2017 NCWIT Summit – Summit Welcome

LUCY SANDERS: Well, good morning, everybody. Yeah, yeah. I’m Lucy Sanders, I’m the CEO and Co-founder of NCWIT, and along with my other two co-founders, Bobby Schnabel and Telle Whitney, we are officially opening the 2017 NCWIT Summit. Woo! Woo-hoo! The summit is a super special event. It’s our community meeting and all of you, or most of you, are NCWIT members, this is our community. If we have visitors here, hopefully next year you’ll be here as part of the NCWIT community, and it has that really special community vibe. As you walk around and talk to people and think about going to the different workshops and sharing practices, and networking, and forming partnerships, it really is that special feeling and we’re all here because we’re united with one common purpose and that’s to increase representation in computing. So, yeah, say it, Brenda. Yeah, alright, good, so it’s a really, really special event and as I was out walking around yesterday because we had a full day of meetings yesterday as well, member meetings, people kept asking me, “How are you going to open the summit? “What are you gonna do?” ‘Cause you know of course that I usually show a vintage family photo, right? The more embarrassing, the better. And so, we were here four years ago and I used up my personal embarrassing vintage photo at the Great Canyon, so I had to figure out really what to do. And so, I thought, and thought, and thought, and it came– Whoop, it went back. Okay, I thought– Whoa, okay. Well, now it ruined it, okay, I thought and thought, and I came up with the… Who knows these people? Oh my God, are you all younger than me? It’s the Griswold family, National Lampoon’s Vacation, do you remember them? Clark, Ellen, Rusty, and Audrey, this is in Arizona when they had just become stranded in the desert and Clark was looking out into the distance trying to figure out how to rescue the family, right? How many people saw that movie? Oh, good. Well, so I thought, well, let’s use this photo to officially welcome you to Tucson. I’m waiting for my prompt back there.

MAN: But wait, there’s another photo?

LUCY SANDERS: Oh, wait, there’s another photo! What could that look like? Well… Isn’t that cute? Definitely looks like Arizona, doesn’t it? Yeah, and um… That is a vintage family photo. That’s my husband, Bruce, 15 years old. Aww, and his sister, Sheri. Don’t you see some similarities here? Hands on hips. Hands on hips. Arms straight down. Arms straight down. Looking a little disgusted. Looking just a little disgusted. As it turns out, Bruce was driving the Family Truckster from Louisiana to California at the legal age of 15. Don’t be scared to go to Louisiana because now it’s 17. But at that time, you could drive in Louisiana at 15. So, maybe the look on Sheri’s face is sheer terror of thinking that her brother was driving her across the country. Go, another prompt–

MAN: But, Lucy, we’ve never had two photos to welcome everybody to the summit before. What are we going to do?

LUCY SANDERS: We’ve never had two photos to welcome people to the summit before, so what are we gonna do? We could pick the Griswolds, or we could pick the Sanders. Or, technology could come to our rescue… And we could get both. Isn’t that just the best ever? What did we do without digital stuff? Amazing, so welcome, everybody, to Tucson, and welcome to the NCWIT Summit. We are in a very beautiful venue, it’s also very arid, and it’s hot. So, please hydrate yourself very well and also look out for these little folk. What is this? Javelina, and what letter does it start with?

AUDIENCE: J.

LUCY SANDERS: J, okay, you know they run in little packs. Last time we were here, a little herd attended our reception, do you remember that? They ran across the reception. They’re not really as cute as this, mostly. But when I was looking to find the cutest ever javelina picture, I found this. It’s pretty cute, don’t you think? Looks like you could pet it, but don’t do it. And I also discovered that there’s an award-winning child book called, Don’t Call Me Pig because javelinas aren’t pigs. Oh, so you can read all about javelinas and what they really are, and it’s pretty interesting if you care about those things. So, lots of excitement going on here in Tucson, as well as over the livestream. So officially, welcome our livestream viewers, let’s give them a round of applause. And in fact, we’re doing two new things with the livestream this year. Some of our members are hosting livestream viewing parties and they’re convening people and talking about the different plenaries and sessions that they see over the livestream. So, that’s exciting for us and that way we’re hoping to spread this message far and wide. We’re also, for the first time, having continuous content, but it’s super frustrating when you go to a livestream site and it’s black, there’s nothing there. And so, we’re going to dig into our archives and put some other summit plenaries and other things up on the livestream during the time when you all are off in workshops and on breaks. Very exciting. I wanted to just take a minute too and go through just a really small bit of information about what NCWIT is because I know there are new members here, and/or new people attending for their member organizations. NCWIT is a change leader network. We are an organization of organizations, almost 900 strong. K-12 through career, all of us care about significantly increasing the meaningful representation of girls and women in computing. And not just girls and women, but all groups that have been historically marginalized in computing. And that’s the united purpose that brings us here. NCWIT staff works hard all year long to convene all of you in different projects and programs, and round tables, and also the summit. We equip our change leaders with resources, data, resource tool kits, et cetera so that when you step out as change leaders, you do so based on evidence and not whim, super important. The research foundation that we have, we have wonderful research scientists working with us. I can’t say enough about them, can’t say enough about our Social Science Advisory Board really helping to keep us grounded on research and evidence, super important. And then, we unite change leader organization in common action platforms with the idea that when we act together for a critical national goal, we’re gonna get there faster, and we’re gonna get there more efficiently than if we only acted by ourselves. Change leader network, convene, equip, unite, that’s us, that’s you, and you’ve been doing amazing things this year. First of all, the community is growing nicely. We are at 900 members now, that’s amazing. This time last year, I think we were like 700. Yeah, and that’s due to you spreading the word. Talking about NCWIT, talking about our community, talking about our mission and our passion. It doesn’t just come from NCWIT staff, it comes from all of you as we grow this into a real movement. And so, we really need to keep getting the word out, and it’s not just about numbers, it’s not just about, oh, how many members do you have? It’s about what are you doing and you’re doing amazing things. First of all, we’re building a talent pipeline, some of the students are here today, you’re gonna meet them in just a moment. We have now, these are 2016 numbers, now we have 10,000 high school and college women in the aspirations in computing online community, 10,000, that’s huge. That’s huge! And you are doing that, you are getting the word out. You are offering scholarships, and internships, and jobs, and possibilities, and resources for these women. You are helping them persist, and look at that persistence rate. Almost 91% persistent post-secondary in some STEM-related field, and 77% in computing. Huge, huge persistence, and that’s because this community is essential for persistence. It’s not just a one-time exposure to computing that will help underrepresented groups persist. It has to be a longitudinal multi-touch point effort. Our research foundations teach us that. And it’s very diverse, very, very diverse group as well. Now, when these students get to post-secondary, we want them to graduate, right? And so, our university members are doing amazing work. Here, you can see the members who have been members of the academic alliance for two or more years show a much better graduation rate now in four-year degrees than non-members, right? It’s amazing, and this is kind of a lagging indicator. We’ve been working on this for over 10 years, but you know, it takes a while for those graduation rates to go up. A lot of hard, hard work by a number of our universities, by programs like extension services, by our extension services clients, by pacesetters, a lot of hard work on everybody’s part to get this to happen and then when they graduate, we want them to find a corporate technical culture that is welcoming and allows them to innovate. That allows they to bring their ideas, and their passion, and their hope for the future of technology into the workplace and create. This is just one survey from one member company that the workforce alliance and the entrepreneur alliance are on a roll. They really are starting to get this idea about technical culture, they’re really starting to get the idea that you must integrate it into your functional leadership, it’s not a job for somebody else. And they need to get bias out of their meetings, out of their business processes, et cetera. So, they’re really on a roll, we hope to have even more companies next year, we’re starting, we have about 10 companies that are really after this right now, very large companies and smaller companies as well. So good progress there. Now, however, we’re not done, so here we are at the summit. What are we doing here? Well, we’re connecting the research, it’s super important, I just said that. These are some of the topics we talk about. It’s really important as a goal for all of you to know what these things mean at some point. Maybe not right here at the summit over the next couple days, but get working knowledge of these research topics because as change leaders, we need to be grounded in research. So, we definitely connect to research, you’ll be hearing more. We also share practices as a community, we need to share. We need to share what works, what doesn’t work, we need to share our questions. We need to help people come up with answers. So, we’re out there doing that as part of our networking in our workshops and breakouts, et cetera. And then we also celebrate. Communities celebrate the accomplishments of each other. And so, we have little celebrations and awards sprinkled through the summit as we go. Celebration is super important, it keeps us inspired and we need to give that celebration to each other. We did also ask you why you were coming. About 200 people told us when you registered and we don’t have to go through all these but you can see the various things that people are interested in. Again, very good change leader things to be doing. So, outreach, or learning how to mentor or teach better, raising awareness, et cetera, so lots of good reasons why you’re here. And so, let’s just get a bit into the schedule before we get into our first session. So, you may have noticed we mixed it up again this year. We had all of our member meetings yesterday, or most, right? Did you like that, did that work out well for people?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Yes.

LUCY SANDERS: Okay, good, so now today we have all new content. So, this is the content day, this is that day were you can come and listen to speakers and go to workshops that you may not agree with all of them. But you’ll be learning something. So, the idea is to challenge you as change leaders, to think and to be mindful of learning new things. So, this is the schedule for today, you also have it on your app and in your program and another thing to point out about it is that we are not doing workshops and running them twice this year. We have one 90-minute session that you can pick from, different types of things, and then we have one 60-minute session. The reason why we did that was because we found 60 minutes wasn’t enough to have these truly interactive experiences, it just wasn’t enough time. So, we thought well, let’s try this, let’s have 90-minute interactive sessions, 60-minute, they’re still gonna be interactive, but not as much of a workshopy feel because they’re just not long enough. So, there’ll be different conversations that you can participate in. Oh, wait. Don’t forget the Wine and Cheese Reception. We’re gonna put a book fair with it this year, very excited. So you can come and look at– We have many authors here this year and they want to share their books. So, we thought, well, that’ll be fun, let’s have a book fair. Tomorrow we close with another award, it’s kind of a media day. Margot’s coming, the author of Hidden Figures. She also has a research project, The Human Computer Research Project I think, so she’ll be delivering the final keynote. And then we’ll have a grab-and-go lunch, and we’ll go. Alright, so a few reminders before we get going. Uh-oh. Oh, okay. Who has not downloaded the NCWIT Summit app? Oh, no, okay, download if everything’s there, alright? And we have a custom of doing really short introductions so we can just get to the content. So, if you have questions about speakers, look at their bios on the app and find out who they are and read a little something about them ’cause we’re not gonna go into laborious detail for the sake of time. So, please do that. And also, those of you who were in meetings yesterday may have noticed that we’re trying to simplify summit evaluation. Bite-size it, that should be like B-Y-T-E, I think. But bite-size it, make it smaller so that you can answer evaluation questions right in the moment for most things, so you’re not gonna get this really long meeting survey a few weeks after the summit. So, please participate with our pilot, you’ll be asked to evaluate a session and please evaluate it like right on the spot with your summit app so that we can get evaluation data. Last but not least, we would not have any of this without our program sponsors. And as you know, NCWIT really doesn’t charge nonprofits for membership, we don’t charge a registration fee for the summit, but our program sponsors really go the distance in helping us bring you all the different programs to summit, et cetera, so let’s give them a round of applause. Likewise, our communities are brought to you by sponsors and also the livestream and so, let’s give them a round of applause as well.

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