Ada Lovelace Day

About Guest Poster, Helen Whitehead

Helen Whitehead is co-founder and Director of Reach Further Ltd. Reach Further works with businesses, educational & membership organisations to adopt & embed social and collaborative technologies to deliver learning & commercial advantage. Follow Helen on Twitter.

Ada Lovelace Day

A few years ago I worked at Nottingham Trent University and spent a fair amount of time in Ada Byron King House, the home of the Education Faculty. I’m remembering that today because it’s Ada Lovelace Day, an international day of blogging organized by Suw Charman-Anderson to draw attention to women excelling in technology. It’s appropriate because even then I was working with some inspiring women who used technology in  social ways to build community and to collaborate on creative projects (mostly as part of the trAce Online Writing Centre from 1995-2005, archived at tracearchive.

Ada Byron King was born Augusta Ada, daughter of the poet, Lord Byron. Later she become the Countess of Lovelace when her husband William King, whom she married in 1835, was created an Earl in 1838. It’s entirely possible that in attempting to ensure that her daughter did not follow in the footsteps of her poet father (who separated from Ada’s mother a month after she was born and died when she was 8 years old) Lady Byron may have encouraged the “opposite” interest – mathematics. Ada showed a natural aptitude in the world of mathematics and worked closely with Charles Babbage, inventor of the Analytical Engine. She described how the Analytical Engine could be programmed and detailed what many consider to be the first ever computer program.

While the numbers of Ada’s most obvious successors – female programmers and the like in traditional IT – are falling, women are now making their mark in the more social and creative aspects of the digital industries. My fellow experts at Web 2.0 Surgery Caron-Jane Lyon, a Social Media and Virtual Worlds advisor and Susi O’Neill, creative industries and digital media consultancy are cases in point. Women are not slow to see the advantages that web technologies offer for flexible and remote working – I myself work from home in Nottingham three days a week for the consultancy I founded, Reach Further, which offers specialist services in the areas of social media, elearning, flexible working and online communities.

Fifteen years ago, when I first started creating communities on the Web, we were seen as weird (I almost typed wired!) geeks and the people we talked to asked why on earth would anyone want to “talk” online? In 2009, after creating a number of successful online communities and networks for universities, businesses, membership organisations and the UN, suddenly ‘online community’ is mainstream, and I put that at least partly down to more women taking to the Web. And once they’ve pushed the children and male partners off the games sites, women like to do social things. As they say – it’s good to talk!