[upbeat guitar music]
LUCY SANDERS: Hello, please come in, we’re about ready to get started. Please come in and take a seat. Whoa, that quieted everybody down. Hi, I’m Lucy Sanders, I’m the CEO and co-founder of NCWIT, and it is my absolute pleasure to welcome you here, to the 2015 NCWIT Summit. Yay, everybody clap yay! [audience applause] Hi! Is it down? Is it in front of my nose? [audience laughter] These things are horrible, okay, just a, okay, so I also wanna welcome all of our remote viewers who are watching over the livestream. And, it is our custom to move the NCWIT Summit around the country, as you know, and we’re delighted to be here in Hilton Head, South Carolina. It’s also become somewhat of a custom for me to find a rather old, embarrassing photo of myself from taking a vacation near the general vicinity of NCWIT Summit that year. So I dug into my family photo album, and I found this. Can you see it? What? Slides? No. [laughter] Yay! Oh, yah! [scattered applause] Okay! Now, this is not me. [audience laughter] That’s only not me because my family never vacationed on the beach, but my husband’s family did, so this is Bruce, my husband. Yoo-hoo! [audience cooing] Aww, isn’t he adorable? Like, look at those shades, and the little terry cloth robe, and the guy like wandering around on beaches, and I know he’s going to be enjoying the beaches here on Hilton Head, and I hope you too. Although not too much, we need you in our sessions. Also growing up in the South, I wanted to bring along a few tips for eating out here, just in case some of you don’t know, you are in the land of sweet tea. [audience murmurs] If you drink ice tea, ask for what you want. You say sweet tea, or un-sweet tea, right? Okay. And really, sweet tea’s pretty good, it’s not just tea with a bunch of sugar swirled around in it, right? It’s brewed sweet, so give it a try, it’s great. You’re also in the land of complicated barbeque. [audience laughter] Alright, so, and please do choose your words carefully when you eat barbeque, you don’t say, ew, this doesn’t taste like Texas barbeque, like real barbeque. Lots of great barbeque here, all kinds of regional sauces, and if you’re a barbeque eater, you’ll like it here. Grits, also very popular in the South, from the Native American heritage, stone-ground corn, hominy, slow-cooked, never buy instant grits, if any of you buy instant grits, you are, you will be kicked out of NCWIT as a member. [audience laughter] Very slow-cooked, wonderful with butter and cheese and other things that aren’t good for your heart. But really very good, and there’s no such thing as a singular grit. So if you ask what is a grit, you’ll be humiliated. Always plural. Last but not least, if you want a snack, do consider the official snack food of South Carolina, a boiled peanut, boiled peanuts. So, this is not the same thing as peanuts you buy in a baseball game, and throw into a pot of water and boil. Right, that’s not what it is. These are green peanuts, young peanuts, again, thrown into a pot and boiled, with plenty of salt. And you can wander around the roads here in the South, and find them for sale among the roadways, they’re quite good. And if you don’t find them, they are exported here from South Carolina. Peanut Patch boiled peanuts, so you can go and find these at your grocery store, and give them a try at home. Alright, so now you know how to eat, and you know how to be on the beach. NCWIT we also intend to feed you well, here at our Summit, so don’t, you will not go hungry. A word or two about NCWIT, what we do, and how we do it. NCWIT is an organization of organizations, we are all of you, we are all of your organizations, and together, K-12 through career, we form a change-leader network. We are in action all year long, all year long, on projects that advance girls and women and computing. NCWIT’s staff supports all of you, and we’re honored and humbled to do that all year long. We convene our change-leader network members at this Summit, and in meetings and task force and committees all year long. We equip change-leader organizations with research and resources and data sheets and toolkits and everything else you tell us you need, so that when you step out as a change-leader, you do so based on the best possible evidence, and not on whim, and not on anecdote. And then we unite all of you in common action platforms, that when we work together, we make a national difference. So we build the national infrastructure as NCWIT staff, and your organizations can plug-in in various ways as appropriate to what you’re doing and what your goals are. And together, we make a bigger difference than if we acted alone. Aspirations in computing is one of those action platforms that we work on together. So it’s been a really busy year. I know it’s been busy for us, and it’s busy for us because it’s been busy for you, because we directly, everything we do directly supports your efforts, both in your own organizations and nationally. Sure you all notice the news, how many of you have read all the stories in the news about girls and women in computing? Yes? Ton of them, right? Social media, the news, some of them have been helpful, some of them have been downright wrong and destructive. And so, most of them however share a common thing, they still are admiring the problem. We as NCWIT members, we’re way past admiring the problem, and we’re well into action. And that’s what’s so inspiring about working with all of you. It’s time to stop admiring the problem, and get into action, and we know how to do it, and you’re doing it everyday. A few metrics from our member survey. And by the way, a shameful plug, please do fill in our member survey when we ask you. [chuckles] You know, because these kinds of metrics are just really important for us to understand. First thing, membership is growing really well. At the end of 2014, we had 636 members, we’re well over 650, moving hopefully close by the end of the year to 400. And all of you are in action, 85 percent say they’re learning things, they’re in action. Over a thousand giving presentations, and writing publications in the space of girls and women and computing. These two metrics are really, really important because they say a few things about who we are. You’re gonna hear this phrase, hopefully throughout the Summit, NCWIT’s a collective impact organization. We’re grassroots, we’re a movement, we’re organic, and so when you talk about this, when you make presentations, when you build your constituency base, and when you involve other organizations, we’re gonna turn the corner much faster. And so, these metrics are very important. Our resources help you, and we’re always grateful for new resource ideas, so please keep them coming. This, these metrics tell a pretty interesting story if you move from left to right, 85 percent learning something new, 80 percent sharing, 75 percent implementing, 65 percent achieving their goals. And this is kind of reflective, I think, of our membership base, right? So, so the more experienced members typically tend to use a resource to actually implement something to achieve a goal, whereas newer members are really using resources to learn and build their constituency base and to share with others. We also are seeing really good pipeline growth, this is, these are numbers from our Aspirations in Computing program, which is growing very nicely. You can see that over 20 thousand girls and women interested in computing have registered at our portal. That this is a very important metrics, metric, because they have self-selected as being interested in tech. We’ve honored over 46 hundred at the local and national level in the high school Aspirations in Computing program. 57 percent of those in high school go on to study computing and engineering in post-secondary, and that number will grow over time. And then we have coverage in all 50 states, so that we can honor high school women pretty much everywhere now. So with these kinds of metrics, it’s pretty clear, and others, it’s pretty clear that all of you have been busy. And again, we, you know, we can’t do what we do without all of your hard work, so I think we should give ourselves a round of applause. [audience applause] So here we are at the Summit, the NCWIT Summit is our annual members meeting. This is where we meet and convene to learn new research, to share ideas with each other, to, you know, to form partnerships, to celebrate. All kinds of things happen at the NCWIT Summit, it’s a very active time. I’m sure you’ve seen your lovely program, and you can look to see all the things that are going on. And see what staff has literally worked all year long and we probably have at least 40 or 50 members engaged in our workshops and our sessions, maybe more. And so before we get started on the Summit, I think they too, deserve a round of applause. [audience applause] We always have new things at the Summit. So, a few things of, of note. First thing is we’ve taken our popular plenary Flash Talks, and combined them with the popular TV show Shark Tank. And, we will have a Flash Tank. We didn’t want to get in trouble with the intellectual property people, so we called this something different from Shark Tank. But the idea is that five of our members will stand up and make a pitch to an esteemed panel of sharks, judges, and they’ll be pitching an idea about something they think NCWIT should be working on that we’re not. And the Royal Bank of Canada and the NCWIT Board of Directors have set aside funds so that we can, we can take the idea and really sort of, put some ideation around it and try to push it forward towards implementation, so that should be fun. I’m gonna say more about Empower Hours after our plenary speakers, but this is also a new concept that we’ve put in place here at the Summit to help members set goals, talk to each other, and learn in-depth about how to achieve their goals while they’re here at the Summit. We also have a lot of new awards, and these are really important to encourage excellence in change leadership within our community. We have awards for our Extension Services clients, these were universities that have achieved quantifiable results, you know, in terms of women’s enrollments and graduation. That’s funded by Google.org. We have our new collegiate program, which you’ll hear more about in a moment, funded by Hewlett-Packard. Also, the EngageCSEdu participation awards, you may recall EngageCSEdu is a curated collection of over two thousand resources that you can use in computing courses, to further the engagement of under-represented groups in introductory computing, so people who work within that community to find new resources and curate new resources will be recognized there. And then finally we have a new Hollywood award, and you all have asked us for a long time to get involved somehow in Hollywood, like yeah, like don’t you think I should have a career there? [chuckles] That would be great. But, but now with Google, the help of Google and the Entertainment Industry Council, we will have a new award this year for positive portrayal of a woman in tech, will go to Renée Felice Smith from NCIS: LA. So, yay, yeah. [audience applause] So last but not least, thank you to our sponsors. We can’t have the Summit, we can’t have NCWIT, we can’t have our programs without the help of our sponsors, and so if you like the food here, give them a round of applause, if you like the programs, give them a round of applause. I just stole that line from Tracy Camp, I don’t know where she was, she used it at SIC-C one year. But seriously, let’s thank our sponsors. [audience applause] Some of you have asked me specifically about the recent news about Apple’s donation to NCWIT, and so I thought I’d just say a few words about that. Apple has made a very generous contribution to us to further the Aspirations in Computing program, to build the infrastructure to extend it in certain ways, so that it becomes a real robust, end-to-end engagement and innovation pipeline programs, so, I mean, I know you all will see, you know, many benefits from their support of this work, and we’re just very excited about it. Thank you Apple, very much. [audience applause] Finally, thanks to our media partners, we couldn’t have the livestream without our media partners. JupiterReturn, Microsoft, and Fablab. We really do appreciate it, I mean they bring cameras, they bring people, they bring production talent, they bring everything, and really help us get this content out there, and also archived, so you can come back and visit it again. So thanks to our media partners as well. [audience applause]