Be Careful What You Commit To

One caveat around declaring a themed blogging day is that it certainly ups the ante for meeting a deadline.  I'm feeling that only too well in the wee hours of the morning after having spent an intense day shadowing and interviewing women technologists @SAP just before Ada Lovelance Day commences in the Pacific time zone.

A Brief Ada Lovelace Blogging Day History

"The first Ada Lovelace Day was held on 24th march 2009 and was a huge success. It attracted nearly 2000 signatories to the pledge and 2000 more people who signed up on Facebook. Over 1200 people added their post URL to the Ada Lovelace Day 2009 mash-up. The day itself was covered by BBC News Channel, BBC.co.uk, Radio 5 Live, The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Metro, Computer Weekly, and VNUnet, as well as hundreds of blogs worldwide.

In 2010 Ada Lovelace Day will again be held on 24th March and the target is to get 3072 people to sign the pledge and blog about their tech heroine."

            From "What is Ada Lovelace Day? And who is Ada Lovelace?: http://findingada.com/about/

 

What I Tried to do With This Year's SCN Pledge

My original intention, beyond getting others to participate in blogging about women in technology (and science) in honor of the Ada Lovelace Day blog pledge, was to make participation easy (one click easy) and to stir creative juices around highlighting women role models, especially in our own SCN community.  As a direct result, I am now the proud owner of an embarrassment of riches, having myself grabbed many video snippets while in Newtown Square as well as in Palo Alto.  I'll need to upload the videos and pay due respect to each and every subject individually.  But I am excited to see that many took me up on my challenge to add women to the wiki event space called: http://wiki.sdn.sap.com/wiki/display/events/Ada+Lovelace+Day where indeed you can add a heroine, a video about her and a picture with a few clicks.

Besides my speaking to women I already knew or knew of, I met an additional number of women technologists through introductions provided by folks like Moya Watson, who in her own words is: ""Bridging the gap between hither and yon".

So what began as an attempt to honor many women in one blog post will now be a series of highlights of some remarkable colleagues I'm meeting or have met here at SAP while "finding Ada".

Finding Marge Breya (who made herself easy to find)

To launch the SAP Community Network 2010 Ada Lovelace Day Blog Heroine series I'd like to salute our executive vice president and general manager of the Solutions Group at SAP AG, Marge Breya, who sets the tone of our series with a lively, passionate, intelligent and candid number of very informal video interviews.  Marge Breya reports to Jim Hagemann Snabe Co-CEO SAP AG and is our highest ranking female executive, but that didn't prevent her from making herself extremely accessible to Moya and myself and by extension to the entire SAP Community Network.  It is with great pleasure that I showcase her thoughts and stories and illustrated examples.  I can honestly say in the process of these interviews with her I discovered a new and exciting heroine and role model, refreshingly unrehearsed, uncensored, and undeniably inspirational.

You can see the full "salute" to Marge Breya, in a dedicated blog which contains selected video clips and describes the process of engaging with this SAP Community tech heroine.