International Women's Day Celebration 2017 by Women Techmakers Sri Lanka

Hello everyone.. Here I am going to write about my experience as an organizer, speaker, and a panel moderator at International Women's Day Celebration, Let's Celebrate International Women's Day 2017, by Women Techmakers(WTM) Sri Lanka. You can find more about Women Techmakers from here. Google's Women Techmakers program is to provide visibility, community, and resources for women in technology. There is a global event series at Women Techmakers to Celebrate International Women's Day. This year's theme is 'Telling Our Story'.  Celebrations for non-google venues are hosted by Google Developer Groups/ Women Techmakers Chapters and you can find out more about that from here.

We started our event registrations at 8.30 AM on Sunday the March 5th 2017 and we had a set of volunteers to help us throughout the day with event day tasks. The number of total attendees was around 130 and 120 among them were women, the men on the floor were Google Developer Group(GDG) Sri Lanka organizers and volunteers only. Our giveaways for attendees contained 2 laptop stickers, batch, pen and a notebook with Women Techmakers branding. Here we thought to move with useful swag like pens and notebooks rather than t-shirts. 
(Image source:  https://www.facebook.com/FlexusLabsLK/photos/a.789756134507439.1073743147.144399519043107/789759837840402/?type=3&theater )
The event was started by an small icebreaker from session from WTM lead Michela Thalagala and by giving an Introduction to Women Techmakers by WTM lead Dilini Weerasinghe and there we specially mentioned about Women Techmakers membership program.
As the second item, we had the codelab session - Build Google Maps using Web Components and No Code conducted by me. We chose this codelab session with the expectation of everyone to complete the codelab and we are happy that many of the attendees completed the codelab with me, and the major problem with others who had laptops was the internet connectivity problems.
(Image source:  https://www.facebook.com/FlexusLabsLK/photos/a.789756134507439.1073743147.144399519043107/789759154507137/?type=3&theater) 
(Image source:  https://www.facebook.com/FlexusLabsLK/photos/a.789756134507439.1073743147.144399519043107/789757121174007/?type=3&theater) 
(Image source:  https://www.facebook.com/FlexusLabsLK/photos/a.789756134507439.1073743147.144399519043107/789761737840212/?type=3&theater )
Then we had the breakfast break of 20 minutes.
As the third item, we had a panel discussion - Experience Sharing. For the panel discussion, we invited the two local Google Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship winners of the year 2016, Ms.Dilushi Piumwardene and Ms.Dinu Kumarasiri who are having their early careers at MillenniumIT as software engineers. They talked about the experience they got at Google Summer of Code and other coding competitions, contributing to open source projects, applying for technical scholarships and doing research. The panel was moderated by WTM lead Chaduni Wickremasinghe.
(Image source:  https://www.facebook.com/FlexusLabsLK/photos/a.789756134507439.1073743147.144399519043107/789761884506864/?type=3&theater)
Then we had an icebreaker on building an android bot in teams and after that, we played the greetings video from Chelle, Erica and Yu Okawa from APAC Developer Ecosystem team, Google for Women’s Day celebration.
(Image source:  https://www.facebook.com/FlexusLabsLK/photos/a.789756134507439.1073743147.144399519043107/789761817840204/?type=3&theater)

(Image source:  https://www.facebook.com/FlexusLabsLK/photos/a.789756134507439.1073743147.144399519043107/789772774505775/?type=3&theater)
Next, we had lunch and networking and in the lunch break, participants enjoyed taking photographs from official photographer too.

 After the lunch, we had a panel discussion - Local Company Demos. There we chose 4 women who have established careers in 4 different areas representing 4 different companies. They are, Ms. Vidumini Ranasinghe - Project Director at London Stock Exchange Group, Ms.Nimashi Perera - Business Consultant at Virtusa Polaris, Ms.Erandathi Ranasinghe - Senior Quality Assurance Lead at Pearson, Ms. Dimuthu Leelarathne - Director Solutions Architecture at WSO2. There they talked about the women engagement in the specific area they are employed at and visibility within their company, career growth for women in their companies and also what is their company's business. It was a motivational session itself for our participants who were undergraduates/ in their early careers from from those ladies who has established careers in locally famous companies. The panel was moderated by me.
(Image source: https://www.facebook.com/FlexusLabsLK/photos/a.789756134507439.1073743147.144399519043107/789772251172494/?type=3&theater)

(Image source: https://www.facebook.com/FlexusLabsLK/photos/a.789756134507439.1073743147.144399519043107/789767231172996/?type=3&theater )
Then the next session was Introduction to User Experience by WTM lead Michela Thalagala. She gave an overview of what UX is like, in order to get a brief understanding since UX is still not very popular among Sri Lankan women in technology.
(Image source: https://www.facebook.com/FlexusLabsLK/photos/a.789756134507439.1073743147.144399519043107/789766257839760/?type=3&theater)
The final item on our agenda was a team activity which is a mock Design Sprint done within 2 hours and initially, we gave them the time breakdown. A problem was given and participants had to come up with user goals and business goals. And according to those goals, they came up with design solutions individually. The deliverable were sketches and they had to vote the designs within groups. After voting, the team had to finalize one design and present it. For the final designs, our WTM lead Michela Talagala gave feedback to them based on her experience.
(Image source: https://www.facebook.com/FlexusLabsLK/photos/a.789756134507439.1073743147.144399519043107/789771967839189/?type=3&theater )

(Image source: https://www.facebook.com/FlexusLabsLK/photos/a.789756134507439.1073743147.144399519043107/789765557839830/?type=3&theater)
Within the team activity, we gave a tea break of 20 minutes too.
(Image source: https://www.facebook.com/FlexusLabsLK/photos/a.789756134507439.1073743147.144399519043107/789767087839677/?type=3&theater)
The event was concluded with the vote of thanks by WTM lead Dilini Weerasinghe and by giving some tokens for the 5 event volunteers who helped in handling event day tasks by Michela and myself.
(Image source: https://www.facebook.com/FlexusLabsLK/photos/a.789756134507439.1073743147.144399519043107/789775411172178/?type=3&theater)



(Image source: https://www.facebook.com/FlexusLabsLK/photos/a.789756134507439.1073743147.144399519043107/789769097839476/?type=3&theater )

 Hope to get back to you all with our next amazing event =) 
(Images are taken from the album, IWD Celebration 2017 by Women Techmakers Sri Lanka, by Flexus Labs on their Facebook page. )
Location: Colombo, Sri Lanka

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