Creating space for women in male dominated arenas of life is a good trend, especially for geeks. Geeks are different, and the geeky world is sometimes a lonely world. Geeks look around themselves in the world and see lots of people not-like-them. Female geeks often feel this even more acutely. They look around themselves in the workplace and professional events and see lots of people not-like-them. Which is one reason why the upcoming She’s Geeky is great. She’s Geeky is an opportunity for women across different areas of technology to connect, to present ideas (just show up and present!), exchange skills, swap visions, and build community.

From AboutUs friend Kaliya Hamlin:

She’s Geeky (http://www.shesgeeky.org) - A Women’s Tech (un)conference on October 22-23 in Mountain View, CA.

This event is designed to bring together women from a range of technology-focused disciplines who self identify as geeky. Our goal is to support skill exchange and learning between women working in diverse fields and to create a space for networking and to talk about issues faced by women in technology. ( more details regarding Kalyia’s motivations and hopes.)

As with any unconference (which are solidly based in Open Space Technology), no one has prior knowledge of what topics will be actually be proposed by attendees, but here are some topics that may be proposed. This give unconferences the feel of the coffee break session common at most regular conferences (where often the most interesting discussion and activities is created). Some of the highlights for us are: open source collaboration styles and how that works or doesn’t for women, balancing work/life, technology for social-purpose goals, technology usability, hardware hacks, small-scale projects using software engineering techniques.

We personally know and respect (read: think is awesome!) Kaliya’s work (she co-facilitated the most recent Portland RecentChangesCamp with one of us), and there are many more fantastic people organizing this: Mary Hodder, founder Dabble.com; Julia French, Covered Communication; Susan Mernitt, Yahoo; Sylvia Paull, Berkeley Ventures; heathervescent, Purple Tornado; Danese Cooper, Intel; Laurie Rae; Deb Roby a BlogHer blogger; and Melanie Swan, and many more awesome people already signed up.

Contibutors: TedErnst, MarkDilley, TakKendrick