[peppy music]
LUCY SANDERS: I’m Lucy Sanders. I’m the CEO and co-founder of NCWIT. [cheering and applause] Whoo! And I’d like to welcome you to the 2016 NCWIT Members Summit. On behalf of myself and other co-founders Bobby Schnabel and Telle Whitney, I promised I would call out, who’s right there. And also our board or directors who met earlier today also in the audience. So, welcome. I know that many of you know we move the summit around the country. So we won’t be back here next year. We’ll be someplace else. But it is my custom also to open the summit with some somewhat embarrassing family photo. Related to the location of the summit in that year. I used to only show embarrassing photos of myself, but now I’ve taken to showing embarrassing photos of my family members as well. So with that, welcome to Las Vegas. Our son, our oldest son Zack, is in the back of that photo looking at you, with the glasses on, and hat. Obviously playing poker. Zack got his Computer Science degree, and he actually supported himself for 18 months using that Computer Science degree. And then he decided to become a professional poker player. [laughter] Okay, okay, all you professors, just hold on. It was in the day of Bringing Down the House, you know, so he actually did support himself. He didn’t move back in with my husband and myself. I don’t think, right, I don’t think, okay. And he did support himself as a professional poker player for at least several years. Now he runs his own IT security company, [mumbles] hacker. So again, all of our educators here, yes, the degree really did pay off, just not right away, upon graduation. Now I wanted Zack to come and give you tips about how to not lose money in Las Vegas. And conveniently he is at the wedding of one of his best friends in Mexico and sends his regrets. But he did send along some email tips for you. And if you’d like I’ll send you his email address and you can ask him more questions. Okay, here we go. Alright, now, every parent or anybody who has a young person in their life must be really, really impressed that he used budget in here, right? How many times do you see budget? But basically the idea is this. Set a budget, play low stakes, have more fun. You’re eventually gonna lose it all anyway, but you may as well have fun while you’re doing it. Number two, there’s all kinds of games. I don’t know much about the game, particularly, but there are card games, there’s craps, there’s all kinds of machines. How many people had to walk through the casino? It’s mind blowing, right, all the different kinds of machines. There’s all kinds of odds and different pay off on full house or flush or jack or I don’t know, I can’t even say it. Or better game, you can read it. But I think the salient point here is, If you find a 9:1 or 6:1 better machine, sit there forever. So really the corollary to this is if you see somebody sitting at a machine forever, just lurk. Because you know they’re gonna have to leave sometime. So, just look for the places where people are camping out and make note of them. Don’t learn how to play poker here. [laughter] Okay, this is where you may want his email address. But there’s a tremendous amount of talent in poker even in the lower-stakes games. Are any of you poker high rollers in here? Not a single one. I was gonna make a shameless pitch that if you go and play poker and you win a lot that you remember your favorite nonprofit. Okay, well, good. So don’t learn how to play here. You can play these machines everywhere. Yes, they’re in supermarkets. You probably saw them in the airport. I think the fact that they’re in churches is a joke. Actually. But the trick here is don’t play at any machine where there’s a lot of foot traffic going by. Because it’s just impulsive kind of stuff. That they’re putting out in front of you. Tip number five, the last one, is don’t play. [laughter] So, I mean, those years were valuable years for our son Zack. He learned a lot. And it was kind of funny because we would have people come up to us in those years and they’d go, what is Zack doing with that really cool Computer Science degree that you paid so much money for? Right. And I said, well, you know, professional poker player. And the reaction was usually one of two things on some spectrum. On one end of the spectrum it’s like, that is so cool. Wow. Is he winning? You must be really proud. And on the other end of the spectrum there was silence. And they would say, we’ll pray for you. [laughter] So now he’s running an IT security company and all is well. Alright, so, welcome to Vegas. I did all of that, and welcome to our summit. This is your meeting. This is our annual members meeting. This is all about you and the great work you are doing in your organizations to make change all year long. We come together once a year at the summit. For those of you who don’t know or are new to NCWIT, I apologize to the people who have heard me say this three times already today. NCWIT is an organization of organizations. We’re a change leader network. Over 700 organizations across the whole pipeline, K12 through academic and corporate and start-up careers. All working all year round to significantly increase girls’ and women’s meaningful participation in computing. NCWIT staff has the very distinct pleasure of convening all of you and working with you in project management and thinking about the things you need within your own organizations. We equip you with the best resources and tools and data and so forth so that when you do stuff as change leaders you do so based on evidence and not whim or anecdote. And then we unite you into common action platforms where we set national goals and then we work on them together. With the idea being that together we’re stronger than if we just acted alone. Within our own organization. So what do we do at this summit? A few things. Number one, we, it’s kind of like a giant professional development conference for change leaders. So the first thing we do here is we connect ourselves to what research says is true and effective. We generally do that in plenary sessions such as this one. These are sort of interlocking puzzle pieces because the social science research theory relates to each other, of course. It’s in a rough chronological order from when we first started research oriented plenary sessions, when we first started talking about unconscious bias. And then when you move towards the right, you see that we’re talking now about systemic change. Changing cultures. Really looking at processes and thinking about how to mitigate and/or reduce unconscious bias. We’ve also been talking a lot lately about intersectionality or intersecting identities, and we’re gonna continue that at this summit as well. So super important that we, that we really educate ourselves and be grounded in what research says is true. Otherwise we stand to fall prey to check-box solutions that just don’t do any good. So this is a very important part of what we do, again generally in the plenary sessions. But we have to connect that research to action. We have to take practical applications. We need to really try to drive that down into practice. And so we do a lot of that. Our plenary speakers will do some, but a lot of where this happens is tomorrow in our workshops, our plenaries, and our empower hours where you’ll be working with other members across alliances to think about, how do you take research on gross mindset and use it to give better feedback to students? Or use it to give better feedback at work. How does that really drive to practical applications? For example. We also do this at our alliance meetings where we work with other corporations or universities like ourselves or start-up companies where we start to share best practice and also K12 nonprofits. What’s working, what’s not? What kind of curriculum are we using? What kind of pedagogy are we using? So that happens, this whole drive to practical application, mostly tomorrow. We do have some plenary sessions tomorrow as well. But this is the kind of thing that we do in our breakouts and our workshops. And we also celebrate. We’re gonna celebrate in every part of a plenary session we’ll have a few awards. We have some really wonderful and inspirational accomplishments represented in this room. And we think it’s important that we celebrate together, in plenary. So that we can congratulate our colleagues and also learn from the things that they’ve been doing as a group. So, connection to research, drive to practical application, and also celebrate. And of course network. And we also party. So also have great receptions and fun times. Another thing that I wanted to point out is a move towards action. Super important that we are all in action now at this stage of where we are as organizations. And so I’m not gonna describe these graphics to you. But you’ll see them in your alliance meeting, this move towards a change model if you will. As a matter of fact, as we change our organizations it’s not just one thing. It’s not just recruiting. It’s not just recruiting and retention in our top leadership. It’s not just curriculum or pedagogy. It’s a combination, it’s a cluster, it’s an ecosystem of things that we would call a change model. So when you registered for our annual summit, we asked you to list what you were hoping to get out of it. It’s the first time you’ve ever done it? I’m happy to see that over 50% of you actually told us. So we were very excited about that. And we took your responses and we coded them into these change model words. With me so far? We took what you said, we go, oh, we had one of our researchers take a look at that and map it into these change models. Pretty cool. And here’s why you’re here. According to, lots of you are here to learn how to recruit better. Not too surprising. To teach better, better curriculum. All the way down, you can see role models, evaluation. The fact that leadership support is down at the bottom, I don’t know what to make of that. What I’m hoping that all of you already have top leadership support. No? [laughs] Okay, we’ll work on that. Okay. Some quotes as well. Some fun stuff in here. A lot of people wanting to work on men as advocates, on removing bias from learning situations, or from their organizations. To network, to be sponges. All kinds of things in terms of what you wanna do. Some really big ideas. For example a new course on legal and ethical issues in computing using some of NCWIT’s resources, assuring that every child has access to a rigorous, relevant and inclusive computer science curriculum. It’s like a huge idea. Somebody wants to write and advocate for more women in venture capital. Really big ideas. I say let’s give us all a round of applause here. These are great. Really good stuff. [applause] So you’ve probably seen stickers. People seen the stickers? Not yet. You’ll see them. We made a set of stickers coded to these action areas, and we’re hoping that you’ll find your stickers of choice and put them on your badge. So that when you meet people you’ll say, oh, you care about curriculum or you care about pedagogy or something else. It’s sort of an icebreaker or as a way to share more why you’re here. They will be at the reception, is that correct? I think they will be at, yes, Malia said yes. At the reception. Alright, I can’t get off stage without thanking our programmatic sponsors. These are our financial sponsors for all of our NCWIT programs. We wouldn’t have programs without these people who finance them, so thank you very much to them. And also, we are now starting to have specific sponsors for the summit. And these wonderful people help offset the costs of our community receptions and also the live streaming. So, yes, we do have a live stream, and I wanna welcome people watching remotely over that live stream. We’ll have it for every plenary session but one. So check your listing for that. But we’ll have it for every plenary session but one. And with that, it’s on with the program. So the person who will speak first knows more about corporate governance and leadership than anybody I know. Pat Russo has held really technical leadership positions at AT&T, Alcatel-Lucent, IBM. And she is currently the chair of the board of HP Enterprise. And she’s been recognized in so many ways I can’t even count them all. Her bio by the way, in your handy mobile app or in your program, you can read more. Time’s Most Influential. Fortune’s Most Powerful Women. My favorite title for her is Boss. [laughter] I work for Pat, and I’m really not telling the full truth. She was actually my boss’ boss’ boss’ boss’ boss. Or somewhere like that. But I was always like super impressed by her effective leadership, and also her graciousness as a leader. And a very rare combination of strengths often that she had, and truly, truly passionate around diversity and inclusion. She’s on her way to an HPE board meeting. We actually tried to convince her to just not go. But when you’re the chair I guess you have to go. I thought it’d be great if she could just spend ten minutes or so giving you remarks about the need for accelerating women and members of other underrepresented groups into the top levels of computing leadership. And so I’m really super thrilled she can be here, and then she’s gonna help us with our first two awards. Then we’re gonna have a plenary. That’s the plan. So with that please do welcome Pat Russo to stage.