The film will be based on Ada’s letters and is, as Rosemarie describes it, “a documentary with some dramatic readings”. One of Rosemarie’s previous films, Out from the shadows: the story of Irène Joliot-Curie and Frédéric Joliot-Curie, was recently shown at the International Science Film Festival in Paris and is in a similar vein.

PBS National will distribute the film, so it will reach 95% of American households with an expected first night viewership of at least 7,000,000 the first night. It will also probably get an international airing, and Rosemarie is also putting together a web site plus a site in Second Life.

Advisors include Betty Toole, who wrote Ada, the Enchantress of Numbers; Joan Baum, who wrote The Calculating Passion of Ada Byron; Drummond Bone, a Byron scholar from Liverpool University; Doron Swade, a Charles Babbage expert; plus an as yet unconfirmed representative from the US Department of Defense for the Ada Software project.

But Rosemarie needs letters of support from people who have been influenced in some way by Ada and who are willing to help publicise the film, be a part of the interactive website, perhaps show the film, or contribute in any other way.

Rosemarie says, “I need letters from people stating how important a film like Ada is and how they through their networks can help to publicize the film. It would be great if the women have organizations they work or belong to. If they are software developers or computer experts, this would be great. It would be best if they were Americans, as the NSF (National Science Foundation) is American.”

If you’re not American, letters would still be useful of course! The deadline is the end of October.

Please write to:

Rosemarie Reed
On the Road Productions International, Inc.
310 Greenwich Street, 21F
New York, NY 10013

Or email Rosemarie directly.

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!

On 26th July, over 40 of us trouped up to Bletchley Park to find out more about the women who worked there during WWII. We started off with short introductions by Kelsey Griffin, Bletchley Park’s Director of Museum Operations, Sue Black from BCS Women, and Jean Valentine, our tour guide. She gave us a history of the Park, including a critique of the rather eclectic architecture! To get us into the swing of things, we were given a demo of an Enigma machine:

We then moved on to the wartime cinema, which was crammed with period cinematic equipment. (I pretty much had to prise my other half, Kevin, off the antique projectors!) The film we watched, The Women of Station X, was put together as part of BCS Women’s Women of Bletchley Park project.

After lunch, we were treated to a tour by Jean Valentine, who had worked at Bletchley Park during the war. She had operated one of the Bombe machines, which were designed to decode messages generated by the German Enigma machines. Jean gave us an amazing insight, not just into the work that she and her colleagues did at Bletchley, but also what it was like to live there. Her narrative was fascinating and funny, and often poignant too.

Bletchley has built replicas of both the Bombe and the Colossus, which was used to decode encrypted teleprinter messages. The Colossus is, indeed, colossal, and the working replica makes a bit of a racket. Watching it in action, complete with streaming tape and flashing lights, gives you some idea of what it might have been like to have worked with it. Unfortunately there was no one available to give us a demonstration of the working Bombe that is also housed there in the National Museum of Computing.

We ended the day with a fun look at the history of computing in the musuem. I was tickled to see that they had three of the computers that we had when I was a kid: the ZX81, the ZX Spectrum and the Amstrad PC1512. (Sadly, the didn’t have the ZX80, which was my very first look at a computer!)

If you’re even vaguely into computers, cryptography or codebreaking, then Bletchley Park is well worth a visit. It relies wholly on ticket sales for its income, although it is trying to raise some money for essential repairs. Sadly, it has been left to rot and there is a lot of work that’s needed to just keep our history safe. Sue Black told me, “they are desperately short of funds and have no sustainability or security, if faced with any sort of crisis they would have to close for good.” It’s a few minutes walk from the Bletchley train station and trains go regularly to and from London so you have no excuse not to hop on one on the weekend and go visit! But more than that, go and visit Save Bletchley Park and get involved in saving some of our country’s most important computing heritage.

Several of our group have blogged about the day, including Laura James, Pernickety (lots of fab photos!) and Sue Black.

Many thanks to Kelsey, Sue, Jean and everyone else from Bletchley Park for helping organise the trip and making it such a memorable day.

The day will include a tour of Bletchley Park by Jean Valentine, and a tour of the National Museum of Computing, including the Colossus and the Bombe. There will be a hands-on Enigma machine demonstration and maybe even a visit to Station X if numbers allow.

Tea, coffee, biscuits and lunch are included in the ticket price of £19.

When & Where
Sunday, July 26, 2009 from 11:30 am – 3:30 pm
The Mansion, Bletchley Park, Sherwood Drive, Bletchley, Milton Keynes MK3 6EB

Schedule
(As it stands – we may tweak it a little!)

Arrive: 11.30 Tea/coffee on arrival in the Ballroom

Start: 12.00pm Talks in the Ballroom:

* Suw Charman-Anderson: Welcome and Introduction
* Simon Greenish, Director of Bletchley Park: Update on the current funding status of Bletchley Park
* Sue Black: The campaign to save Bletchley Park

Film showing in the wartime cinema: Women of Station X http://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/content/video-example.rhtm (The cinema takes 40 – 50 people each, and the film takes 26 minutes, so there may be two showings, depending on how many people sign up.)

There will be wifi in the Ballroom, so if you want to live Tweet or blog, then bring your gadgets!

Lunch: 1.00pm (-ish – depends on film showings)

Tour: Jean Valentine, a Bletchley Park WWII veteran, will to be our expert tour guide for the day, and Lin Jones will be on hand to give a personal tour of the The National Museum of Computing, including the Colossus and the Bombe. We’ll also have a hands-on Enigma machine demonstration, and may be able to offer a visit to Station X – only three people can enter Station X at a time and it’s not normally open to the public, so we’ll have to see how the numbers pan out on this one!

Tea, coffee and debrief: 3.00pm

Departure: 3.30pm

Travel arrangements
You must make your own way to Bletchley Park.

Bletchley Rail Station is 2 minutes walk away. Trains from London leave from Euston, and we recommend the 10:23am train which arrives at Bletchley at 11.17am (no changes).

More travel info: http://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/content/visit/findus.rhtm

Cost
The ticket cost of £19 includes all Eventbrite and PayPal fees, with any surplus being donated to Bletchley Park. Book online at Eventbrite.

In the meantime, I’m putting together a weekend day out to Bletchley Park. I’ll blog more about that when I have a date sorted, but I’m very excited about going to the centre of geek history in the UK!

In other news, I took part in Be2Camp North via Skype a couple of weeks ago, talking about Ada Lovelace Day. It’s always a bit tough to do a talk remotely, but it was fun and I was very happy to be able to take part.

I also spoke at the Media140 conference last week, talking about Ada Lovelace Day and the part that Twitter played in promoting the day. Each panellist had only five minutes to talk about their subject, which meant I couldn’t really go in depth, but Adam Tinworth has a good summary of what I did say. Despite the brevity, it was good to share some of the insights I gained from Ada Lovelace Day (I didn’t mention all of these during my 5 mins):

• The pledge asked people to do something they were probably going to do anyway, e.g. blog, but asked them to focus on a specific subject, i.e. women in tech. That made it much more attractive and much easier to recruit participants.
• Using Pledgebank made participation visible, which helps encourage others to join in.
• Twitter was the most popular mode of communication. @findingada has 1,124 followers now, whereas the mailing list has just 37 members.
• The Facebook events page was a bit of a fail. Many Facebookers just didn’t seem to be interested in signing the pledge, they were much more inward-facing. In fact, only 300 of the 1200 people who signed up to the Facebook event page also signed the pledge. This means we had over 2800 interested people all together, but it’s impossible to judge exactly how many took part on the day. I won’t use Facebook again next year because it fragmented the conversation and participation in an unhelpful way.
• Making messages easy to retweet helped the meme spread, as did the fact that it was something that resonated with people.
• After an initial burst of enthusiasm in the first week, it was hard to keep the momentum going and keep the sign-ups coming in. Next year, I’ll have to think of ways to keep the sign-ups rolling in.
• Once you hit a certain number of followers, it becomes hard to keep Twitter conversational and it becomes a bit broadcast. I really don’t know what one can do about that.

We will have another Ada Lovelace Day next year, and hopefully will have the time to be a little bit more organised. I honestly wasn’t expecting it to take off the way that it did, so it all rather took me by surprise!

Finally, I’m putting together a session on women in tech for OpenTech 2009, on 4th July, more info on which later. Please do come along.

My question to you is, what event would you like to see? My current ideas are:

• Meet the Conference Organisers: A short talk on what conference organisers are looking for in a speaker, how to bring yourself to their attention and how to get the right experience, followed by a “speed dating” session women can meet the different conference organisers.
• Meet the Press: A discussion about the way that women in technology raise their own profile in the media, a few tips on dealing with the press, and a chance to talk to different tech journalists.
• Presentation Skills: A talk on how to give good presentations, followed by lightning talks (strictly 5 minutes each) or PowerPoint Karaoke.

Which of those ideas do you most fancy? Or do you have other ideas that you’d like to float, whether for themes or session speakers? I’m hoping to make a decision on this very soon, so please chip in!

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.

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.

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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!