Katy Dickinson

2nd Shipment to Orlando Today (for Hopper 2007)

The Hopper conference will be held next week (October 17-20, 2007), mostly located in the Hilton at Disney World (Orlando, FL). The Friday Sponsor's Night event will be at nearby Universal's City Walk. As a Platinum Sponsor, we have had to make a number of different shipments of Sun's giveaways, conference bag stuffers, posters, marketing materials, etc. Tanya sent our first shipment a week ago (six boxes of Sun-marked back packs to City Walk). The second shipment goes today (conference tote stuffers). The very cool t-shirts arrive here tomorrow, so they go into what we hope will be the final shipment to The Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, which goes out Thursday morning. The t-shirt literally required worldwide collaboration to design: we had contributors from China, Russia, India, and Czech Republic as well as the USA. We are very eager to see how well they turned out.

There are a number of special things we will hand carry, including the Sun SPOT development kit, and the leather jacket which are Sun's raffle prizes. Sun has 20 attendees plus 4 recruiters going to Hopper 2007. We are participating in ten panels or BOFs plus three Sun women are Official Bloggers. The Hopper conference takes a great deal of preparation but it is great fun to attend: well worth all of the work!

Posted at 03:16PM Oct 09, 2007 by katysblog in Hopper - Anita Borg Institute  | 

SEED Event Feedback

We have the feedback from participants in last week's annual SEED Event. 34 people responded to our survey, out of about 80 SEED mentees, managers, and mentors who joined the meeting in person or by phone from around the world.

Using the following response scale: (very poor = 1, neutral = 4, very good = 7), the highest average score among the nine questions was 6.19, rating "Arrangements for the meeting (advance information, event web page, room size, location, room temperature)"; the lowest was 5.28, rating the "SEED Showcase presentations".

Here are some comments from the surveys:

• It is great that the presentations are about Sun's new products, advanced technologies, strategies or of help for engineer's career plan and development.
• Especially I really liked the technical presentation.
• The presentations are informative. I learned a lot that I didn't know but wanted to know (such as the details on Blackbox).
• Very amusing, I learned several interesting facts. Tour guide Excellent !
• Was not aware of how our product design came from, but when standing in the special black room [of the Usability Lab], I got the answer
• Nice people, really friendly atmosphere where even such introvert like myself could feel like at home :)
• Awesome - met some great people and made several new contacts.
• Participated remotely. Could hear fine and appreciated having the presentations posted on the website.
• Room was a bit cold for those not used to real aircon :)
• A little tough to sit through that many presentations on the phone in a row and stay focused. I'd recommend breaking up the speakers a little bit.
• Worked well - presos in the morning, while folks are awake :-)
• I think that you did a good job of making remote participants involved in the discussions.
• I think the variety of speakers was a good idea

We are now setting up the schedule for SEED's 2007-2008 monthly phone-in meetings. More information on SEED is available at http://research.sun.com/SEED/

Posted at 10:35AM Oct 09, 2007 by katysblog in Mentoring & Other Business  |