To briefly describe a hack day in 2009 it was usually a weekend with a number of software developers in a space with spankingly good wifi, some data, pizza, beer and a few dodgy prizes awarded to those who got the most claps, gasps, cheers or laughs. They were informal events that brought together groups of people and individuals who would never usually have time and opportunity to meet. The results, the prototypes, were less important than the community activity for the developers, and the meercat moment for the sponsors or people for whom the hack was being produced.

As with growth of any idea or concept, as Rewired State has continued to run these events so we have refined and learned what we do to make it better for developers, better for clients and to refine outcomes to meet the need that sparked the hack. I hope that by sharing this updated learning with you all now, it will help.

Here is how a hack day looks to us now in 2013

Ideation

We found that we were spending more and more time with clients refining the actual challenges being laid down to developers during the hack. It has always been profoundly important that hack days do not turn into bootcamp for building prototypes to a specific brief. In order to enable the unique collaboration, the creative ideas, the spark of solution that generates a number of prototyped digital ideas that resolve a particular issue – it is essential to define the problem first, not design the solution.

We advise that hack days have three of four challenges laid, and the associated data made available.

In order to define the challenges, the problem must be identified and this usually requires the meeting of several people on the client side of the hack. In Rewired State we spend the majority of our time initially with the client shaping these in such a way that they are clear enough without be prescriptive about potential solutions.

The Hack

Our hack weekends are hugely crafted in order for them to be simple and open. It takes us at least eight weeks from woe to go to get everything in place, including the developers. Luckily for us our network of devs and designers is made up of over 1000 people who can create working prototypes in 36 hours or less. So we have a hugely talented pool of people we can draw upon.

We take time to initially invite specific people from this pool to try to make up a group of people at the hack made up of 50% devs with expertise and experience of the field we are focusing on, and 50% with no experience whatsoever. We find that this mix tends to create realistic yet innovative ideas, without stifling creativity. And then we open the hack up to anyone who would like to join for whatever reason – we don’t second guess peoples’ passions!

The end of the hack event will produce ‘winning’ solutions for each of the three to four problems laid out in the beginning.

Modification days (Modding days)

It was becoming clear to us as we grew up that clients were increasingly wanting to take ideas forward from the hack, as the solutions were what they had been looking for. As we in Rewired State are committed to not becoming a body shop for developers, others are doing this perfectly well, we needed to find a way to enable prototypes to be taken through to product, with the teams who had come together in a perfect storm to come up with the concept in the first place; (often people with full-time jobs and geographically separated).

And so we created a modding process: the selected prototypes from the hack day would go through a process of development whereby the client would feedback to the dev teams on what would be useful to change or adapt, followed by a day or two of scrum-style programming and design, on all three or four prototypes so still a ‘hack’ format everyone is together again, followed by client internal review and feedback, and so the iteration process continues until the products are ready for the client to adopt.

When you don’t need a hack day – we have Rewired Reality

Clearly the hack days we run cost more than sponsoring beer and pizza, well the problem-solving ones do, and so sometimes people come to us thinking they need a hack day, but don’t have the time or money necessary to get the benefit from full-blown physical event. And so we created Rewired Reality, where we have a number of our Rewired Staters and Young Rewired Staters behind an online board. Here is how it works.

IP and money

IP is always the question that must be resolved up front. We are careful to ensure our community of developers feels like they are having fun as much as building solutions to real problems, and so we try to strike a balance between commercial hack days around specific problems, and those where it is just for fun (where we have found some amazing data being released that they would enjoy having a go at, or for a cause that we know touches the hearts of many).

For the former, we pay developers for their time. They are paid to attend hack days, they are paid for modding days and in most cases, the client will retain the IP. But they don’t always, in some cases they are happy for the developers to keep IP, so there is no real defined rule, but it has to be discussed and agreed in advance.

For the latter we don’t pay developers money, but we do provide a well-run hack, with good healthy food, some pizza usually thrown in, fun and frivolity. And they keep their IP.

This balance works for us right now, it may well change as the hack day continues to grow up.

Hack day Prizes

Originally hack days had some token prizes, often deeply ironic or just downright funny. As they began to become a thing outside of the developer-only zone, prizes became more valuable, cash sums or shiny kit. For a while we grappled with this – trying to strike the right balance.

A high sum of money would skew the attendance and reason why the hackers chose to come along, change also the dynamic of the event, less collaboration and more secrecy, and attracted a different kind of developer, often entrepreneurs with an unwilling and exhausted coder in tow. Not what we are about at all!

A low sum of money could be seen to be insulting.

So we try to avoid financial prizes.

“Stuff” is always hard, because it is tricky to second guess the number in a hack winning team, and if an individual but amazing thing is donated, such as a 3-D printer, how does a group of four strangers who have come together to create a prototype over a weekend, share that?

So we try to avoid “stuff”.

Experiences are good. Vouchers are good.

But actually, the conclusion at the moment is that we need to make the hack weekend itself so enjoyable that it is about that experience and not the prize – for our open and non-commercial events. Prizes more in line with the original ironic/playful times and a well-stocked bar at the end.

We do not award prizes for the winners of commercial hacks as the process continues through the modding days. but we maintain a consistently high standard of service to those devs who come along.

With thanks to Hudson Hollister who presumed that I had written all of this up and shared it, ad nauseum, as did I. But then I realised that this was all in my head, or in my conference slides, which is no use to anyone.

We are running a very exciting event in New York City this Summer: YRS NYC 29-30 June 2013 when we will invite 50 of NYC’s top young coders to work with a wide-range of professional programmers to build new digital prototypes and projects.

The teens will all take on open government data to create apps, algorithms, digital prototypes, widgets and websites that are relevant to themselves and their peers, and that address real NYC issues.

Rewired State alongside Mozilla Hive NYC and the Museum itself will host this weekend of exploration and hacking where our aim is to build a local community grounded in the power of programming in networks. It is the first of the International outposts of Young Rewired State that started in the UK in 2009 with 50 local coding kids and now represents 1000 young coders across the UK and celebrates its 5th annual Festival of Code this August in Birmingham, England.

Here’s how you can get involved:

1. Alert any teens (ages 14-18) you know  in New York (or who can commute to Queens for the weekend) and invite them to sign up on this page https://youngrewiredstate.org/yrs-everywhere/yrs-new-york-city

2. If you have experience or worked with open data and are a programmer or designer, sign up to mentor here https://youngrewiredstate.org/yrs-everywhere/yrs-new-york-city

3. Come and support these young NYC coders and see what they come up with: email us info@youngrewiredstate.org to attend the show and tell on the afternoon of Sunday 30th June 2013

4. If you are representing government or a civic organization and have data or challenges to contribute, contact kait@rewiredstate.org to discuss

We know from experience that finding the founding 50 is a hard, hard thing to do. So the very best thing you can do is to work as a worldwide hive mind to identify the young people who would most benefit from this event and the lasting community it creates.

Funding for this project was provided by The Hive Digital Media Learning Fund in The New York Community Trust. We have a small amount left to raise to cover travelling costs for the young people, so if you would like to sponsor the event you can contact me through this site http://mulqueeny.wordpress.com/contact-me/

The benefit for attendees at such things is not only the opportunity to take part in the overall conversation, but also the connections you make with people around the formal event and it is the results of one of these connections that I wanted to share.

I sat at supper on the Friday night in an achingly cool art space in Brooklyn and next to a lovely lady called Valerie Chang, the Director for Policy, US, from the MacArthur Foundation. We started chatting about the day and the focus on participation and I explained about Young Rewired State, and how we seemed to have struck on a formula that worked with mentors and young people focused on specific challenges, building solutions and learning through peer-to-peer rather than alone or in a classroom, and my subsequent passion around education and opening up learning. As I knew the MacArthur foundation were all about research I asked her if she knew of any around this.

Grabbing her business card she began scrawling web addresses and talking to me about research that just ticked every single box in my head of the stuff I wanted to understand and know more about.

I have just had a chance to start to look at these links and *gold dust* I need to take a week off to go through it all fully, it will take up much of my bedtime reading over the next few months I suspect – but I thought I would share it with those who read my blog. Some of you may already know of it, some may not. But I know that you all care passionately about the same things I do, and so I think it would be interesting for you all too.

So here goes:

Connected Learning

Youth Participatory Politics

DML Spotlight blog

Mimi Ito – Ethnographic research

As I do read through all of this I am sure I will write up the bits here that just nudge my brain up a gear, but if you have any thoughts, please do let me know and share them here.

Fascinating stuff, and thank you GovLab for inviting me.

To restore faith in government, we need to provide citizens with the clear channels to communicate their issues with those who have the power to address them.

But I am not (just) telling you where I am and why, I just wanted to explore a few thoughts now and then again after the event.

I have in my inbox a wealth of background material, but probably the most important one is to read this research by Pathways through Participation that is:

… a two-and-a-half year research project that aimed to improve our understanding of how and why people participate, how their involvement changes over time, and what pathways, if any, exist between different activities.

Interesting stuff, really good, go have a look. There is so much more to read and if you really want to then leave a comment and I will forward you an email with lots more.

My own thoughts are the following:

• engage young people throughout school and show them how. The research shows that parental behaviour does affect how much young people growing up engage with their community and government, but current parental generations just don’t, usually. This seems so obvious, perhaps also obvious is that this is a very long game – however it is comforting to think that these kinds of discussions should be irrelevant in say 10-15 years when the new generations become parents, if they are afforded this opportunity. We know through Young Rewired State that young people understand what bugs them and are amazed and amazing when given a channel for their views and bug bears
• make participation normal. It seems again obvious, but if it is a natural order when growing up to engage fully with communities and government, then the behaviour of non-engagement will be exception rather than the rule
• create data communities to explore government data releases. It is recognised that the act of chucking data out to nations, citizens who have never been taught the skills in school to understand or interrogate the information locked in there is only useful to a very small group of experts. However, it is also recognised that this group of socially conscious “hacktivists” are very willing to help others, and apply their skills for the greater good. I personally can vouch for this as can all those in Code for America and so on and so forth. So my suggestion here is that, in a similar way to the UK e-petitions and the US We the people websites, we stop making the problem and challenges so large – how about a site similar to those petitioning ones but for citizens to explore data, they can highlight data released by governments, and ask for it to be explored. The developer community can then engage openly and look at what other individuals and groups are keen to understand further. However… the next bullet is important
• watch the cost and manage expectations. Historically there have been many high-profile people hectoring governments to open data and that hundreds, nay thousands will engage for free to explain and explore that data. Similarly with teachers and digital skills: apparently there are hoards of people just gagging to do a lot of stuff in the name of community forever, for no payment. I would say this is a limited view – yes there are socially conscious people, but they all need to live and the data keeps on coming and the expectations of the public sector is set at: all these fabulous people do all this stuff for love, pizza and beer… we need to watch this

The money thing and how participation is paid for is important, and tricky, it is touched on in the original participation report: people will engage to a point, but at some point the receiving beneficiaries, in this case governments, do need to recognise and pay for the value they are getting in order to secure the value they need to do their jobs to change law and policy. There is a place for personal passion, but if the need is real and the engagement successful – the passionate initiator has to make an important decision about how or whether to continue. This is a conversation longer than a blog post but it needs to be aired and discussed.

I hope to do a bit of this over the next two days, with all of the above points, but if anyone has anything else to add, please do here or on the #govlab hashtag over the next two days.

Nice one

Google hosted that first weekend for us but the legend now goes that it took us three months and a massive credit card bill for hotels and trains to find 50 coding kids in the whole of the UK for a single weekend hackathon at the much-lauded Google HQ in London. Our original sign-up was three kids… three… for a free weekend in Google HQ London.

Photo by Lettuce

We wanted to introduce coding kids to open government data, instead we discovered

• schools were not teaching programming, computer science, or anything really other than the PE/Geography/any spare teacher showing the kids how to turn on a computer and use Word/Excel/How to photoshop a kitten pic (the only nod to programming – some of you will get this)
• this was not something the teachers were happy about and I found acres of frustrated geeky teachers fighting a Latin Goliath
• young people were being driven to teaching themselves, something well-served online with a tonne of lessons on YouTube, websites with individual lessons in the greatest detail, should you care to look, but these kids were isolated and bullied
• some/many were being failed at school <- when I posted that blog post 25,000 people on Hacker News clicked on it within the first hour…

M’esteemed colleagues were well-renowned software engineers and designers and did not have the capacity to fight this particular fight, except by continuing to do good – most of whom are now in the UK Government Digital Service – but I was able enough, and I was a Mum and I was an entrepreneur, and I was an open government data campaigner – and I had to stay to do something.

Through personal and professional means I turned myself into a lobbying machine to teach our kids to code and, through Rewired State, continued to run Young Rewired State as an annual event, growing from 50 kids to 600 kids, now 1000.

I gave up my job.

I fought battles.

I lost battles.

I won them.

I did school runs.

I got cross about girl engineers (lack of).

I wrote.

I did.

I talked (although I am not a natural speaker – BetaBlockers FTW).

And I found a community of fabulous people: Mathematica, CodeClub, Mozilla, Nominet, Nesta, Raspberry Pi, Raspberry Jam, MadLab, Birmingham City Council, CoderDojo, Treehouse, General Assembly – seriously so many people… and now I feel like I can step back from that fight now. I have been as much use as I can be… and a *lot* is happening.

I need to look to the future and I need to re-focus the kids we are now finding in increasing numbers, and as the others teach them how to code, and as the others fight the battle with institutions and education – I want to go back to what we wanted to do in the first place.

And so I think now is the time, as we grow beyond the UK, to re-focus what we are doing on finding these kids and introducing them to Open Government Data. I will always fight for education, but I fight for democracy, transparency and accountability over all – and I would like our children to grow up understanding Open Data as freely as they understand Open Source.

Starting now…

Our aim is to find and foster every child driven to teach themselves how to code – and introduce them to open government data

http://youngrewiredstate.org

Today I received an email from Theo Blackwell at Next Gen Skills, a wonderful man working with Ian Livingstone et al (and lobbying hard for this) explaining it. I thought I would share the salient point here to assist the baffled (myself included)

English Baccalaureate

There has been some confusion in the press about the English-Baccalaureate and English Baccalaureate Certificates (EBCs).  EBCs, according to today’s announcement, have been scrapped not the English Baccalaureate as a performance measure. 

Computer Science is still counted as one the E-Bacc performance measure options, which is what was announced last week and what we campaigned for.  This counts how many pupils have obtained a grade C or above in a range of GCSEs and Computer Science now counts as one of those options.

This means Computer Science GCSE now contributes to the success rate of a school, which is why it was so vital that it was included.

Computing replaces ICT on the National Curriculum

The ICT has been scrapped on the curriculum…  Reform of ICT was a key demand of Next Gen Skills – Recommendation 1 – it will now be replaced with a Computing Programme of Study, with computer science principles at its core and replacing the ICT brand.  

It is essentially an online hack day, for those tasks that would benefit from the hive mind of Rewired and Young Rewired State developers, but not a full-blown hack event. A challenge is submitted alongside a sum of money, we work with you to further define the challenge and to ensure the monetary reward matches the challenge and is not ‘cheap labour’*. Behind the Board there are a number of Rewired State and Young Rewired State developers hand-picked for now from successful hack events who will, if they choose to, create a prototype solution to the challenge. After 5-7 days there is a short period of peer review thereafter the Bounty Hunter, the client, is shown all proposed solutions and chooses a winner. The money is then shared between all devs taking part, with the winner taking a greater Bounty. (Collaboration is encouraged on and off the platform).

We think this is awesome for two reasons:

• hack apathy is real, as is developer apathy, yet there is still a diminishing pool of talent who still really *do* want to assist with bringing dreams to life and solving complex technical problems – Rewired Reality brings a solution
• Young Rewired Staters get an opportunity to solve real world problems, build their portfolio and experience – and clients get access to the brilliance of young minds

At the same time I have been dedicating myself this year to delivering against this dream. I am really pleased to report that conversations have begun in the following regions outside the UK:

• New York
• San Francisco
• Aarhus
• Berlin
• Jo’burg
• Amsterdam

With dates secured (yet to be revealed – wait until the new YRS site is launched ) in NYC, Jo’burg and Aarhus. Working on the others at the moment. We are aiming to start with 50 young coding kids in each region, aged 18 or under, engaging them with local open government data and the open data developer communities – with a view to creating a worldwide, independent developer network, both mentored and mentoring, enabling these young people to grow up teaching and bringing peer-to-peer learning to life through solving real-world problems, using open data.

Our raison d’être in Rewired State is still to find and foster every child driven to teach themselves how to code, and by looking beyond the UK we are actually starting to realise this dream.

I am constantly amazed at the fact that in every country or region I speak to, the response is hugely enthusiastic, coupled with concern that these young children do not exist in their community. I am convinced that they do, and I am convinced that for the ones we find through these events, we will enrich their lives by bringing them a community of other people like themselves.

The ultimate dream is that these young people will grow up mentoring and being mentored, with children across the world working together to solve real challenges regardless of borders or oceans. They will no longer be isolated and coding alone.

So there you are! YRS Hyperlocal is happening very very slowly, funding is taking its time to happen, but we are getting there and will have news within weeks of a successful part-funding venture that affects YRSers in London and the Midlands. More to come…

* we work hard to ensure that people with a reduced budget can also take advantage of the board, by reducing the scope of the challenge to meet the reward, so we are not being elitist

** Rewired Reality is not yet pretty we are doing the design work and a nice video explanation in the coming weeks, the platform has taken up the energy

Here is an unedited version of me talking about Rewired Reality

I have a lot of business cards from people I have met over the last few years, I tend to be given them during or after a conversation and I keep them as I know that person had something in common with me and we spoke long enough to exchange cards.

I am a dullard and only bang on about three things:

• hack/modding days (Rewired State and Young Rewired State)
• coding kids (Year 8 is too late)
• women in technology (need more)

Therefore, I know that all the cards I have here relate to one or all of those subjects. I have exactly one foot of people who love the same things I love.

Being 41, I think – I do lose track: July 1971, I have pretty much decided what I want to do when I am a grown up. These are:

• be a good Mum
• keep the business alive for life so that I can still be doing it when I ‘retire’ and work with *lots* of people and friends
• relentlessly campaign to bring coding back
• actively grow a worldwide community of coding kids who can do with it what they will
• work tirelessly to significantly enhance the number of girls in computing and design by whatever means I have at my disposal
• open data, open borders, open business
• help to code a better world

Those seven things are my bucket list.

Now I am starting on this foot high pile of business cards. I am creating a spreadsheet, that only I have access to (this is not a commercial thing) of people I have met who are as passionate as me about these things.

This community of people, bound by the three passions I bore on about, will then be in one place and I will endeavour to explore how I can use this list of incredible people and their energy, to create a worldwide thunderclap of informed action over the next few years.

If you have never handed me your business card, but want to be a part of this thunderclap, email me emma@rewiredstate.org with your name, job, email address, passion and I will add you to the list.

This is not a commercial enterprise, it will take some time as it will be my spare time, but it seems a pretty good way to build on the energy in this space right now.

I am not missing the irony of the fact that last year I started the Silent Club to do exactly the opposite of this. But I am not suggesting that the Thunderclap be a physical networking thing, but it will be active not passive, and community-based – I am not ruling out us having a massive and brilliant party one day.

1. Google donated 15,000 Raspberry Pis to schools across the UK

2. Today it was announced that Computer Science will be included in the new English Baccalaureate (EBacc)

Much of this achievement is down to relentless campaigning and education by groups such as Computing at Schools, Next Gen Skills and a large number of dedicated individuals: too many to mention here. We should be proud of these things happening, but let’s not wipe our hands of this problem just yet.

We need to focus our attention on the junior school children, Year 8 is Too Late in my opinion and even with the impetus of the EBacc computer science course we need to introduce ‘computeracy’ in junior schools across the land: let the 7 year olds have fun, break stuff, play and enjoy exploring the potential of computers and the digital renaissance. Bring back the What if? questions, What would happen if I…?

I know that there is a while yet before the decision is taken as to which schools will get the donated RPis, but it would be really wonderful if they were only given to junior schools, bringing an excuse to the classroom to discover the potential and joy of computers, in the same way the BBC Micro gave all us oldies hours of code-y fun in the 80s. I suspect that this would see a far greater take-up of the EBacc as those children move into senior school.

All that aside, what a brilliant week for young people in the UK?

A version of this opinion piece is in the Education section of The Telegraph

I love Radio 4, I have always loved radio 4, I also like Capital sometimes, but mainly R4 when I have no kids with me. Woman’s Hour has occasionally stuck in my craw as a title, but I think that – like the rest of the country – I adopt it with an indulgent smile, a nod to our ability to see humour in everything and satire is our bag, right? I love Woman’s Hour with the same bit of me that loves Boris being the Mayor of London.

I also thought long and hard about writing this blog post. It is not always helpful to be stabby and cross about things, but when my retired step-mother, who was a GP and fought the battle she had to fight for so many years as a female GP, was so totally gutted that this was *still* going on, and so cross she even surprised my father with her depth of feeling about this, I felt that I was not stupid to feel this cross.

Being a chick and doing what I do, I do get asked to go and talk on radio and telly, albeit badly as I have had no media training, just conviction and experience, so getting an email from Woman’s Hour was not completely weird, but it was EXCITING!

Now because of the caveat at the bottom of all BBC emails, I can’t share word for word what that email said, but I can tell you what my reaction was and what happened – I think. Well they can sue me if I got their email rules of secrecy wrong.

They asked me if they could talk to me the next day with a view to maybe going on to WH on Friday, tomorrow, to talk about the lack of women speakers at tech conferences and as a side issue girls and coding. Both of these things are passions of mine, and I run the Year 8 is too Late campaign and fight to get equality in attendees at Young Rewired State (last year’s der moment written here, with a reference to Woman’s Hour! #irony <- please read it, it is far more important than this rant). But I came back from that and by bringing Lily Cole onto the judging panel, upped the YRS girl attendees from 3% to 18% girls – still not awesome, but better.

I was also contacted by another lady geek type person who had been approached but they had replaced her with me, she and I had a digital thumb war, but basically all very happy about the fact that this was being discussed, even though really I should learn my own lesson from last year and NOT shine a big light on this!

Within half an hour they contacted me again to say that actually they wanted to have a man speaking on the programme, as they wanted to focus the programme on men standing up for women in tech and they would replace me with someone, whom they named, who – much though I love him and respect his work, is not known for campaigning or acting on either subject.

At this point I was just gutted, I had been so excited but I was gutted.

I suggested Aral Balkan, who is the accepted person who fights hard for this and writes about it, acts on it and it the male voice in this space.

It turns out they already had him booked, they wanted another man. “So…” I clarified, ” you want TWO men talking about this? Oh the irony”

Look, I have no problem, dear Woman’s Hour, with finding the right people for the discussion regardless of gender. I would have had no problem with you actually speaking to me and deciding that what I said was not appropriate, or that my lack of media training made me an unsuitable candidate. But to pass me over, simply because I do not have a willy, in the very thing I give up my spare time, and earn sod all in my organisation, actively working for, trying to solve and sharing and writing what I learn along the way on the very subject that actually cries out for a woman’s voice amongst the men who do indeed fight for us, is infuriating. Patronising. Misogynistic.

I know I will never be invited on Woman’s Hour now, and I am over that.

Tomorrow’s discussion is what it is. I am not sure that it is the right thing to do, shining a big light on this can have a detrimental effect, but there are ways to address and overcome it. I certainly do not have all of the answers, but I do have quite some decent experience – as do many other lady geeky and non-geeky people.

But it seems: No Willy, No Woman’s Hour #NoWillyNoWH

PS Dear YRS kids, do not let this happen in your generation

PPS I have nothing but respect for Aral Balkan and Dr Tom Crick, those two men who are speaking on WH tomorrow, Aral was always going to be there and so he should as this has long been a fight he has naturally, if uncomfortably, felt driven to fight for and write about. Dr TC is doing wonderful things and is an academic who also spends his spare time fighting for digital literacy – not known focus (unless I have missed something) on female speakers or girls and coding, more about just generally shifting the nation up a gear – a noble and respectful thing. My issue is just with Woman’s Hour and how they have interpreted this problem and actively chosen to address it

Update to this post now that the programme has aired

Firstly, both the boys were brilliant, of course. However, I saw absolutely no reason why it was so necessary to have two men debating the subject, as Tom was asked questions about girls in programming and Aral – rightly so – was asked about his campaign to get more female speakers into tech. So the above blog post remains true. I understand that the BBC’s response to a National paper was that this was always going to be about men standing up for women and they only ever wanted male speakers, which begs the question: why contact me, and *all* the other really fabulous and far more eminent than I, ladies.

To the points made in the comments about researchers using contact to get background for the show, this is often the case, but I just want to clarify this contact was made in email form to set up a discussion the following day with a view to me talking about it on the show today. The follow-up email stating they wanted two men to discuss it instead came 1/2 an hour later, not after they actually spoken to me.

Finally, and most importantly, Amy Mather was an absolute superstar. She was the young female programmer they had pre-recorded a session with, during which she spoke eloquently and brilliantly about what she does, why and the problems facing young girl geeks. I know Amy well through Young Rewired State and think she is great. The points she made are what we should be focusing on. However, her inclusion in the show does not take anything away from the fact that the live debate on this subject was actively selected based on gender and was intentionally all male.

I think this is quite enough on this subject, I am glad it has aired, I just think that one own goal could have been foreseen and avoided very easily.