“It’s one of those events that stays with you”
#TDW16 — thoughts and insights
2016 saw our inaugural Thinking Digital Women event in collaboration with Newcastle University held at the fantastic Northern Stage.
We welcomed atendees from across the UK to help us celebrate, discuss, and learn about Women’s role in S.T.E.M., innovation, industry and more.
Getting hands on
Our pre-event workshops were held across our partner Newcastle University’s campus and covered a broad range of future looking topics such as biometrics, robotics, design, sensors and more.
One group even coded a group of mini robots — a ‘crumblebot’ — to race around a track. Not your ordinary beginning to a conference.
Inspiring Talks
After a morning of hands on learning we got into the main event. The day was expertly compared by TDC founder Herb Kim and co-host (and speaker) Emer Maguire.
We had a dozen speakers throughout the late morning and early afternoon, all of which informed, inspired and entertained us. Below is a flavour of some of the talks. (psst… many of these talks will be available on our YouTube channel — subscribe here to be first to see them)
European Space Agency engineer Amanda Regan got the day off to a great start with an empowering talk about self-confidence.
Jessie Link gave us a peek around the curtain on of one of Twitters biggest new product developments, in Twitter Live Video. Explaining how the UK based developer team have been responsible for one of the most technically demanding and important product development in recent times.
Dropbox’s Global Head Of Diversity Judith Williams explained how diversity drives innovation. Judith highlighted issues seen across the tech sector “In Silicon Valley we see a lot of ‘just-like-me’ bias” and drawing a comparison between being inclusive v. being included. “Not everyone can/wants to socialise with their team mates at a bar!”
Robot Humanist Alex Rueben explored the fine line between technology and humanity.
The entertaining and incredible Meri Williams (CTO Moo) demanded more than just ‘tolerance’ in the workplace, tackling tough subjects such as diversity and priviledge with entertaining and pertinent stories from her life.
And Finally
The day went off without a hitch and we’ve been blown away by the blogs, emails, and social media thanks and praise that followed in the days and weeks after.
But this was a team effort…
We’d like to give a huge thanks to all of our speakers, sponsors, volunteers, the Northern Stage and Newcastle University team, the TDC team, and our new and exisiting community of Thinking Digital attendees.
Want to watch the talks?
The great news is many of the talks fromt he day will be on our YouTube channel very soon. All you need to do to see them first is to subscribe here.
In the meantime we’ve compiled a playlist of women speakers from across the years to have graced the Thinking Digital stage.
