Until now, money hasn’t been an issue for Ada Lovelace Day as none has changed hands (other than hosting costs), but it turns out that I’ve had to hire some chairs for the event on Wednesday night, which has set me back around £120. If you would like to help out, please consider donating just a couple of quid either via PayPal below or by bringing some loose change on the night, when there will be a donations box.
Thank you!
We have finally got the design for the Ada Lovelace Day 2010 merchandise completed and have opened a Spreadshirt shop.
You can get various t-shirts for women, men and children, plus a mug and tote bag. If there are particularly styles of t-shirt or other bits of merch that you know Spreadshirt does that you would like us to include, please let us know in the comments. I still have to add descriptions and stuff, but please feel free to have a poke about and give us feedback. All items are marked up by £1 which will go to cover costs of the Ada Lovelace Day event (comprising mostly of chair hire!).
If you’re in Madison, WI, you might like to tune in to the Perpetual Notion Machine show on WORT 89.9FM tomorrow, Thursday 18 March, at 7 PM Central Daylight Time to hear me talk about Ada Lovelace Day with Benet Devereux. If you want to, you can listen live over the internet or catch up later via the podcast feed.
Benet and I had a great chat about Ada Lovelace Day and women in tech and the program will also take a look at Ada herself. Please do tune in and let us know what you think!
There are just two weeks to go until Ada Lovelace Day 2010, and we still have a fair few bloggers, Twitterers, podcasters, web comic artists, and videocasters to recruit. We have 1114 pledgers and need 1958 more people to sign up. That’s a challenge with only 14 days to go, but if everyone recruits just two more people, we’ll still make it!
There’s loads of stuff going on around Ada Lovelace Day this year. We have events in London and worldwide (Copenhagen, Dresden and Montreal, with the promise of others to come). The London Potluck Unconference, to be held at the Centre for Creative Collaboration in Kings Cross, 6.00pm onwards, still has some places left, so please nab yours now, whilst you can.
We have T-shirts on their way – we’re just polishing off the design and hope to get them up and ready for you to buy very soon. We also now have an Offers page which currently carries a 10% discount from the lovely people at AdaFruit Industries. Again, we hope to have more there for you soon!
If you’d like to get involved, then our main need at the moment is promotion. We need to get more people signed up, and here’s how you can help:
There’s more info on how to help, including a Tweet you can just cut and paste, on the blog!
We do have more goodies in the pipeline, so stay tuned for more news!
The wonderful Sydney Padua, she of The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace & Babbage, has sketched out three possible t-shirts designs for us! Before she goes the whole hog and works up the sketches into proper designs, we thought it would be good to get an idea of which one is most popular, so please take a look at the roughs below and vote! (Please note: These are not finished designs, just ideas so you can get the gist.)
(Oh, and if you haven’t already pledged to take part in this year’s Ada Lovelace Day already, please sign up now!)
Right, so, the contenders!
A. Ada on horseback
B. Ada and punchtape
C. Ada says, We can do it!
UPDATE: I’ve closed the poll now because we have a clear winner! Syd is going to tidy up the design, taking some of the comments into account and I’ll post it as soon as she’s done. Thank you all for voting!
In closing, Syd says:
The final design is bound to change somewhat and probably I’d aim for colour on all 3. The Horse and Ray Gun is a sort of 30s western poster; the second one is an Alphonse Mucha ripoff, like these; and We Can Do It is this one obviously.