Ada Lovelace Day round-up

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.