Girl Geeks
The Amsterdam Girl Geek Dinners held their sixth dinner two weeks ago; one of the rare days that I wasn't knocked out by illness, so I went to Amsterdam with my ex-colleage Donna (she is one of the organizers) to see how things were. Besides the talk by Karin Spaink -- well known in the Netherlands for her agitation for privacy -- it was like meeting a bunch of old friends again. Take a look at the GGD site, it gives a good impression. I'd almost say it was "like a KDE event" -- in the sense of good food, good drink, camaraderie and a good deal of technical progress.
I also met the woman who runs Therp (great name, if only they were located in Friesland; site in Dutch), which is an OpenERP consulting gig. That kind of business software has been missing in my experience with Free Software (thinking back to OpenExpo in Winterthur, for instance), so I'm going to applaud it.
The Girl Geek Dinner reached one of the national papers (Algemeen Dagblad) on Saturday the 27th of February as part of a multi-page article titled "gezocht: vrouwen met wiskundeknobbel" (wanted: women with an aptitude for mathematics). [At which point the translation is rather weak: there's a -knobbel for all kinds of things, like someone who easily learns new languages is said to have a "talenknobbel". A bump on your head. See, Dutch is just a cover for phrenology.] That article in the paper also reminded me of the Wiskundemeisjes, two girls (now women) who have been blogging about their discoveries in mathematics for the past four years. Who now study at Leiden, where I'll attend a thesis defence on a Free Software legal topic next month.
See, there's a network of serendipity going on here.
It wasn't until Geek Girls at Linux Expo showed up on my screen today (was I searching for sometihng? Was it on /.? Who knows) that I had to translate serendipity into a rambling blog entry. Which is this.