Monday, February 08, 2010

I’m supporting Ada Lovelace Day this year, will you?

Last year, I supported Ada Lovelace Day, the international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology and science.

The team behind it are now planning this year’s effort for 24 March 2010 and they’re looking for bloggers, old and new, male and female, whether you blog in audio, video, images or written word, and from all sectors to sign the pledge to write a blog post about a woman or women you admire in technology.

Last year, 1200 of us wrote blog posts, there was a great amount of press and it was even covered by the BBC News Channel.

I support this initiative, as women’s contributions, for whatever reason, often go unacknowledged, their innovations seldom mentioned and their faces rarely recognised. So the Finding Ada initiative aimed to do something about that.

It’s a topic dear to my heart, as too often, women are invisible in the mobile industry. Yet as organiser of various mobile events, including the Women in Mobile Data Association, I know there are lots of women in the mobile industry, yet it’s the men in the industry whose voices are heard more often than not. And since women are more than 50% of the mobile phone customer base, it’s increasingly important for women’s voices to be heard and recognised and to be acted upon instead of ignored or sidelined, whether intentionally or not. This is one effort to do something about just that.

So the goal is to reach 3072 names this year – more than doubling last year’s effort. And there’s just over a month to go. There are 72 names on the list at the time of writing, so 3,000 to go. Will yours be on it?

Please sign the pledge at http://findingada.com/ and let all your friends know about it too.

To keep up to date with what is happening:

     The Pledge: http://findingada.com/
     The Blog: http://blog.findingada.com
     on Twitter http://twitter.com/FindingAda
     on Facebook http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=253179284089