Open Tech 2010 is now open for business. If you’re a woman in tech, you should consider submitting an idea for a session as the schedule is still open, but get in quick as closing date is 30th June!

Open Tech 2010
sponsored by data.gov.uk

Saturday 11th Septmber
ULU, Malet Street, London, WC1E 7HY
http://www.ukuug.org/events/opentech2010/

Tickets only £5
Students Free Entry

40 talks across 3 tracks over 7 hours, on crowds, earthquakes and battlefronts, which hope to challenge, inspire or talk about something that makes you want to get involved. OpenTech 2010 includes earthquakes of the metaphorical and physical kind, ForTheWin, enlightenment and the environment, and with plenty of time to talk in the bar after sessions which challenge, inspire or talk about something that makes you want to help how you can. The last two times we have sold out in advance, so you are strongly advised to pre-register.

This year’s line up features…
* Another 500 years of Enlightenment from Bill Thompson
* Tales from the Battlefront from No2ID
* For the Win: Game-space and Public Engagement
* Just Do It: The Documentary from Director Emily James
* Climate Change: how screwed are we? from Gavin Starks
* 10:10 global from Technical Director Robin Houston
* Crowdsourcing Data Context from Hadley Beeman
* OpenGeoScience: not just earthquakes
* Keeping the web open – Mozilla Drumbeat
* Lessons and futures from data.gov.uk
* Today’s Guardian
* Who’s lobbying?
* and much much more besides

The full schedule is at http://www.ukuug.org/events/opentech2010/

Tickets are £5, paid for on the door; but you should pre-register yours online at
http://www.ukuug.org/events/opentech2010/registration

Want to help out?
OpenTech is organised by volunteers and we are now looking for volunteers to help out on the day. In return for free early entry and our eternal gratitude, we’re in need of a few people to show up a bit earlier and help us set the venue up, and a few people to help with the audio recordings.

If you’re interested, or have random other questions, email us on opentech@ukuug.org

One thing we’re doing this year is giving everyone related to OpenTech the chance to post their projects on a page, and say what help they need. Offline or on, whether you’re after tech people or just more helpers, you can ask the OpenTech community to help out what matters to you: http://ukuug.org/opentech/friends

Final programme may be subject to alteration. OpenTech is a not for profit event open to everyone so please help spread the word online and offline. Thanks for reading!

The BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT (was the British Computer Society) recently launched the Information Pioneers campaign to raise awareness of five “often forgotten” pioneers: Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing, Sir Clive Sinclair, Hedy Lamarr and Sir Tim Berners-Lee. Each has a short film about them, so here’s Ortis Deley from The Gadget Show talking about Ada.

Please do pop along to the website and vote for your favourite. Ada is currently 5th… i.e. last, so she does need some TLC! You can also follow @infopioneers on Twitter.

Ada Lovelace Day is winding down a bit now. We will leave the mash-up open for the next few days to pick up any final stragglers and then I’ll do an analysis of the data and we’ll publish our final top 20.

Meantime, there are a lot of people who pitched in to make Ada Lovelace Day 2010 the success that it was:

Thanks to Stephanie Troeth and Stephanie Booth again for their continual support, help and inspiration. Without you, ALD would still just be an idea.

Thanks to everyone at TechnoPhobia who helped revamp the site, particularly Danny Hawkins and Saul Cozens who worked tirelessly to keep everything up and running yesterday as well as working really hard in the run-up to ALD10. Thanks too to Tony Kennick for his invaluable contribution, and to Gill Birchmore, Diane Bedford, Martin Waite and everyone else at TechnoPhobia.

Thanks to Paul and Will at UKHost4U who pulled out all the stops to keep the site live and to get us back up and running when the volume of traffic threatened to overwhelm us.

Thanks to Lloyd Davis and Brian Condon at the Centre for Creative Collaboration for supporting our event last night.

Thanks to Maggie Berry from Women in Technology for her support, advice and help, and to Grace Ross for helping out at the event. Thanks to Maggie Philbin for her support and for being our opening speaker.

Thanks to Sydney Padua and Lorin O’Brien for their help with the T-shirt design. It looks fab, guys! Even @wossy says so.

My list of thanks wouldn’t be complete without one person. They say that behind every great woman stands a great man, and the support that my husband, Kevin, has given me over the last few months has been amazing. Thank you, Kevin, for always being there when I needed you.

Finally, thanks to everyone else who helped out in some way, who organised events, helped promote the day, provided feedback and supported the cause in some way. And thank you to everyone who took part – it would have been rather dull without you!

Huge thanks to everyone who came to the ALD10 Potluck Unconference last night at the Centre for Creative Collaboration! It was a really great evening with Maggie Philbin kicking things off in great style and many others speaking eloquently about their heroine.

Thanks to Lloyd Davis and Brian Condon for inviting us to use the space and for their support and help. Brian streamed the event live and, for those of you who missed it, here’s the video:

Further thanks to Maggie for her support, to Maggie Berry from Women in Technology for helping organise and Grace Ross for her help on the day.

Ada Lovelace Day is also a part of the European Commission’s eSkills Week, a series of events across Europe seeking to ” highlight the growing demand for skilled ICT users and professionals to drive a competitive and innovative Europe”. Although the week itself was at the beginning of March, there are still activities going on through April. Take a look at their News and Events page for more, or follow them on Twitter, or via their blog or podcast.

If you don’t have your own blog, feel free to leave your post about a woman in tech, science or engineering that you admire here, in the comments.

Andra Keay has done this great presentation about Ada Lovelace herself for ALD10. Love it!

It’s currently early morning in Kiribati, so the 24th March 2010 has begun! You can now add the URL to your Ada Lovalace Day contribution to our database. Just go to findingada.com, log-in and add your details to your profile page.

If you haven’t yet pledged, you can still sneak in under the bar by going to findingada.com and filling in all the details on the pledge widget on the front page!

If you’re short of ideas of who to write about, take a look at this list of lists of notable women from Panopy, or this wiki at Ada’s Daughters.

Enjoy Ada Lovelace Day!

BrainPop have put together this short movie about Ada Lovelace:

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!