Category Archives: Mentoring Standard

October 11, 2016 · 11:21 pm

Africa Wins!

At yesterday’s TechWomen Community Event, all five Pitch Day seed grant prizes went to teams representing countries in Africa: Cameroon, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Tunisia, and Kenya! All 19 presentations from Central Asia, the Middle East and Africa were so inspiring, I am sure the judges had a tough time deciding which to honor. It was a pleasure to spend the evening with my daughter Jessica.

I am so very proud to have been one of the Impact Advisors for Tunisia! Our WAKTECH action plan to improve transportation in Tunis included six from Tunisia and three from the San Francisco Bay Area:

Melek Jebnoun- Tunisia Emerging Leader
Raoudha Lagha- Tunisia Emerging Leader
Salma Saidi- Tunisia Emerging Leader
Salma Sayah- Tunisia Emerging Leader
Sinda Soussia- Tunisia Emerging Leader
Yosr Tammar- Tunisia Emerging Leader
Fatema Kothari- California Mentor and Impact Advisor
Katy Dickinson- California Mentor and Impact Advisor
Mercedes Soria- California Mentor and Impact Advisor

Early tomorrow, TechWomen shifts from the San Francisco Bay Area to Washington DC. What a month this has been!

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Filed under Mentoring & Other Business, Mentoring Standard, News & Reviews

Tagged as Africa, Cameroon, Central Asia, Kenya, Mentoring, Middle East, Sierra Leone, South Africa, technical women, TechWomen, Tunisia

October 10, 2016 · 3:52 pm

Advising 6 TechWomen from Tunisia

Since August 2016, I have been honored to be one of three Impact Advisors to the six TechWomen Emerging Leaders from Tunisia. We started meeting while the ELs were still in Tunis and we have continued our discussions at least weekly since. Mercedes Soria (Vice President of Software Engineering, Knightscope), Fatema Kothari (Senior Consultant,
T-Mobile), and I have had a wonderful time working on this.

On 7 October, the ladies presented our plan for WAKTECH at the TechWomen Pitch Day hosted by Oracle here in the Silicon Valley. This is the Executive Summary for WAKTECH, from our Action Plan:

The biggest public transport issue in Tunis is delay. Bus and metro schedules are confusing and unreliable. What makes this issue worse is the lack of total absence of online and offline information about these delays. Users are deprived from real time information about it. WAKTECH will be the first mobile platform to centralize the information about public transportation in Tunisia. It will provide all the needed information about traffic, schedule and transit itinerary. The particularity of this application resides in the community of trusted users who will be its main source of data.

We will be building an application that enables users to share information about public transit like departure and arrival times or possible incidents. Based on that data, the users can access at any moment that information to schedule their trip, be on time, and save money. Using WAKTECH will help create the smart Tunis everyone is dreaming of where technology serves the citizens to manage their time effectively and create a community of responsible users.

Our Tunisia team was one of 19 that presented – one from each of the TechWomen countries. I was so proud of their poised and professional presentation! Tonight at the TechWomen Community Celebration in San Francisco we will hear the results of the pitch judging – only five teams will win one of the cash prizes. There were many superb presentations and inspiring projects proposed for Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia. Wish us luck!

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Filed under Mentoring & Other Business, Mentoring Standard, Uncategorized

Tagged as Africa, Central Asia, Mentoring, Middle East, Silicon Valley, technical women, TechWomen, Tunisia

September 1, 2016 · 5:23 pm

TechWomen Community Cycle

The TechWomen mentoring program has been since 2010 a big part of my annual planning. 90 Emerging Leaders from 19 countries in Africa, Central Asia, and the Middle East will arrive in the San Francisco Bay Area in about ten days to start working at local STEM companies. I am already working with the 6 ELs from Tunisia as one of their 3 Impact Advisors. Our Impact Advisory group has been meeting remotely every Friday – I look forward to meeting the Tunisia ladies in person soon. The 2016 Emerging Leaders will be in the USA until mid-October, returning home after a visit to Washington DC.

I am also enjoying supporting one of my 2014 mentees, TechWomen Fellow and Fulbright Fellow Mai Temraz from Gaza, who will be starting her MBA at Cal State San Bernardino next month. Several of us visited Mai and her family in Gaza City earlier this year. The Temraz family is staying with us in San Jose while Mai goes through orientation at UC Davis. Last weekend, my daughter Jessica, Mai, and I did a road trip to help find an apartment in San Bernardino and to see the Cal State campus. In a few weeks, the Temraz family will move to Southern California.

TechWomen is more than an Initiative of the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, it has become a beloved community and extended family for many of its participants.

Walaa, Mai, and Yazan Temraz in San Jose, California, August 2016

TechWomen Erin Keeley, Eileen Brewer, Mai Temraz, Jessica Dickinson Goodman, Katy Dickinson, and Aliya Janjua in Gaza City, February 2016

TechWomen Seham Al-Jaafreh, Mai Temraz, and Katy Dickinson, San Bruno Park, California, October 2014

TechWomen in Tunisia, with Impact Advisors in California, August 2016

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Filed under Home & Family, Mentoring & Other Business, Mentoring Standard, News & Reviews

Tagged as Geeks, Jessica, Palestine, San Francisco, San Jose, technical women, TechWomen, Tunisia

July 22, 2016 · 4:25 pm

Caboose and Cactus Arroyo

My office replaced a swimming pool. WP668 is the 100-year-old railroad caboose in San Jose, California (“the Capital of the Silicon Valley“) where I work for Mentoring Standard. Above is WP668 in our backyard now, and below is what the same space looked like in the year 2000. The swimming pool was removed ten years ago – see more photos on the WP668 webpage.

I designed the landscape setting for WP668 based on large rocks and cactuses, including a Y-shaped arroyo (or dry creek) that is small enough to be called an arroyito. Like the bones of California, our arroyito is largely made up of granite, basalt, limestone, and quartz, with jasper, serpentine, sandstone, conglomerates, and other stones for variety. We bought two large boulders from South Bay Materials but the other rocks were adopted as individuals. Every time we go on vacation or a road trip, we come home with new garden rocks, so the arroyito becomes more solid and complex year-by-year. My family complains when they have to ride home from a trip with their feet on top of the latest stones headed for the arroyito but they still help me stuff rocks into the car.

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Filed under Home & Family, Mentoring Standard

Tagged as garden, House Work, Jessica, San Jose, Silicon Valley, Willow Glen

June 27, 2016 · 12:22 pm

Happy 100th Birthday WP668 Caboose!

On Saturday, we celebrated the 100th Birthday for WP668, the railway caboose where Mentoring Standard has its office in Willow Glen (San Jose, California). Many friends and family and train enthusiasts joined John and me in cheering on our old train car. You can read the history of WP668 on her website.

There were balloons and a cake and we distributed WP668 Caboose Con-Duck-tors (a rubber duck toy dressed as a train conductor) as party favors. John gave tours of his N-scale model train layout in our former garage. WP668’s birthday present was new night lighting along her roof line.

Images Copyright Katy Dickinson 2016

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Filed under Caboose Project and Other Trains, Home & Family, Mentoring Standard, News & Reviews

Tagged as garden, House Work, Jessica, John, Matthew, Paul, San Jose, Willow Glen, WP668

May 17, 2016 · 4:17 pm

TechWomen Alumnae Resources

The TechWomen Alumnae Resources web page is now available, presenting recommendations and references to materials helpful to technical women stuck in place because of politics or personal circumstances. So far, TechWomen Alumnae Resources topics include:

Professional Associations for Technical Women
Funding Graduate School
Starting a Local Mentoring Program
E-Learning Sites – Thanks to TechWomen Mentor Lisa Ramirez (Juniper Netoworks) for her recommendations
Writing for Wikipedia – Thanks to Dr. Susan Rodger (Duke University) for her recommendations

More topics are being developed. This resource was created as a result of discussions on 12 February 2016 during the TechWomen Jordan Delegation’s Unconference at the Dead Sea. The session I lead was called “Supporting TechWomen Fellows in Conflict Zones”. A group of nine TechWomen Fellows, Mentors, and supporters from the Middle East and USA started by discussing how to support TechWomen Fellows in conflict zones – especially Gaza, Yemen, and Libya – but we soon expanded our scope to consider those stuck at home because of severe family illness or other care taking responsibilities. That is, these are ideas / resources / programs to benefit TechWomen Mentors and Fellows who are stuck in place. This was not about getting them out but rather helping them remain professionally active where they are. The five categories in which we felt that support could be offered / maintained and would be most helpful are:

Entrepreneurship – training, startup feedback, recommendations to funding sources.
Outsourcing – recommendations on finding / developing professional work that could be done where they are.
Starting and managing local mentoring programs.
Professional visibility and volunteerism:
- Writing for Wikipedia
- Open Source contributions
- eLearning Resources
Recommendations and introductions:

The top photo shows my 2014 TechWomen mentee, Mai Temraz, with her Grace Hopper Conference bag and gifts in Gaza City, in February 2016. We carried these gifts to her because she could attend the October 2015 GHC15 conference in-person to accept her award as 2015 Change Agent ABIE. Being stuck in place is part of life in Gaza City. Remarkable technical leaders like Mai are the inspiration for the TechWomen Alumnae Resources web page.

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Filed under Mentoring & Other Business, Mentoring Standard, News & Reviews

Tagged as Africa, Central Asia, Gaza, Jordan, Libya, Mentoring, Middle East, Palestine, technical women, TechWomen, Yemen

May 16, 2016 · 2:39 pm

Videos from Jordan, Zimbabwe, Kazakhstan TechWomen Delegations

The TechWomen Alumnae Council held a reunion for the Jordan, Zimbabwe, and Kazakhstan Delegations on 26 April 2016, hosted by AOL in San Mateo, California (in the Silicon Valley). TechWomen Director Arezoo Riahi reported that the three Delegations (of 37 Mentors from the US and almost 50 Fellow from 13 countries) together reached 1,925 girls and women.

John Plocher taped the inspiring personal and professional reports by IIE staff and Delegation members: the set of 11 videos is now available. You can also watch the individual videos:

Arezoo Riahi – opening, Delegations report, update on 2015 and 2016 TechWomen cohorts
Audrey Simpson, Cindy Cooley, Cathy Simpson, Evelyn Zoubi – update on TechWomen Alumnae Council, and how to make Jordanian mansaf
Katy Dickinson – Jordan, Palestine, Zimbabwe, and update on TechWomen Alumnae Resources
Rekha Pai – Kazakhstan
Rebecca Biswas – Kazakhstan
Teresa Zhang – Kazakhstan
Molly Pyle – Zimbabwe
Sarasija Parthasarthy – Kazakhstan
Shawne Van Deusen-Jeffries – Zimbabwe
Zhilan Zweiger – Zimbabwe, Kenya
Mary Karam McKey – “All Protocols Observed”

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Filed under Mentoring & Other Business, Mentoring Standard, News & Reviews

Tagged as Africa, Central Asia, Gaza, John, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Mentoring, Middle East, Palestine, technical women, TechWomen, Zimbabwe

Category Archives: Mentoring Standard

Africa Wins!

Advising 6 TechWomen from Tunisia

TechWomen Community Cycle

Caboose and Cactus Arroyo

Happy 100th Birthday WP668 Caboose!

TechWomen Alumnae Resources

Videos from Jordan, Zimbabwe, Kazakhstan TechWomen Delegations

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