KatysBlog

For those who are just starting to appreciate how wonderful the annual

Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing is for your Engineering
organization’s networking, technical education, morale building,
and recruiting, here are some tips. Sun Microsystems has been a Hopper conference
sponsor for many years. Earlier this month, at GHC 2008, Sun was a Platinum
sponsor and had 37 staff participate, including 14 presenters and panelists.
(We met some
Sun Campus Ambassadors and former
Sun interns at Hopper
as well!) There were companies which sent more staff to Hopper 2008, but not many!

Dr Sheueling Chang

Dr Gilda Garreton

Valerie Fenwick

Dr Susan Landau

Catherine Ahlschlager

How did Sun get so many people to Hopper 2008?

• Hopper asks for panel, presentation, poster, BOF and other proposals
  long in advance of the conference. (The deadline for Hopper’s October 2008
  conference was in March 2008.) Sun submitted many more proposals than were
  accepted. Start working on ideas now for Hopper 2009!
• In these tight money times, many managers feel that they should not
  spend their travel budget, even for a CTO-sponsored conference.
  I have found that Sun’s CTO organization offering a limited number of
  free registrations plus matching funds for travel puts Hopper in a new category
  and encourages Sun managers to approve the balance of the travel funds.
  Winning a travel scholarship is seen as an honor.
• Papers required for travel vary a great deal from country to country.
  Check out the
  Visa Network Requirements page for details. It can help (and sometimes is
  required) for a non-US traveler to have a formal letter of invitation from the
  organization they will visit in the USA. With a travel scholarship award to
  someone coming from outside of the USA, I always offer to write them a formal
  executive letter of invitation to support their visa.
• Frequent email communication giving information on conference preparation can
  be of great help. “Frequent” means once or twice a month starting about 9 months
  in advance, increasing to one or two emails a week in the month before the conference.
• Not everyone is an experienced traveler. Some travel advice that proved
  valuable:
  • Remind newbies that they may need to order business cards weeks in
    advance so they are delivered in time to pack. Provide information on how to
    order cards.
  • Send out weather information so travelers know what to pack.
  • We started from many places (Beijing, San Francisco, Boston, San Diego)
    but all flew at the same place (Denver, CO). A Wiki page listing
    arrival and departure times allowed us to share shuttles, rental cars, and companionship.
  • One of the airport shuttle companies was much cheaper than the others
    – providing this information in advance saved Sun travel money.
• Having a single Sun internal web page listing Sun’s speakers (with talk/panel
  titles, dates and times, room names, etc.) with photos, names, and titles of all
  participants helped us plan our time and find each other during the busy event.
• Having one person be the contact on key topics (like shipping giveaways,
  posters, and other exhibit table stuff) makes for less confusion.
• Sun provided great tshirts (soft, well fitting, and well designed) for
  both staff and giveaways. We encouraged Sun staff to wear their shirts at Hopper
  – this is good advertising plus we were easy to see in a crowd.
• Sun’s table in the Hopper exhibit hall served as a central place to
  find people, leave or pickup messages, and find current information.
  Next year, I want to follow up on a suggestion and offer a sign on Sun’s
  table listing where Sun staff are speaking.
• We had professional recruiters with us but most of those staffing
  Sun’s exhibit table were Sun Engineers or executives, who could answer
  questions from their own experience in software, microelectronics, systems,
  storage, research, systems, networking, security, and operations.
• If possible, I encourage more than one person per country to attend – so
  they have support and someone familiar to talk to and maybe travel with.
  This may be particularly important for younger staff who like to travel in packs.
• 
  Dr. Greg Papadopoulos (Sun’s CTO) is executive sponsor of Sun’s participation
  at the Hopper conference but I ask other executives to get involved and show their
  support by funding Sun’s reception, giveaways, or part of the sponsor fee.

Dr Sukyoung Ryu

Katy Dickinson

Foz Saeed

Tarik Ono

Meenakshi Kaul-Basu

Some of Sun’s Giveaways:

Sun’s Hopper 2008 Shirt

OpenSolaris Student Pack

Images Copyright 2008 by Katy Dickinson

Here are some of my photos from the
Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing (aka GHC 2008),
in Keystone, Colorado (1-4 October 2008). Sun Microsystems was a Platinum
conference sponsor and had 37 staff participate, including 14 presenters
and panelists.

Some Publications:

• 
  “Grace Hopper Celebration For Women In Computing Introduces New Hardware
  Track At 2008 Conference” 9 June 2008 Press Release by
  ABI, includes information on
  Sun Labs’ hardware development
  scholarships
• 
  “Sun at the 2008 Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing”
  September 26, 2008 story on Sun Labs’
  external web page
• Sun Bloggers:
  • 
    Valerie’s Weblog – GHC 2008
  • Gilda en Espanol – GHC
  • 
    Katy Dickinson – Hopper – Anita Borg Institute

Some Photos:

Lodge Room View

ABI Sign

Aspen Tree in Autumn

More Aspen Trees

1 Oct: Poster Hall Setup in Process

Tanya Jankot Unpacking Sun’s Table

1 Oct: Jessica’s Poster

Aspen Leaves, Keystone CO

1 Oct: Technical Poster Session

Sheri Kaneshiro

1 Oct: Technical Poster Session

2 Oct: Fran Allen

2 Oct: MAGIC Core Team Lunching

2 Oct: CTO Panel

’94 Hopper Banner

Sun’s Exhibit Table

Meenakshi Kaul-Basu

3 Oct: Open Source Women Panel

Checking Out Alice Software

Interviewing Susan Landau

3 Oct: MAGIC BOF – Table View

Women@Sun Reception

3 Oct: Sun Reception

Tanya, Cathleen, Sheri

Sun Reception

Sun’s Hopper 2008 Reception

Images Copyright 2008 by Katy Dickinson

Yesterday was the third and last of the
Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing (aka GHC 2008),
in Keystone, Colorado. Sun had 37 staff participate, including 14
presenters and panelists. As usual, there were too many excellent
events overlapping but I very much enjoyed those I attended.

Friday’s superb keynote presentation was by
Mary Lou Jepsen.
Working with
Nicholas Negroponte, Jepsen was the founding CTO of One Laptop Per Child
(OLPC). She was listed by Time Magazine in 2008 as one of the 100 most
influential people in the world. Also this year, Jepsen founded the company
Pixel Qi to follow up on the OLPC technology.

Other Friday GHC talks and panels I attended:

• Session Six: “Internship Program Showcase” It was interesting
  to see how other companies manage their internships. Interns are
  a big part of our world in
  Sun Labs.
• Session Seven: “Women in the Brave New World of Free and Open Source
  Software”. This energetic panel was put together and chaired by Meenakshi Kaul-Basu
  and also included Valerie Fenwick of Sun. The room was packed and full of questions.
  You can read more in
  
  Valerie’s Weblog about this excellent panel. Sun’s registration
  bag giveaway for Hopper was our OpenSolaris Student Pack (see my
  
  September 19, 2008 blog entry).
• Session Eight: “Anita Borg Technical Leadership Award Winner – Elaine
  Weyuker (AT&T Labs)”. I spent 1985-1993 as one of the architects and overall
  program manager for Sun’s software product life cycle (aka the
  
  Software Development Framework), so this talk about AT&T’s statistical approach
  to bug reduction in large software was fascinating.
• Session Nine: “Intellectual Property & Patents Empowering Innovation”
  This was an interesting talk, particularly in light of the recent
  
  JMRI case.
• BOF: Our MAGIC BOF!
  “Setting Up an Effective Organization to Support Girls” MAGIC was kicked off
  at our 2007 GHC BOF. The 2008 MAGIC BOF was well attended and we heard many
  helpful suggestions for the MAGIC girls’ mentoring program’s second year.

After the BOF session ended, we boogied over to another building for Sun’s private
reception. Sun’s CTO organization partnered with the Women@Sun group to
host the event. We invited both Sun staff and friends. After the Sun reception,
most of us went to the joint Google-Microsoft party for dinner and dancing.

Sun’s Hopper 2008 Reception

Image Copyright 2008, by Katy Dickinson

Today is the second day of the
Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing (aka GHC 2008)
in Keystone, Colorado. We are at 9,300 feet and few people are
sleeping well because of the altitude but the conference is
still excellent.

Today started early with a kenote/CTO breakfast, followed by an
interesting keynote presentation by
Fran Allen
(IBM Fellow Emerita and first woman to win the prestigious
Turing award).
Before Fran spoke, two female sailors from the
USS Hopper
missile destroyer showed pictures from their ship. There were many
activities, panels, and presentations to pick from. I attended:

• Session One: “Innovating with Chip Multi-Threading Technology”
  by Catherine Ahlschlager (Sun Microsystems) and
  
  “Outside of Normal Operating Conditions: Using Commercial
  Hardware in Space Computing Platforms” by Heather M. Quinn
  (Los Alamos National Laboratory)
• Session Two: “Enabling Nonprofits to Accomplish their Missions through
  Technology”
• CTO Plenary Session – “Leading Technology, a View from the Top”
  (including Sun’s CTO
  
  Dr. Greg Papadopoulos)
• Session Three: my panel! “Taking the Long View – Many
  Careers in One Company” with Sheueling Chang-Shantz (Sun Microsystems), Martha Lyons (Hewlett Packard), Cristina Mahon (Hewlett Packard),
  Ana Pinczuk (Cisco), and me. Our panel was well received with both the
  panelists and audience enjoying themselves.
• Session Four: Invited Technical Speaker – Anna Karlin,
  Professor, University of Washington, on “A Survey of Some
  Recent Research at the Border of Game Theory, Economics, and
  Computer Science”

There was a thunderstorm and rain at lunchtime but the weather
cleared after. Dinner was another buffet in the poster hall followed
by the annual award ceremony, a “Rhythm and Hue” painting performance by
David Garibaldi
(who painted portraits of Admiral Hopper and Anita Borg), and finally
dessert and a dance.

Closing the Hopper awards with a dance was
a tradition started by Anita Borg and remains one of the unique
and delightful experiences of the Hopper conference. Dancing with
several hundred women college students, Engineers, and executives from
all over the computing world is a real delight. (But having my daughter
Jessica as a
dance partner was the best part!) The few men present
seemed to have a good time as well. Our
MAGIC girls’ mentoring BOF is tomorrow.