I’ve been involved in helping start a number of non-profits.  One of them – National Center for Women & Information Technology – has surpassed my wildest expectations.  Lucy Sanders and her team have done an awesome job of building a coalition of over 170 prominent corporations, academic institutions, government agencies, and nonprofits working to improve U.S. innovation, competitiveness, and workforce sustainability by increasing women’s participation in IT.

I’ve been chairman of NCWIT since its early days.  As with most of the non-profits I’ve been involved in helping start, the board of directors evolves over time.  Unlike for-profit companies, each stage feels like a step function as you add new board members who bring a new set of capabilities, range, and diversity to the board.

Stage 1 for NCWIT’s board was a group of early board members who simply helped get things going.  There was a lot of evangelism for NCWIT, a lot of ad hoc help, and plenty of ambiguity about roles and responsibilities.  The board members were extremely enthusiastic and supportive – we wouldn’t have made much progress without them.

Stage 2 for NCWIT’s board was an effort to build some formality into the board.  We included several members from our larger investment partners, a handful of folks that played specific functional roles, and began to organize around a set of board committees.  Some of these committees were effective; some weren’t.  The consistency of board communication increased and while there was still plenty of ad hoc activity, in general things were more organized. 

Stage 3 for NCWIT’s board has just been launched.  We just announced the appointment of eight new board members.

• Thaddeus Arroyo, Chief Information Officer, AT&T Services, Inc.
• Phillip Bond, President and Chief Executive Officer, Information Technology Association of America (ITAA)
• Dr. Rodney Brooks, Founder, Heartland Robotics, Inc. and iRobot Corp., and the Panasonic Professor of Robotics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
• Lisa Brummel, Senior Vice President of Human Resources, Microsoft
• Carol Mosely, Senior Vice President of Information Systems, Wal-Mart Stores, Inc.
• Nancy Phillips, Chief Operating Officer and Co-founder, ViaWest
• Merle Waterman, Chief Financial Officer, OneRiot
• Emily White, Senior Director, Asia Pacific and Latin America Online Sales and Operations, Google

It’s an incredible set of people that cross the boundaries between entrepreneurship, academia, and established technology companies.  They are joining a well established board that has a great working tempo.  I’m really psyched about the next stage of NCWIT.

A few weeks ago, my friend Alan Shimel connected me with Jennifer Leggio.  Jennifer is the Director of Strategic Communications at Fortinet and an active blogger in – among other things – security and communication.  Alan suggested to Jennifer that she might be interested in the work we have been doing at the National Center for Women & Information Technology.

I remember the conversation fondly because I was sitting on the floor upstairs at Oblong’s office in LA while a bunch of people ran around downstairs looking at some cool stuff that Oblong was presenting to one of their customers.  Oblong had recently moved in to their new office and there was a noticeable lack of comfortable surfaces or devices to sit on (or in) upstairs.  The floor had to make do.  It was actually pretty clean and comfortable.

Jennifer asked a bunch of hard questions.  We had a great conversation.  I connected her with Lucy Sanders, the CEO of NCWIT, and they talked.  Jennifer got her mind around how to engage in the problem NCWIT is addressing and Women in IT – Be A Change Agent (Part One) is the post she wrote kicking off her thoughts and actions.

I appear to have said at least one memorable thing during our conversation:

“The most impactful people tend to be the doers in the organization. We can’t rely solely on entrepreneurs, who may have very little time, to make change happen. Anyone with a strong voice can be a role model. It’s easier to get started when you’re a leader but real change happens when you build momentum across a much broader spectrum.”

Jennifer riffed nicely on this and came up with a number of actionable things for doers to do which she enumerated in Women in IT – Be A Change Agent (Part One).

Jennifer – great stuff on many levels.

We all know this, but it’s useful to be reminded of it periodically.

I’m chairman of the board of the National Center for Women & Information Technology.  It’s a remarkable organization that has accomplished a great deal under the leadership of Lucy Sanders.  While it would be easy to categorize NCWIT as a "gender equality" organization, it’s not.  Instead, NCWIT is focused on helping the US be more competitive in the long term in the field of information technology and computer science. 

Simply put, the only way to satisfy the increasing demand for computer science / IT folks in the US over the next decade is to get more women involved.  There is a long list of other important reasons to get more women in the US engaged in computer science / IT, but the need to stay competitive in this arena is the one that seals the deal for me.

NCWIT periodically gets emails like the following:

Subject: Answer of why woman in IT is shrinking

IT is a very hard field in which you have to study all the time to keep up with technology.   Also, it involves incredible troubleshooting skills, which by nature woman lack.   What you need are more special laws, so that woman have special privilages, which is the only way their will be an increase of women in IT.   Until then just keep complaining as your gender is perfect at it.  Please post this on your wall at your Facist Woman in IT offices.   Or just delete as women hate the truth.

Someone should teach that guy how to spell fascist.

I’ve been chairman of the National Center for Women and Information Technology for the past two years.  The mission is straightforward – it is “to ensure that women are fully represented in the influential world of information technology and computing.” 

NCWIT programming is organized into “alliances” – we have an academic, workforce, K-12, and entrepreneurial alliance.  The academic and workforce alliance are the most mature; the entrepreneurial alliance is the youngest.

A year ago I sat down with Lucy Sanders – the NCWIT CEO – and a few other folks (including Heidi Roizen and Lee Kennedy) to discuss the most impactful thing we could do to raise the visibility of successful women entrepreneurs in the IT / computer science field.  While there are some very notable successful women, we wanted to shine a bright light on some of the younger ones and those who could be additional role models for young women interested in entrepreneurship in the IT arena.

We came up with the NCWIT Heroes program – a series of short podcast interviews.  These 15-minute interviews interviews are going to be released weekly with approximately 20 women IT entrepreneurs chosen from among more than 100 nominations. I’ve found the project fascinating – both identifying the women and helping set up the interviews. 

The first three interviews are with:

• Lucy Sanders: CEO and co-founder NCWIT; Bell/Lucent/Avaya Labs
• Helen Greiner: co-founder and Chairman of iRobot
• Elaine Wherry: co-founder of Meebo.com

Listen along or subscribe to the podcast for your weekly fix of NCWIT’s Heroes.  Thanks also to Larry Nelson of w3w3.com, Ben Casnocha, and Jay Habegger for helping out.

We had an NCWIT (National Center for Women & Information Technology) board meeting yesterday in advance of two days of NCWIT alliance meetings.  I’m delighted with the progress this organization has made in the past three years.  We held the meeting for the first time at the new CU Boulder ATLAS building.  Bobby Schnabel – a co-founder of NCWIT, the Director of ATLAS (“Alliance for Technology Learning and Society) and Vice Provost for Academic and Campus Technology – has a good podcast up describing ATLAS titled ATLAS – Is It Technology, Art or a Coffee Shop.  If you haven’t been there, it’s a cool, cool building.

Tonight’s reception is from 6pm to 8pm at the Folsom Stadium North Club Level.  We’ve got over 300 people attending – if you are part of the front range tech community and want to learn more about NCWIT – come join us.

On May 15^th and 16^th leaders from over 100 distinguished universities, corporations and non-profits from across the country will attend the National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT) semi-annual meeting at the University of Colorado at Boulder. 

I’ve been chairman of NCWIT for the past few years and am incredibly proud of what Lucy Sanders and her team have created.  NCWIT is a capacity-building coalition working aggressively to increase women’s participation in computing/information technology (IT) – we believe that women’s participation is a compelling issue of innovation, competitiveness, and workforce sustainability.

On the evening of May 15^th, at 6:00 pm, NCWIT and the ATLAS Institute at CU Boulder are hosting a reception on the CU Boulder campus (on the North Club Level of Folsom Stadium) at which you can meet these leaders and share ideas with them about the meaningful role women can play in technical innovation.  If you are a member of the tech community in Colorado, I encourage you to come join us.

The reception is sponsored by NCWIT Investment Partners Avaya, Microsoft and Pfizer and we are honored to have State of Colorado Lt. Governor, Dr. Barbara O’Brien, and CU Boulder Chancellor Dr. Bud Peterson offer remarks.

I hope to see you there.

At the National Center for Women & Information Technology we are about to embark on a “heroes campaign” – a new project to highlight 20 successful women IT entrepreneurs via 15 minute podcast interviews accompanied by text transcriptions. We’ve got a great initial set of women that we’ll be interviewing but are casting our net far and wide to find interesting, amazing, and inspirational stories.  If you fit the profile (female IT / software / Internet entrepreneurs) or know someone that does, please give me a shout.

As chairman of the National Center for Women & Information Technology, I’m enjoyed observing the regular evolution of how we describe the organization.  My friends Larry and Pat Nelson just interviewed Lucy Sanders – the CEO of NCWIT – and I think Lucy did a particularly crisp job of describing what NCWIT is about and why it’s important.

David Brin has an outstanding article up on Salon titled Why Johnny can’t code. 

I’ve been the chairman of the National Center for Women & Information Technology for the past two years and have learned an enormous amount about the sociology of computer science, especially among women and kids.  This summer I decided to “practice what I preach” by teaching my Alaskan 14 year old neighbor Eric how to program.  I received a bunch of interesting comments and eventually settled on Ruby – which we are making ok progress with.

However, Brin’s article smacked me over the head.  I learned how to program on an Apple II using BASIC when I was 13.  I eventually learned Pascal, but did most of my programming – until I was in college – in BASIC.  When my best friend Kent came home with a prototype for the first TI PC in 1982 (his dad – ultimately one of the early Compaq guys – was the TI project manager for the PC) we programmed a complex Yahtzee game in BASIC (the TI graphics were incredible – I learned a lot about abstraction manipulating them.)  In my first real job (in 1983) at a company called Petcom I wrote two sophisticated commercial programs in Basic (PC-Log – Oil Well Log Analysis; PC-Economics – Economic Forecasting for Oil and Gas projects).  Lest you wonder how sophisticated this could get, I also contributed to an Oil and Gas Accounting System (PC-Accounting) that ultimately used Btrieve as the database engine and probably could have been a competitive stand-alone accounting system in the 1990’s if the company had evolved that way.

So – when I read Brin’s article, I longed for the simplicity and beauty of BASIC as a teaching tool.  Yeah – I know – it teaches you “all the wrong stuff”, but as I’m working through basic looping with Eric, I’m not sure objects and methods are the right way to learn this stuff.  Maybe I’ll hop on eBay and buy Eric an old Apple II.

Lucy Sanders – the CEO of the National Center for Women & Information Technology – was a key participant in last week’s Microsoft Annual Faculty Summit.  InformationWeek has a good summary of the meeting – and the issues – up on the web in an article titled “Funding Innovation Where It’s Incubated.” 

The basic message – as stated directly by Dan Mote (president of the University of Maryland) is that “”Students do not see opportunity in our field [IT and computer science]. And it’s not just kids in poor districts–even the rich kids don’t get jazzed about tech. That’s going to be a problem as computer companies hunt for the next generation of workers.”

Lucy – who is one of the most insightful and articulate people I know when discussing this issue – added “Part of the reason the U.S. isn’t grooming enough future computer jocks could be that the discipline mystifies lots of kids.  Computer science is a stealth profession – no one really knows what we do. Instead of teaching how computers can help solve practical problems, schools’ coursework couches things in terms of technologies – Java and C vs. business and medicine. That’s just the wrong way to approach it, [Education needs to get] away from the notion that computing equals programming.”

Google is having a similar summit in a few days.  I’m glad major software companies are thinking hard about this and getting engaged.  We’ve got to figure out how to get our kids to get re-excited about computer science.