Finding Ada

It was really nice to see Ada Lovelace Day (in the form of me) recognised in the Telegraph’s list of The 50 Most Influential Britons in Technology yesterday. It’s good that the effort to bring more women in tech to the fore has been appreciated, and I feel quite chuffed to have been included on their list of influencers.

Unfortunately, there are only five women in the Telegraph’s lower 25. I can’t help thinking that’s slightly ironic, not to mention another indicator that we have long way to go before Ada Lovelace Day becomes unnecessary.

I’ve blogged about the list, and my inclusion on it, in a bit more detail over on Strange Attractor. Meantime, I’ve been considering what needs to happen next with Finding Ada. On which, more news soon!

Wow, it’s a month since Ada Lovelace Day, and I’m still rather amazed at how well it went. My personal life has been incredibly hectic, with moving house and a trip to the US getting in the way of my finding the time to write this post. But sitting on a plane back to the UK seems like a good time to write a round-up!

Ada Lovelace Day was a phenomenal success, which it wouldn’t have been without you! We ended up with 1,980 people signed up to the pledge, well over 1,100 blog posts in the Collection and countless more scattered across the internet. Over coming weeks I’ll be tidying up the database, removing duplicates and deleting the spam that it has sadly attracted. At the moment, the top four women were:

1. Ada Lovelace
2. Grace Hopper
3. Hedy Lamarr
4. Barbara Liskov

But that might change when we’ve cleaned things up!

We also received a phenomenal amount of media attention, including a lot of coverage in the press:

• Computer Weekly: Ada Lovelace, computing countess: Celebrating the first lady of IT
• The Guardian PDA Blog: Ada Lovelace Day: A word on Jane McGonigal
• The Guardian: Let’s hear it for women in technology
• The Telegraph: Five women in technology for Ada Lovelace Day
• BBC Internet Blog: Ada Lovelace Day
• VNU Net: Women in IT celebrate Ada Lovelace Day
• The Metro: Ada Lovelace Day – celebrating the women of tech

Plus Computer Weekly put Ada Lovelace their cover, I appeared on Radio 5 Live and the BBC News Channel (video to come – it’s currently stuck on the hard drive of a non-functional computer).

Overall, I think we can count the first ever Ada Lovelace Day as a massive success! But I could not have done it on my own. I really do need to thank:

• Stephanie Troeth and Stephanie Booth for their support and help
• Tony Kennick for doing the mash-up
• Kevin Marks for the name
• Kevin Anderson for his invaluable support throughout the project

We will certainly be running another Ada Lovelace Day next year, and I hope that we will reach even more people. But that’s not the end of things. We have teamed up with NESTA to put on an event, currently scheduled for June 10th, which I’ll be blogging about forthwith. Keep an eye on our Twitter account or join our mailing list to keep yourself up to date with all our news.

This morning, I went to the Science Museum to talk to Ada Lovelace herself about Charles Babbage, his computing machines, and her vision and brilliance.

Ada was a most fascinating lady, and I hope that because of today, more people will know not just about her, but about all the other amazing women in technology.

I’d like to thank Steph Troeth and Steph Booth for helping me with Ada Lovelace Day. Both of them helped me to figure out what shape the campaign was going to take and were then invaluable in kick-starting it. Without their help and encouragement I’m not sure that Ada Lovelace Day would have happened at all. Thanks also go to Vicky Riddell at the BBC for deciding to run with the story on the BBC News Channel and doing such an amazing job of getting so many smart techie women on the news.

I also need to thank two men, firstly Tony Kennick, who very kindly cobbled together the Ada Lovelace Day Collection mash-up, and who put up with my last-minute-ness with grace and good humour.

And secondly, my wonderful husband Kevin who has provided me with endless support and help over the last three months, who shot the video above, and who came with me to BBC Television Centre this evening and helped me calm my nerves before my interviews.

Thanks are also due to everyone who has taken part. Ada Lovelace Day was a community effort, with everyone playing an important role in making it the success it is.

But it’s not over yet! We have another 15 hours before the day that is Ada Lovelace Day is finally over as midnight arrives in the Baker Islands, and we have a lot more blog posts still to be added to our Collection.

Even then, it’s not over. We have our first event booked at NESTA for 10th June – on which more to come – and I have a few other ideas up my sleeve too. So don’t go away – keep FindingAda.com in your RSS reader, or follow us on Twitter, and keep up-to-date with our news.

Technorati Tags: ald09post

It’s 3am in Kiribati, 2am in New Zealand and 1am in Fiji, which means it’s now 24th March and Ada Lovelace Day has started!

Some people have already blogged, and we’re beginning to see posts trickling into our Ada Lovelace Day Collection mash-up. We have pins on our map from New Zealand, Israel, Sweden, the Netherlands and the UK! When you have published your contribution, please add it to our database.

You can view the posts on the map, in a list, by language, or by subject, i.e. the woman or women blogged about. It’s going to be fascinating to see how this shapes up over the course of the next 47 hours – due to various international date line shenanigans, one day lasts 50 hours online!

In other news, Ruth Wilson of the UK Resource Centre for Women in Science, Engineering and Technology emailed me to let me know that their guest blogger from today is the great-great-great niece of Ada – Honora Smith, Operational Research and Management Science at the University of Southampton.

If you’re going to the Game Developers Conference, look out for Celia Pearce and her colleagues at Ludica who have created an Ada Lovelace badge that they’ll be giving away throughout the event. The badges (or buttons, if you’re American!) are free but they are accepting donations to cover the cost. You can also buy online.

NetBehaviour are inviting all women who work in media arts and net art to join their email list for a week between 23rd and 30th March to talk about inspirational women. At the end of the week they will collate all of the posts in the thread and feature them on Furtherfield.org.

And there’s more from the Science Museum on Ada Lovelace Day:

Finally, if you signed the pledge but don’t have a blog of your own, please feel free to write your piece in the comments on this Finding Ada blog post, which we’ve set up specifically for your convenience:

Don’t forget to add your comment permalink, found by mousing-over the comment timestamp, to our mash-up.

We have 1,527 people signed up to the pledge so far, which is a lot more than I ever imagined would take part. Thank you all for supporting Ada Lovelace Day – it wouldn’t have happened without you!

If you don’t have a blog of your own, but you still want to take part, please feel free to leave your post here, in the comments. We want to provide an opportunity for everyone to participate, regardless of whether or not you have your own blog!

Don’t forget to add your comment permalink (which you can find by mousing over the timestamp of the comment once you’ve published it) to our Ada Lovelace Day Collection mash-up. The mash-up will let you view the posts on the map, in a list, by language, or by subject, i.e. the woman or women blogged about. We already have pins on the map from New Zealand, Israel, Sweden, the Netherlands and the UK!

It’s just one week now until Ada Lovelace Day, and we have some great news to announce.

Ada Lovelace Day at The Science Museum
As you may know, The Science Museum has a reconstruction of Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine on display, which is worth a visit on its own. But on 24th March the museum is putting on a special treat: Ada herself will be will be walking the floors throughout the museum, telling her story.

Visit the Science Museum website for more information, especially on the day as an article about Ada by Tilly Blyth, the computing curator, will be featured on the front page.

Computer Weekly
I’ve been chatting to the lovely folks over at Computer Weekly, who happen to have an issue out on the day itself. They are going to be featuring Ada Lovelace Day in the magazine, and will be blogging as well. So take a look if you see it on the news stands, or visit their website and the WITsend blog.

Summer events with Nesta
I am particularly pleased to be able to announce that Nesta, the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts, is going to be hosting a series of events for women in technology over the summer. The first is scheduled for June 10th, so get that date in your diary! We’ll announce more details slightly nearer the time.

Ada Lovelace Day on Flickr
If you’re doing something on the day, or what to post related photos, we now have a Flickr group you can join.

Meanwhile, we are still working on our mash-up which will let you add your blog post, and will send out the URL for that as soon as we have it, although details will of course be posted here.

I hope you’ll agree that it’s looking like the 24th March is going to be a fun day. I’ll be going to the Science Museum to see Ada, so if you see me there please do come and say hello!

Ada Lovelace Day itself is fast approaching – we’re just two weeks away now.

Please remember that you can talk about your tech heroine in any medium you choose: blog, video, podcast, newspaper column… the choice is up to you. Your contribution can be as long or as short as you wish, in any language, and can be published any time on 24th of March, regardless of time zone.

On the day, please use this to tag on your post, video, podcast etc.:

• ALD09post

And if you’d like to link to us, we’re on the web here:

• Pledgebank
• Twitter
• Yahoo Groups
• Facebook

We’ve some exciting last-minute news brewing, so please do keep an eye out for our next announcement!

In the meantime, why not pop along to the Guardian Tech Weekly podcast to hear Aleks Krotoski, Emily Bell, Jemima Kiss and I talk about women in tech.

Finally, we currently have 1386 people signed up to the pledge. Can we hit 2000 before the 24th? Please do continue to spread the word and see if we can’t find another 614 people over the next two weeks.

I’ve been thinking about how we might keep track of all the Ada Lovelace Day blog posts, podcasts etc., and have had a number of emails from people thinking the same thing. Initially I was thinking perhaps a Delicious tag and an RSS feed, but surely there’s a more visually exciting way to do it than that!!

So, what about a map mash-up? Can we set something up so that people can locate themselves on a map, link to their post and state who they’re talking about? I think the minimum info that I’d like to collect would be:

• geolocation
• language
• URL for blog post, video, audio, etc.
• name of blog or blogger
• name of woman featured

What would be the best way to do this? And is there someone out there willing to build something for us? It’d be good to have a permanent archive of the day and a visual representation of all the posts. Please use the comments to discuss your ideas.

The last couple of weeks, since launching Ada Lovelace Day, has been bonkers. I originally worried that we wouldn’t find enough people to sign the pledge, but it took just seven days to get 1000 signatories and we now stand at 1183. That’s fabulous, but we’ve got 62 days left before the pledge completes. Surely we can find another few thousand people willing to sign up?

I want to make a really big splash on 24th March, so even though the pledge target has been met, let’s keep on spreading the word and recruiting new bloggers, podcasters, video bloggers, Seesmicer, Twitterers and, hey, even journalists!

Here are a few things you might like to do:

• Blog about Ada Lovelace Day: Dozens, possibly hundreds, of people have already written about Ada Lovelace Day, for which I’m very grateful. But if you haven’t yet mentioned it, please do.
• Put the pledge badge on your blog.
• Tell your friends. If you know someone who might be interested, let them know!
• Tell your local media outlets. Can’t hurt to try and get a bit of press, can it?
• Invite your Facebook network. There’s an event page on Facebook, but we also need people to sign the pledge as well.
• Go crazy mad with the social bookmarking: Digg it, Reddit, Delicious it, just get it out there.
• Twitter a link: Let’s have a big push on Twitter to get the word out to our communities!

How else can we spread the word? Let me know in the comments, and let’s get as many people as possible to join us all on Ada Lovelace Day.

We are just 95 signatories off reaching our target of 1000 people, all promising to blog about a woman they admire on 24 March 2009. I had originally been a bit worried that we wouldn’t see 13 people per day sign up, but the reaction to the pledge has been just awe inspiring. Now my aim is to get 1000 people within the first seven days – which means that we have to reach our target by 10pm tonight, GMT.

If you haven’t signed the pledge, please do. If you haven’t blogged about it or Twittered about it yet, please do. We have less than twelve hours to hit the target!