I attended the Women Who Tech (@womenwhotech) afterparty here in San Francisco and had an amazing time meeting women from the Bay Area actively making the world of technology a better place.

It quickly reminded me of how far I had come in just two years since attending my first Women Who Tech Telesummit Conference in the spring of 2008. I will be forever grateful for the encouragement, support and wisdom the conference generates through it’s focus to provide women with role models and a central place to come together and connect!

Thanks for encouraging me to join twitter March 31st, 2008!

Transcription

Ok, Geek time!  I love the video quality on this new video!!!  It’s from the new Logitech Pro C910 (Amazon affiliate link) I picked up this month to replace my aging Logitech 9000 Pro I’ve had since November 2008 and wow is there a huge difference!!!  More on it later.

What I did here was extract the audio and then use Macspeech Scribe to transcribe it to text for me.  I had to do a bit of clean up but wanted to post it here for those of you interested in following along with the video and also to show the power of Scribe which I’ve been dying to use for audio transcription of my videos!  Eventually, I plan to transcribe my training courses at Freshworkshops and this all came out of meeting someone at a Wordcamp who was deaf and asked about taking my training!

Here you go:

Hi folks as they do and I want to say hello from San Francisco, it’s Septembe.  I just got back from the Women Who Tech AfterParty.  WomenWhoTech.com is a virtual conference it happens every year and the goal is basically to help women step into technology boldly and fiercely.

On their web site here they have three goals.  Their first statement, women are under represented in technology and they want to change that.  The second one is they have this summit to break down barriers so it doesn’t seem so hard.  I know last year I struggled with tech conferences because to me, every time I went to one, it was just a bunch of tall White guys, you know? And their third goal here is to mobilize a network of women.

I want to say I had a fantastic time tonight and I was really touched to realize that it’d been a little over two years since I first joined Twitter.  The reason I joined is because I went to this Women Who Tech tele summit conference March 31st, 2008 and they said, “Oh you need to get on the Twitter” and I thought that Twitter would be like some kind of live chat thing and I would get to talk with other people but that didn’t really happened. I think I sat on my own Twitter page because I didn’t know how to use it.

I’ll tell you, I’ve come really far in two years; tonight’s even was great!  I loved the food that they had.  It was all Middle Eastern stuff and lots of  wine because we’re in San Francisco and I met a lot of interesting women.  I mean it is so refreshing to go somewhere and have people be like, “Oh yeah I work on Debian and Ubuntu” you know and another person’s like, “I work for Creative Commons.  Yeah, it’s a nonprofit organization, I actually work there”.  I’m like, “That’s cool!”.  I mean there were just so many interesting folks and we had real conversations it just really touched me as to how far I’ve come in life and this wonderful network of not just women but of people in general attending conferences, being encouraging…folks I’ve met on Twitter…all these women in tech who are fighting for me, for us, for the future…love it!

So I thought I’m long overdue to make a video.  I’ve been making a couple but then I don’t post them.  I am recording this with my new WebCam which I think is quite fancy versus my old one.  This is also a Logitech camera.  It is the new HD Pro C910.  You can see that there.  I’m going to check on my other monitor.  Anyway I think it looks clear vs the other one which is my Logitech 9000 Pro.

Anyway, I had a great time chatting with folks.  Cheryl was there.  I’ve seen her at several conferences so glad that I have been able to connect with her and no truly get to know her as a person, she’s very cool.  I went up to another woman tonight and I said, “Hi!  I want to introduce myself because you are a Brown woman and so am I!” and it went well!  I’m going to keep doing that because I have felt that kind of, “Am I the only one here?” type thing and so I really want to be that person to walk up and say, “Welcome”.

So I just want to encourage you if you’re on Twitter, if you’re in social media, makes you getting out and doing real-life networking events.  Now I know the word networking has a negative connotation but I’ll tell you these people in tech, especially people who are blogging, it’s not the same, it’s not your mom’s networking group, let’s just say that.  I just want to say that I’m so grateful for my opportunities in life, I’m glad, I’m speechless with my decision to move to San Francisco it was the right one and you know what people keep saying me over and over – “Adria, any given night there’s several things going on; you can’t do all of them.”  So that makes me feel good because it can feel overwhelming every single week is a conference, there’s an event, there are parties, I mean I don’t know.  There are people who do several some folks like to go to another event tonight.  I was thinking, “I’m going to do one event and I’m good to go”.

So anyway I say if you’re on you’re out there, you’re starting a business or thinking about pitching a business idea, a start up idea, you’re getting into in the software, you’re working with hardware, open source, content management systems, e-mail, whatever it is… go for it!  Find other people are interested,  reach out on Twitter and connect with people because is worth it.  I cannot wait to see the future holds for me and for everyone else!  I am so committed to shaping the future I see in my mind into reality that I’m willing to step out of my comfort zone to do that.

So with that, I hope you have a wonderful night and I’ll see everybody later. Take care and thanks for the positive Tweets!

It’s experiences like these that make me have faith in a higher power.  It’s moments of connection between the handshake and the eye contact.  It’s realizing that I’m one of many in a long line of women who will benefit from events like this so that our daughters can have an easier time for decades to come being able to just…be.