June Reading Girl Geek Dinner – Save the Date

While the Sun is still shining and bank holidays aren’t completely over, here comes a quick reminder of our next Girl Geek Dinner in Reading:

Thursday, 11th June at Revolutions

Details and registration coming up very soon.

We hope to see you there!

A Very Networked St. George’s Day

Our April Girl Geek Dinner in Reading was on Thursday, 23rd April and we had 24 girl and guy geeks at Il Gusto.

The dinner was kindly sponsored by our friends at Symantec who, this time, also gave a lovely prize for a draw: gorgeous champagne that, no doubt, will be enjoyed by the lucky winner Safeena Azar-Burnett.

We enjoyed meeting again with some “regulars” as well as new faces. We hope to see you soon at the next event – we will publish date and venue shortly.

Thanks for coming along and thanks to Symantec for their support.

Safeena Azar-Burnett with the prize donated by our sponsor Symantec

April 23rd – Reading Girl Geek Dinner

We’re thrilled to announce our April Reading Girl Geek event, sponsored by Symantec, at Il Gusto just across from the Reading train station.

The event will commence at 6.30pm with some simple networking; dinner will follow and we will have some more time for networking after the meal.

The theme of the evening will be “Go Mobile”: Come to share ideas, get inspiration and show off your mobile phone, and talk about any other topic that you find interesting.

This event is possible thanks to Symantec’s kind sponsorship and they are also offering a prize draw amongst the attendees… So don’t forget to bring your business cards!

Many thanks to Kate and her team from Symantec for arranging sponsorship and prize draw!

Full Details:

• Date & Time: Thursday, 23rd April 2009, 6:30pm for a 7pm start
• End Time: Late
  
• Venue: Il Gusto, Reading
• Hosted by: Girl Geek Dinners and Symantec
  
• Food & Drink: Delicious Italian and Greek food, buy your own drinks
  
• Subject for the evening: Go Mobile
  
• Format: Reception, Dinner, Conversation
  
• Capacity: 40 people
  
• Attendees: As ever, boy geeks are welcome to attend if invited by a girl geek although on this occasion we do stress that there are few and limited spaces so more boy geeks = less girl geeks.
  

If you’d like to attend on 23rd April, please sign up via the Register Now button below, and we’ll see you at the event!

 

March Reading Girl Geek Dinner – Thank You!

Sponsored by Symantec

The second Reading Girl Geek Dinner of 2009 took place on Monday 23^rd March at La Tasca, with delicious tapas and great networking. We can confirm that local networks do work!

Thanks for coming along and making it a success.  With 30 geeks and girl geeks based in and around Reading, conversations with new contacts and catching up with old friends made the event most enjoyable.

Special thanks to Symantec for their kind sponsorship and goodie bags for the attendees.

The event was co-hosted by Stuart Stoter, Girl Geek founder Sarah Blow and Mireia Fontbernat.

We look forward to seeing you at the next one on Thursday 23^rd April – Stay tuned for registration and details.

Reading Girl Geek Dinner 3 Announced

We’re thrilled to announce our second 2009 Reading Girl Geek event which is sponsored by Symantec and will be held at La Tasca right in the middle of Reading.

The event will commence at 6.30pm with some simple networking so do remember to bring your business cards with you.

The theme of the evening will be Local Networks: What do you get from networking? How do you build your network? what do you get from networking? Are social and work networks truly independent?

This is expected to be a fun, practical way of sharing your ideas.

When you head off you’ll also receive a fun little goodie bag… I’m not going to tell you what’s in it… that’s a surprise… all part of the fun of goodie bags!

Many thanks to Kate from Symantec and her team for arranging the goodie bags and sponsorship!

Full Details:

• Date & Time: Monday, 23rd March 2009, 6:30pm for a 7pm start
• End Time: Late
  
• Venue: La Tasca, Reading
• Hosted by: Girl Geek Dinners and Symantec
  
• Food & Drink: Lovely Spanish Tapas food, buy your own drinks
  
• Subject for the evening: Local Networks
  
• Format: Reception, Dinner, Conversation
  
• Capacity: 40 people
  
• Attendees: As ever, boy geeks are welcome to attend if invited by a girl geek although on this occasion we do stress that there are few and limited spaces so more boy geeks = less girl geeks.
  

If you’d like to attend on 23rd March, please sign up via the above Register Now button, and we’ll see you at the event!

Google Bursaries to Attend UKUUG LISA Conference – London, 24-26 March 2009

We are pleased to share the following announcement from Google and the UK Unix & Open Systems User Group (UKUUG) :-

As part of Google’s ongoing commitment to encouraging women to excel in computing and technology, UKUUG has announced the 2009 Google UKUUG Student/Developer Conference Grant to encourage more female computer scientists to attend and participate in the UKUUG 2009 Conference, 24-26 March, London.

UKUUG encourages all UK-based student/developer female computer scientists interested in Large Installation Systems Administration (LISA) to apply.

Two people will be chosen from the applicant pool to each receive a 500 GBP grant to go towards registration for the conference, the conference dinner, travel and accommodation. Your delegate fee, dinner ticket and accommodation will be paid automatically from the grant. Travel costs must be claimed back separately after the event.

The UKUUG LISA conference will be held in London at the Park Crescent Conference Centre from 24th to 26th March 2009 and is a must-attend event for system and network administrators. As well as the technical talks, the conference provides a friendly environment for members to meet, learn, and enjoy lively debate on a host of subjects.

Please visit the UKUUG site to learn more about how to apply for one of the two bursary places. Applications close Wednesday, 11th February 2009.

Alternative Concession Entry

In addition to the above grant, there are limited UKUUG concession places available to female students, for example. Please email office at the domain ukuug.org to discuss such alternative options to attend the conference.

Reading Twestival

@simonster invites you to:
Reading Twestival

We’d love to know if you’ll be joing us at the Twestival in Reading ahead of the official invite so we can get an idea of numbers.

Where? Reading, UK
When? 12th Feb	What time? TBC

Reading Girl Geek Dinners on Twitter

Recently we added a twitter feed to the London Girl Geek Dinners site and now I’ve created another one just for the Reading Girl Geeks. On it I’ll be sharing info from this blog, any big announcements and event related info.

Also when we have an event on in an evening and you want to know more or want to give us some feedback/ improvement suggestions etc, you can either leave us a comment on the blog or send us a tweet!

Our twitter URL is http://twitter.com/readingggd

We hope you like it!

Have a great New Year!

Reading Girl Geek Dinner 2 Announced

It’s back again!  Yes you heard that right we are up and ready to roll with the second Reading Girl Geek Dinner.  As some of you may recall we did the first event at the Bel and Dragon.  Well we liked the venue and the food there was great so we are back their again for the second event.

We haven’t yet chosen a theme for the event and don’t have a key speaker but if you would like to make a suggestion or offer to do a short 15 minute talk on a subject of your choosing then do let us know and we’ll publish the details of that on the sign up page.

So all there is left to say is:

The usual rules apply, if you are male and would like to attend this event then you will need to be invited by one of the females attending the event. (Each female has only one invite)

First Reading Girl Geek Dinner

The first Reading Girl Geek Dinner ran on the 22nd October 2008 at the Bel & Dragon.  It was full of bright, bubbly  geeks and girl geeks from in and around the Reading area.  There was no set talk for this event as it was the first of it’s kind but do expect others to happen in the future.

There were around 20 geeks and girl geeks at the event from all sorts of different backgrounds and as a result the conversations were wide and varied. The food was excellent and all in all it was a fun and enjoyable first Girl Geek Dinner.

The event was co-hosted by Stuart Stoter and Sarah Blow.

If you would like to run the next Reading Girl Geek Dinner then please leave a comment and we’ll get back to you!