Queen Mary University of London is set to host an international conference for women interested in using open technologies in digital arts, social innovation and creative industries.
On Friday 8 and Saturday 9 November, Flossie 2013 comes to Queen Mary’s Mile End campus, bringing together women with diverse backgrounds, crossing disciplines and sectors, to diversify thinking and spark new ideas.
Their focus is on the use of technologies with universal access via public license to the product's design, for the benefit of research, knowledge, data and education.
Flossie is an annual event founded by Paula Graham at Fossbox CIC - now also resident as Creative Entrepreneur in Queen Mary's School of Business and Management - and organised by a group of volunteers: a mix of coders, creatives, open knowledge advocates, social innovators, activists and researchers, including Queen Mary PhD student Nela Brown.
Nela, who is an artist, musician and designer, is involved in a number of initiatives promoting and supporting female participation in Science, Engineering and Technology, including WISE@QMUL and female tech collective GHack. She has been shortlisted for the WISE Leader Award at the Women in Science and Engineering (WISE) Awards 2013.
The first conference theme, Women and the 'internet of things' explores a future world, where smart phones, smart homes and wearable devices communicate with other devices and 'sense' human movement, using data to learn and adapt to the user’s preferences. A series of speakers will ask whether this technological future is gendered and a series of hands-on workshops will explore prototyping with designers, coders, data-wranglers, architects and communities using living aids.
A second theme in partnership with Cornelia Boldyreff from BCS Women/OSSG and sponsored by Google is based around rapidly developing Open Collaborative Communities, from online collaborative communities for coding, to Wikipedia or Massive Online Open Access Courses (MOOCs), offered by universities to students across the globe.
Flossie 2013 is women-led but open to all, regardless of gender. In particular, Flossie 2013 will be of interest to:
For more information and ticket booking, visit http://www.flossie.org. Tickets are priced at £11 per day or £16 for both days.
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