Tuesday, March 24, 2009

Ada Lovelace Day: Tessy Britton

Though not strictly a shedworking topic, this marvellous celebration of women's contribution to the world of technology is organised by Suw Charman-Anderson who writes the Kits and Mortar blog. Essentially, Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology. As Suw says: "Women's contributions often go unacknowledged, their innovations seldom mentioned, their faces rarely recognised."

About 1,600 of us around the world have agreed to post today on somebody we believe is an unsung heroine or deserves wider acclaim. It's a very hard choice but - and she doesn't know I've picked her yet - I'm throwing the Shedworking spotlight on Tessy Britton. As Director of Thriving, Tessy specialises in embracing and raising awareness of innovative educational ideas and at the Thriving too group blog which she guides, she provides a platform to "shamelessly prove the case for optimism by revealing the explosion in positive human thoughts, creations and actions from around the world".

As far as I'm aware she's not a programmer or software developer (though she does have an impressive knowledge of the latest online developments), but what she does do is use technology to, in the widest possible sense, improve the world and encourage others to do the same. This is, for me, a key way of "excelling in technology", utilising its many possibilites to achieve positive goals. I'd urge you to nip along and have a look at the sites I've linked to above to see what I mean.

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