for the phenomenon that f.e. laws are implemented with the reason being terrorism, and later used to track down copyright infringements.

Monitoring people is no longer done based on the risk that they are to society, or on the higher chance of success that monitoring will lead to. Monitoring is done simply because it can be done. The general feeling is that society will always be safer with than without monitoring. And not only that, more and more parties are doing it.
Karin showed us a Google Street View picture of a man taking out the garbage, with food wrappers and other telltale signs of his lifestyle on display for the whole world. And, as Karin pointed out, it might not even be his own house, it could also be his mistresses’!

Our rights are decreasing. For example for paper mail there is a post secret; no-one is allowed to open your mail and read it. Since paper mail has as good as dissapeared this right has too. For e-mail we have no such right.
One of the reasons it’s very difficult to do anything about all this is that more and more of our legislation is made on a European level. And some of the rules are not even in legislation but in trade agreements, which is very strange.
Karin told us about the ‘3 strikes and you’re out’-bill, where the mere suspicion of copyright infringement could lead you to loose the right to use the internet.

We don’t seem to mind all this, because we have nothing to hide, don’t we? In fact we are giving away lots of information voluntarily.
But while we are becoming ever more visible to our governements, governments are making themselves less transparent. Karin concludes with the question: If I should have nothing to hide, why does my government?

Photos were taken by Arthur de Smidt.
Post written by Marjon Wiendels.

Karins slides can be found here.

The Dutch word for enthousiastic is ‘bevlogen’. This word also has the word flying in it and it is the best word to describe Hester Bijl. On the 21st of April she stood before us, flapping her arms, showing us how the open and close movements of wings differ from each other. She was also mimicking what a butterfly does (clapping its wings) to give itself an extra push upwards.
Until now, people have made flying devices with stiff wings that do not work anything like the flapping wings you find in nature. An insect’s wing consists of a very thin membrane and blood vessels. The blood vains can swell up; this will influence the flight. Now a machine with flapping wings is created; the Delfly, a small insect-like flying device. Nobody really understands yet how flapping works. Simulation is used to get a grip on this subject, involving a lot of mathematics.
The Delfly can be geered up with a small camera. It can be used to monitor airports for example. If something is wrong, a whole swarm of them can gather. Or maybe they can even be put to use to check whether there are still people in a burning building! They are also great as toys.
As Hester told us, it will be unlikely that in the future we will board a plane that has flapping wings as well, because for big things other laws apply than for small things.
Even for someone not remotely interested in the subject this was a very interesting presentation; she captured the attention of everyone. She made complicated stuff comprehensible by comparing it with things that everyone can relate to; why don’t you stick your arm out of a car window, change the angle of your arm and see what happens?

At the end of the evening we had this fabulous cake to celebrate our 1st birthday!

Photos were taken by Philip Homburg.
Post written by Marjon Wiendels.

Monday 12 January was the fourth edition of the Girl Geek Dinner at the Flexbar in Amsterdam.    ~35 girl geeks and their male companions listened attently to AI Professor Frances Brazier as she shared real-life tales of her climb up the academic ladder.

Frances quoted statistics regarding women in academia (from the VHTO), and shared her battle-hardened point of view as an ’old garde’ female academic, with “tough love” advice for the younger generation.   Her unabashedly candid and direct point of view raised a bit of controversy, resulting in heated and passionate discussion.   At the end of her talk, Francis also spoke about her research, explaining a bit about autonomous systems and the AgentScape platform that she has developed in conjunction with the IIDS group at the Vrije Universiteit.

Frances’ slides can be found here and here.     Photos were taken by Philip Homburg and Guido van Nispen.

The next Girl Geek Dinner will be on Tuesday 21 April 2009 in the Flexbar. The speaker will be Hester Bijl, Professor of Aerospace Engineering at the Technical University of Delft. Keep an eye on our website for more information!

Monday June 30th, the Flexbar filled up with girly geeks (and their male companions) for yet another evening of fun, food, and unapologetically geeky goodness. For some it was like a reunion, others visited for the first time. The Flexbar arranged a lovely dinner and interesting conversation ensued.

Guest speaker of the evening was Elisa Jasinska, who works at the Amsterdam Internet Exchange (AMS-IX). Her speech, ‘The Packets and I vs. The World’, was about the history and fundamentals of the Internet. It was a back-to-basics, but very interesting story about how Internet works.

You can get an impression of the evening by taking a look at Elisa’s slides, as well as some photos from Philip Homburg.

You can also find an excellent description of the evening (in Dutch) from Karlijn van den Berg at the Dutch Cowgirls website.

The Amsterdam Girl Geek Dinner #1 was a big success, with 32 participants!!

Here are some atmospheric photos from the event:

 Fabienne’s slides are available here.

Geek.FM recorded interviews with Melanie Rieback, Donna Metzlar, and Fabienne Serriere.

Complete photo sets have been posted here (by Anne Helmond) and here (by Philip Homburg).

GGD #2 will happen on Monday June 30, 2008 at the Flexbar.

The speaker will be the CCC-hacker and AMS-IX (Amsterdam Internet eXchange) networking expert Elisa Jasinska. She will talk about herself, computer networking, and her personal project: sFlow.

Mark your calendars!