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User Group for ITPro Women - kickoff meeting May 18, 3pm EST

Microsoft

Here’s the info for our kickoff event for the User Group for ITPro Women. Please spread the word!

 

The goals for the first meeting are:

  1. Meet others working in the ITPro space
  2. Talk about a name for the group
  3. Figure out what kind of content we want to cover – technical? Business skills? Diversity and inclusion issues? All of the above?
  4. Discuss logistics of getting/giving mentoring (tip – check out the Community Mentors Program forum)

 

Based on votes on the thread, it seems like Fridays afternoons EST are the best time. I know the timing isn’t great for Europe or Australia, and even worse for India. If we get more people interested in those areas, I’d be happy to set up a second call at a better time – please encourage people in your areas to join in on the announcement thread with their preferred times and time zones. I’ll post the notes about the first meeting back on this forum afterwards for anyone who can’t make it.

 

Let's go for Friday, May 18 at 3pm EST, which translates to:

New York City

3pm/15:00

Paris

9 pm/21:00

New Dehli

Saturday 12:30 am/00:30

London

8 pm/20:00

Chicago

2 pm/14:00

Seattle

Noon/12:00

Brisbane

Saturday, 5 am/05:00

 

Try to join by computer if you can – here are some tips: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Join-a-Skype-for-Business-meeting-3862be6d-758a-4064-a016-6...

Scroll to the bottom of the article for information about joining with a web app or with phone only.

 

You can download the .ics invite attached to this post and save it to your calendar.

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12 Replies

Hi Cathy, will this Skype meeting be recorded?

Hi, @Sonia Cuff I'm not sure - I figured I'd ask the people on the call if they have any reasons why we shouldn't record. If everyone is cool with it, I can record it and post here. I'm guessing this session will be mostly organizing, but I can imagine having some topics that might be more sensitive and people might be more reluctant to talk openly if they know it will be recorded. Regardless, I will post the notes here. 

Thanks Cathy. Recording does make it easier for us in different timezones to be involved as we can review and join the post event conversations, but I understand your point too. I'm no good to anyone at 5am on a Saturday morning : )

Many thanks for your update!

 

Best,

 

Tara W.

Hello everyone,

 

I think this group is a great idea, unfortunately I will not be able to attend directly.

Will the link to the recording be posted in theis Thread?

 

Cheers

Sabine

Notes will definitely be reported here - whether we record or not depends on participants at the call. If it would inhibit anyone from speaking openly, we'll just go with notes, but if everyone is cool with it, we'll record.


If the Friday time doesn't work for you, please let me know what times might work better. We may be able to do other time slots to help accommodate work and family and time zone issues. :)

Great session, looking forward to the next one!

I couldn't make this meeting, but I definitely want to be involved in the future.  Looking forward to hearing the recording.

I am super excited at how the meeting went!! I think we had 36 people total show up, and we had some great discussion. Here are my top observations:

  1. There are women (and men) who are very excited to see a group like this for ITPros. There's a lot for devs, and not that it isn't wonderful to have women devs, but we need to encourage women to be ITPros as well. 
  2. A lot of women end up as ITPros as "accidental admins" or by obtaining industry certifications rather than studying it in school. But there are ITPro degree programs, and we should make sure girls know about all of their options, not just "code code code". 
  3. As we move from traditional IT management to cloud-based modern management, this is a great time for women to jump into the ITPro world. 
  4. The group is interested in talking about all kinds of topics - guest speakers, tech content, lighting talks, business skills

Calls to action:

Let's start doing some serious networking - use this User Group forum to post

  1. introductions - I will kick off an Intro thread and tell us more about your journey into the ITPro world
  2. regional threads so you can find who lives/works near you
  3. tech-based threads so you can find who works with the same technologies you do
  4. event threads so we can know which women are going to events like ITDev Connections or Ignite, or to user group meetings (virtual or face to face) and we can go together

(TIP - you can use Private Messaging in this Tech Community to safely exchange contact information)

 

Get info about how to be a mentor/find a mentor here
 

 

Other notes from the meeting

I will start a thread to consider the name for the group - we had some great suggestions in the chat that I will pull out, but I ran out of time to do it today. (Or if someone wants to beat me to it, go for it!)

 

The Friday slot seemed to work well for a good number of people, so we'll keep that as a recurring meeting. I'm proposing the 4th Friday of the month, so I will create a Skype invite for June 22, 3pm Eastern time. HOWEVER, I know it doesn't work well for everyone, so if you live in Europe or down under or Asia, we can have additional recurring meetings that work better for your time zone, and may also work better for people in the US who have other commitments. Start a thread and suggest times that work for you for your region/time zone. 

 

I will try to attach the chat transcript and recording for the meeting today to this post. 

I did record, but my Skype recording didn't work. OneNote to the rescue! 

 

Thanks for all the interest. I think there is enough excitement that we can keep this going!

best response confirmed by Deleted
Solution

I"m having trouble getting the OneNote recording posted - let me talk to the TechCommunity admins and see if I can post it Monday. Have a great weekend everyone! 

Sorry for the delay - here's the recording. It's only audio, from OneNote, and there's some dead air at the beginning, but here you go!

https://8gportalvhdsf9v440s15hrt.blob.core.windows.net/videos/Diversity%20and%20Tech/User%20Group%20...

I love this meetup! How can I invite my coworkers to it?
1 best response

Accepted Solutions
best response confirmed by Deleted
Solution

I"m having trouble getting the OneNote recording posted - let me talk to the TechCommunity admins and see if I can post it Monday. Have a great weekend everyone! 

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