Philanthropy

On May 15th and 16th leaders from over 100 distinguished universities, corporations and non-profits from across the country will attend the National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT) semi-annual meeting at the University of Colorado at Boulder. I’ve been chairman of NCWIT for the past few years and am incredibly proud of what Lucy Sanders and her team have created. NCWIT is a capacity-building coalition working aggressively to increase women’s participation in computing/information technology (IT) – we believe that women’s participation is a compelling issue of innovation, competitiveness, and workforce sustainability. ...

At the National Center for Women & Information Technology we are about to embark on a “heroes campaign” – a new project to highlight 20 successful women IT entrepreneurs via 15 minute podcast interviews accompanied by text transcriptions. We’ve got a great initial set of women that we’ll be interviewing but are casting our net far and wide to find interesting, amazing, and inspirational stories. If you fit the profile (female IT / software / Internet entrepreneurs) or know someone that does, please give me a shout .

As chairman of the National Center for Women & Information Technology , I’m enjoyed observing the regular evolution of how we describe the organization. My friends Larry and Pat Nelson just interviewed Lucy Sanders – the CEO of NCWIT – and I think Lucy did a particularly crisp job of describing what NCWIT is about and why it’s important.

Amy just blogged about her trip last week to New Orleans . Neither of us had been there since Hurricane Katrina. She went as an attendee at a conference organized by the Women Donors Network called Revitalizing Democracy: What We Can Learn from Katrina. We were together in Boulder over the weekend and had plenty of time to talk about her experience during the few days she was in New Orleans. Her post summarizes her thoughts well and end with some concrete suggestions about what she (we) are going to do.

Bill Erickson sent me a link to a TUAW article on Introducing Nike + Group Goals . Nike has a super cool Nike + iPod Sport Kit (which I’ve bought and have sitting on my desk – I guess I need to get my act together and actually try it). Now – they are donating $1 to a cause for every mile that you run and record on their website. The Lance Armstrong Foundation is up first – Nike is donating up to $50,000 for 50,000 miles contributed (he’s got $24,469.28 contributed at this point.) The Leukemia and Lymphoma Society are in the mix as is a showdown between the Northside and Southside of Chicago. Awesomely cool stuff.

Amy and I have been supporters of KidsTek for the past several years, even since we were introduced to it by Pat Maley when he was the CEO of Dante Group (Mobius was an investor / I was on the board.) Amy and I are big supporters of education – especially in Colorado – and when Pat described the KidsTek mission to me, it was a no-brainer. KidsTek works closely with Colorado youth (ages K-12) service providers in underserved communities to provide the keys to successful technology education, including: ...

David Brin has an outstanding article up on Salon titled Why Johnny can’t code . I’ve been the chairman of the National Center for Women & Information Technology for the past two years and have learned an enormous amount about the sociology of computer science, especially among women and kids. This summer I decided to “practice what I preach” by teaching my Alaskan 14 year old neighbor Eric how to program. I received a bunch of interesting comments and eventually settled on Ruby – which we are making ok progress with. ...

Lucy Sanders – the CEO of the National Center for Women & Information Technology – was a key participant in last week’s Microsoft Annual Faculty Summit. InformationWeek has a good summary of the meeting – and the issues – up on the web in an article titled “Funding Innovation Where It’s Incubated .” The basic message – as stated directly by Dan Mote (president of the University of Maryland) is that “”Students do not see opportunity in our field [IT and computer science]. And it’s not just kids in poor districts–even the rich kids don’t get jazzed about tech. That’s going to be a problem as computer companies hunt for the next generation of workers.” ...

My friends Larry and Pat Nelson just put up an interview with Lucy Sanders, CEO of National Center for Women & Information Technology . Not surprisingly – Lucy is the most articulate person I know concerning the issues NCWIT is addressing. If you have any interest in what NCWIT is up to, have a listen.

Senator Barack Obama spoke at the National Center for Women & Information Technology Town Hall last week. If you are an Obama fan, or just want to hear about what he has to say, NCWIT’s friends at Microsoft Research have put both Obama’s speech as well as much of the town hall conference on “IT Innovation and the Role of Diversity” up on the Research Channel web site.