Czajkowski

Are you the parent of a young girl that likes to play with technology? If so, this competition from the Ubuntu Women project
is ideal for you.

To celebrate World Play Day ,the Ubuntu Women project is running a photography competition, with the prizes including a Dell Mini 10n netbook! To enter, just submit photos of the young girl in your family having fun with Ubuntu.

The competition aims to bust the stereotype that it’s only young boys that enjoy playing with computers, and to show young girls that they can play with anything they want – be that dolls and dressup, or the household PC.

The competition is open to everyone. You don’t have to be an active member of the Ubuntu / Ubuntu Women community to participate (although you’re always welcome to join us on IRC or the forums if you have the time!). We’re looking for a wide range of entries from all kinds of family.

The pictures will be judged on how well they promote the image that “girls love computers”.

Read on for full details of the competition.

A pivotal issue within computing cultures of today is the overemphasis on boys and men as the primary consumers of technology. Children learn by example and since the majority of media images consist of boys playing computer type games and girls playing with stereotypical princess type dolls; this contributes to the lack of involvement in science and technology by our young women.

We would love to have a collection of examples of young girls (toddlers through to 12 years old) playing with — and loving, and being encouraged to pursue — Ubuntu. This would allow parents of girls to demonstrate that it really is ok to be intrigued by the shiny screens, blinking lights, tappity-tap of keyboards, and faint whirs of computer fans.

The girls do not have to be alone in the photos, and photos taken prior to this announcement are eligible. We are not expecting any particular pose, but we would much prefer candid shots — they say SO much more. We do prefer that the images come at a large resolution, in a standard format (JPEG, PNG) and not embedded in documents. /

*Please email your photos (or links to flickr, etc.) to ubuntuwomen.competition at gmail.com by UTC 23:59 14th of May 2010.*

By submitting a photo, you acknowledge that it will be posted on the Ubuntu Women Website under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works license, with special considerations for use within the Ubuntu Women and Ubuntu project (please see Photo/Model Release waiver). If you prefer that your photo to be posted under a less restrictive license such as Creative
Commons Attribution  or Public Domain , then feel free to let us know when you submit. As this competition involves visual depictions of people, we will require that a “Photo/Model Release” waiver be signed for each person in the photo. A parent or guardian of minors must sign this waiver form for their children or charges.

There will be two (2) prizes up for grabs. One (1) prize will be given to the photo that the community feels sells the “girls love computers” line the best. One (1) prize will be given to a randomly drawn entrant. Jono Bacon, the Ubuntu Community Manager will be drawing this entrant in a videocast, and announcing both winners to the world on May 28th.

We will celebrate World Play Day by announcing the two winners. The first of whom will be the popular voted Community Choice, and will receive a Dell Mini 10n (or equivalent net-book based on availability). The second winner chosen by random drawing will receive a Canonical Sponsored Ubuntu SWAG collection that includes: Mouse- pad, Silly putty, Recycled Ubuntu Notepad, Ubuntu pen, Ubuntu lanyard, Ubuntu pack of 3 pin-badges and 1 Organic Circle of Friends Ladies T-shirt.

Oi oi! Oggcamp is taking place this weekend in Liverpool. It’s a free event, and in a barcamp  style, so easy relaxed and lots of interaction. It also means you can come along on the day and just give a talk! Everyone is welcome, and ideas for talks can be added to the wiki.

Oggcamp is being kindly run by the charming  of the Ubuntu UK Podcast and Linux Outlaws so it’s bound to be lot of fun and entertainment with them lot involved!

It takes place on Saturday and Sunday from 10am – 5pm at The Black-E, 1 Great George Street, Liverpool L1 5EW, England OpenStreetMap Google Maps

GEEKNIC – Friday as I’m around far too early and will be no doubt bored and have seen all that there is to see in Liverpool that is not Beatles related I’m going to go on a picnic! All are welcome.  I’ll be at the location below from 4pm, and tweeting where I can be found

St. Johns Garden which is close to shops, pubs in case it rains and tube station

Map of the location and Oggcamp Venue

OpenStreetMap Location

I’m not sure where all of the time is going on me, it seems to be vanishing into some deep dark black hole possibly with the missing socks that have  left their other halves behind!

In the last three months I’ve been involved in 3 largish events, OpenJam, OSSBarcamp and this weekend coming Oggcamp.  It’s been kinda hectic and exciting at the same time, though mental note, 3 events all starting with O gets very confusing fast! I’m looking forward to the weekend in Liverpool as I’ve never been there before and a chance to meet more new folks and hear what people are working on.

It’s been a crazy two weeks working one day and the next day being laid off it’s given me a chance to work on some other things and see what roles are out there. Took a few days off to myself and went home home to chill relax and walk and it’s amazing what fresh air does to help your focus and it’s all good then again.

Onwards and upwards.

Last weekend saw the Ubuntu Ireland team take part in the Ubuntu Global Jam. We did it slightly differently as I’m of the opinion if an event doesn’t fully work for your team tweak it a bit and it’ll work just as good.

We did just that, we invited many of the different user groups to come along and work on their projects together. This was great as we got to hear about all the other things they were doing and interest in projects were increased.

The morning started off slowly with me wiping my lovely mini 9 which came from Dell with hardy on it. It now has a clean install of Karmic on it. It would have been nice to be able to do an upgrade from hardy to Karmic but that wasn’t possible due to the install I got on the machine bought from Dell. *mutters*

Walking around the room and meeting people was great, putting faces to names as I am the worst person for remembering names! thankfully Qamir had brought along stickers so we could write our names and group on them which did help matters greatly!

Some groups broke off into smaller groups to work on their projects and hold small workshops and tutorials on their areas. This was great as it gave folks a chance to hear about the work that was being done and where they could get involved.

Finally lunch came which was very nicely sponsored by Microsoft , and a big thank you to Liam Cronin who helped arrange this and make it possible went down a treat with folks, much chatting at lunch and mingling happened which again was the point of the day.

Afternoon session kicked off with some lightning talks from some of the user groups that were there and hopefully some of them will be talking at OSSBarcamp in April.

While we man not have gotten as much as we’d have liked done on the Ubuntu side of things, we did get a lot of interest in the group. More people have joined our IRC channel and have offered to help.

Sunday I was bored ( it happens ) and sent a mail to the mailing list saying I was going to do some spring cleaning of our wiki pages and would be online. Folks joined in and we did a nice job, so well done.

The day could not have been possible without the help of David Scanlon from Enterprise Ireland. It’s great to see these groups come out and support Open Source here in Ireland.

Enterprise Ireland is the government agency responsible for the development and promotion of the indigenous business sector. Our mission is to accelerate the development of world-class Irish companies to achieve strong positions in global markets resulting in increased national and regional prosperity.

I’d like to see more of these events happen throughout the year here in Ireland as I think they are very beneficial to everyone involved and a lot of information was shared with one another. More pictures are here in the usual spot