As part of Google’s ongoing commitment to furthering Anita’s vision, we are pleased to announce the 2012 Google Australia and New Zealand Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship. Through the scholarship, we aim to encourage women to excel in computing and technology, and become active role models and leaders.

Scholarships will be awarded based on the strength of candidates’ academic background and demonstrated leadership. A group of female undergraduate and graduate student finalists will be chosen from the applicant pool. Each scholar recipient will receive a $5,000 scholarship towards the following academic year. In addition all finalists and scholarship recipients will be invited to an expenses-paid networking retreat to be held at Google’s Sydney Engineering centre.

OWOOT member Donna Benjamin will be doing an interview with Melbourne's RRR community radio station at 10:40am today (March 27) Melbourne time (March 26, 2340 UTC).

You can listen on the live stream, or, if local to Melbourne, on 102.7FM.

Happy International Women's Day! To celebrate, the National Library of Australia has announced that their Trove collection of digitised Australian newspapers and periodicals now contains The Dawn: a Journal for Australian Women, an early Australian feminist journal, published by Louisa Lawson from 1888 to 1905.

View and read the digitised version of The Dawn at Trove.

The project to raise money to Digitise the Dawn was conceived and run by Donna Benjamin in 2011. Thanks Donna!

We’ll have our regular drinks, nibbles and talks at the meetup next month: Please let me know via the link below if you’d like to do a talk!

Speaker:

Paula Ward, Founder & Director, Know The Game

More details and RSVP at the Girl Geek Sydney website.

The next Free Software Melbourne meeting is about encouraging women in the free software community, all the details are on the website.

From 2:20pm at the Haecksen miniconf at linux.conf.au on Monday January 16, Valerie Aurora will be running a workshop especially for our male allies. Please personally invite the men you know to come along and have some fun with us. They will find out why we want and need allies, and what to do when they find themselves in an awkward situation. Val will run through some specific scenarios that we've all seen, and how they can play out differently when there is an ally involved.

Register your interest in attending the allies workshop at the Haecksen website.

The Haecksen miniconf @ linux.conf.au schedule has been announced!

Schedule

The miniconf will be on Monday Jan 16 in Ballarat. It includes talks by Sara Falamaki, Valerie Aurora, Mary Gardiner and Sarah Novotny, and a panel including Pia Waugh, Selena Deckelmann, Leslie Hawthorn and Danni Madeley.

See the full schedule for more information.

Attending

The miniconf is open to those registered to attend linux.conf.au. See registration information and prices.

Thanks

Thanks to Lana Brindley, the organiser of the Haecksen miniconf in 2012.

The Ada Initiative is holding the very first AdaCamp in mid January in Melbourne. This is going to bring the brightest women in open technology to town - the perfect opportunity for a Girl Geek Dinner. Quality food in a gorgeous setting, we'll have the place to ourselves. There's going to be so many interesting women attending this - make sure you are too, to start your 2012 networking with a bang!

The event follows AdaCamp on Saturday January 14. Register by Jan 7.

Find out more and register at the event webpage.

The very first Ada Initiative AdaCamp will be held in Melbourne Australia on Saturday January 14 2012.

AdaCamp will have an exciting, inspiring mix of people from various parts of the “open technology and culture” world, each of whom brings something special to the event.

AdaCamp attendance will be by invitation: if you would like the organizers to consider you, please apply. Applications are now open: apply to attend AdaCamp. Applications will close Wednesday December 14 2011.