User Group for ITPro Women

[Cathy Moya]

Are you interested in helping support women ITPros, and support women moving into community leadership roles in the ITPro community? We're starting a virtual User Group for ITPro Women.

Join us! 

There are lots of organizations that want to help women code, but we want to focus more on women who keep the code running, doing work like:

• day-to-day operation of networks, servers, clients, and devices
• help desk
• network architecture design
• information security management

We also want to include women who work in other aspects of information technology aimed at keeping clients and servers up and running, like

• program/project/people management related to IT
• technical training
• technical marketing
• technical communications

We'll welcome anyone of any gender who wants to participate in a safe space to talk about the challenges women face in a field with a lack of gender diversity. The goals are to network, support women learning technical and professional skills, and help women find mentors.

If you're interested in participating, reply to this post and tell me:

1. What are the best times of day for you to Skype into a meeting? (please include your time zone)
2. What should we call this new user group? 

If there's interest, I'll pick a time and post the information here for our first virtual meeting.
(subscribe to this conversation to get email updates)

Please spread the word!

[#2]

This is awesome! I subscribed and hope others will too.

[#3]

Thanks, Ami! And thanks for being a great role model for ITPro women! I'd love to see more women MVPs in our ITPro space.

[#4]

The best times are after 3 pm EST any day.

I like the name Women in IT 

Mary Beth Moore

Professor of Computer Information Systems

Potomac State College of West Virginia University

[#5]

I love this idea ! I’m in, subscribing as we speak. I’m in the CET timezone

[#6]

I'm in - thanks for extending the invitation to those of us in technical comms and marketing. After 12pm PT works best for me. We are IT!

[#7]

Hi Cathy,
I would love to be part of this group. My timings are in IST.

Regards
Salakshi

[#8]

I'm in - from north of the border in Canada - time zone EST....

As far as a name goes....let me think about that...  :)

What a great idea - working remotely for 18 years but I feel that I do have my experiences on this topic.

[#9]

Great initiative, I’m definitely interested.
Friday mornings would be best time for me.

[#10]

Jo from the Uk. I can do calls at 9am most days. Or 4.30pm most days.

Call the group "Ladies who Tech"

[#11]

Great idea! I would definitely participate. My recommendation between 2pm-5pm EST. I’d have to give some thought to a name

[#12]

Fantastic idea!

Mornings are best for me (CDT)

[#13]

Great idea! Thank you!

[#14]

Great initiative! Would love to join! I am in the CET time zone.

[#15]

Finally; thank you so much! I would love to join - CST. 

[#16]

Great idea.  I'm in!

I'm in the Eastern Time Zone and have a flexible schedule.

[#17]

Count me in. 

I saw a 3pm EST time...that's good for me, too.

[#18]

Fantastic! We need supportive male allies, too! Spread the word!

[#19]

BTW: Ami (Casto) puts on a fantastic Women in Tech event at IT/Dev Connections.

[#20]

Great idea!

I'm mostly best in the mornings (CDT) and early afternoons.

Names, that's the tricky part. If we want to be inclusive...

• GeeksRUs
• NotBASIC or !BASIC (I have nothing against BASIC, mind you)
• Viral Linguists (not sure if this really means anything)
• Geekers
• Dataformers 

[#21]

1) Friday afternoons, PST.

2) I'm bad at naming things.

[#22]

Great idea, Friday afternoons are great, CST. Naming, WITP, or WIP.

[#23]

Hello from Denmark! :)

I love that this is about the women running the servers, network etc. Personally, I don't think, I have ever met another woman working with servers and network in all my years in the hosting business.

I like the name Women in Tech

[#24]

Great initiate! Subscribing. I am in CET , can join after 4 pm.
Application Support engineer, starting journey to C# , bachelor degree in English philology ended up in IT, and I am loving it!

[#25]

I would love to be a part of this! As a sysadmin, I find very few of the diversity or women in tech things are applicable to me because I'm not a coder!

Timezone is AEST, so anytime other than early morning would be amazing. Most other international user groups I've seen seem to run at 1 to 5am AEST :(

As for a name? I honestly have no idea. It's hard to find something that sums up the many facets of IT that aren't necessarily coding.

[#26]

This is really interesting! I'm in UK timezone but can usually be pretty flexible on times. 

[#27]

For me best time would be after 3 pm eastern time.

[#28]

This is awesome! I am in the Eastern time zone and fridays or mondays work pretty well for me.

Melanie

[#29]

I love this idea. I'm in EST and after 2PM is best for me.

[#30]

Great idea!  I'm in CDT and CST, and early mornings or afternoons work for me (9 to 11am usually book up quickly).

[#31]

Exciting idea! I am interested and best availability is Monday and Friday during lunch time.

[#32]

Such a good idea - I'm not sure I fit some of the spec but I absolutely will assist on getting word out via Twitter and LinkedIn if this launches. 

I'm on Pacific Time - best times for me would be between 3pm-4pm PT, or 10am-ish PT.

Re: names, I'd suggest names that are easy to surface when women are searching online for where to connect and learn - and the problem with "IT" is, well...it resolves in search to "it" too often.
So, maybe: InfoTechWomen, with hashtags like #WomenInTech and #DevOps to help us reach more women?

[#33]

Thanks, Lori, if you're not sure if you meet the target group, come anyway! We are inclusive! And thanks for getting the word out. :)

[#34 · Accepted solution]

Hi, @sarahmoore210 - what time zone are you in?

[#35]

That's awesome because this is the perfect place to meet other women in tech (yes, even those who run servers, networks and manage datacenters) around the world! :)

[#36]

You're in the right place because this community is primarily geared towards IT Pros (aka very important people who manage day-to-day operations and management of IT systems and all the good stuff)! Welcome to the community :)

[#37]

British

[#38]

Thanks for creating this opportunity! I am in EST zone and after 3 pm works for me.

[#39]

Hey @Cathy Moya - I'm working on a MS O365 Community Survey (think of it as sort of an Office 365 focused "selfie" for admins and IT teams using that tech) - would this group might be a good place to share it? 

I also have a question for you and others who are interested in the User Group for ITProWomen - if I were to have my employer, who'd sponsor the survey, donate to a non-profit for each unique completed survey...would that be a stronger motivator for people to participate than, say, if a survey responder got a coffee card?

[#40]

Interesting question! Wanted to share my 2 cents - I think it really depends on the survey respondent (i.e whether they place an emphasis on more self-gratification, or adopt a more altruistic mindset/are passionate about that particular nonprofit) - perhaps you can provide them with two options - 1) Donate to a good cause like GirlsWhoCode, or 2) Coffee card and see which people end up picking :) Definitely makes people think about where they want that money to go, and the results may surprise you!

[#41]

Very cool idea - even though responders will be able to remain anonymous, I plan to ask some demographic Qs, and the "altruism / self-interest" divide might be an interesting datapoint to share here. Thanks much!

[#42]

---

Hi, @Lori Witzel

I hope this fledgling community will have lots of people using Office 365, but the Terms of Use for the TechCommunity site prohibit using Microsoft "Communication Sites" (like this one) "in connection with surveys." Sorry about that! The way I read the ToS, it would be fine to post questions and see what people say in reply, but I think it wouldn't be OK to post a link to a survey. 

The question about motivating people is interesting. I don't know if there's any research on that. I know for me, I'm one of those odd people who really enjoy taking surveys and doing User Research studies, so I don't care if there's a gratuity in any form - I just want my opinion heard! If it's a long or complicated survey, though, I think it can help if there's a specific motivation for completing the survey. I just don't know if a personal or altruistic reward would be more motivating. Probably depends on the person. It would be cool if you could do some A/B testing on it! 

---

[#43]

I have posted the invite information for the first meeting! 

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/User-Groups/User-Group-for-ITPro-Women-kickoff-meeting-May-18...

Please tweet/blog/share with anyone you know who might be interested. 

And if this time/day doesn't work for you, we'll have others. Keep "voting" by including your preferred times and time zones. 

Thanks all for your interest! 

[#44]

This is great! I am available from 10am-4pm Sydney Time. Looking forward to this. :)

[#45]

Super excited to see how this goes! :)

[#46]

---

Me too, @ShonaBang! I figure it's an experiment. We'll probably have to try a few things and a few times before we hit on something that works for most. And maybe we'll spawn other groups for more specialized interests or other time zones. But we'll start here and see what happens! :D 

[#47]

I like to women to be engage in IT career, need mentors to train them and how to pass interviews to land a job in which they’re want to progress.

[#48]

I love the idea. I'm on the East Coast, Friday afternoons are usually the best time for me but I am pretty flexible.

[#49]

Hi, @Tony Richards, I hope you can join us for the first one, Friday May 18 - details here!

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/User-Groups/User-Group-for-ITPro-Women-kickoff-meeting-May-18... 

[#50]

Dear Ms. Moya:

I am interested in joining your virtual user group for IT Pros.

I am a front-end web developer in-training. I also write about secure coding, cybersecurity and related topics for BugHeist, a software and hardware bug reporting and remediation website.

Ideally, I am interested in coordinating virtual meetings from 10:30 a.m.-1:30 p.m.

Thank you so much for your time and consideration.

Sincerely,

Tara Williams