Recently, after being an active member of the Brighton Girl Geeks Group since early 2007, and having seen the group fade away as the organizing members became too busy to continue, I have teamed up with Rosie Sherry and Val Cartei and resurrected the group.  I gained an awful lot from the original group, from lots of great new friends to a new job, and was very sad to see the meetings slowly dwindle away to nothing.  Together we decided that we could bring back Girl Geeks and add a slight change in theme.

In the past, Girl Geek meetings would consist of a female business woman or technologist coming to the group and giving a 30-45 minute talk, followed by a buffet and some socialization (and rather a lot of booze from memory).  This was a lot of fun, but frequently the speakers were from outside of the Brighton area and spoke on topics that very few members of the group were passionate about.  What we wanted to create with the new group was a greater sense of sharing why we, as girl geeks from Brighton, classified ourselves as geeks and what we are passionate about.  It was this sense of a community collaborating and sharing the knowledge and interests within the group that we wished to foster.  Of course we still want to bring in new speakers from various areas of technology and the internet from around the world, but we also wanted to provide a forum from within the group as well.

In order to kick this off, I was somewhat volunteered to do the first event.  So on December 2nd 2008, I gave my talk; Batteries Not Included: A Beginners Guide to Building Robots.  Surprisingly for me, as I never present anything, it all went extremely well.  Despite a few technical hitches including some last minute soldering of one of the bots with a soldering iron borrowed off one of the attendees and porting the presentation from mac to windows just beforehand as the projector did not work with macs, the talk went smoothly, all the robots worked in the demo’s and everyone had a good time.

After the talk a number of people came up to me and said that being shown how simple it was to get started has inspired them to start robot building themselves.  This is exactly what I had wanted to achieve from both the talk and this blog and so it was heartening to hear people tell me that this had worked.  I am hoping to take the momentum generated by the event and use it to start a Brighton robotics group where enthusiasts and hobbyists can get together to share knowledge and experience and build their own robots.

Thank you everyone for making it such a good night.  You can watch the video that Rosie took of the event here.

Girl Geek Dinner - Emily Toop on Robots from Rosie Sherry on Vimeo.