Ada Lovelace Day at York University 2016

2016-10-26-22-11-19Once again, York University's 2nd International Ada Lovelace Day celebrations involved two different events:

  • Canada Research Chair in Radioastronomy, and Director of the University of Toronto's Dunlap Observatory, Professor Bryan Gaensler gave the Ada Lovelace Day Lecture
  • We held a drop-in Wikipedia Editathon in Steacie Science and Engineering Library

We thank York University Libraries, the Lassonde School of Engineering, and the Faculty of Science for supporting the events financially. Additional in kind support -- advertising and promotion -- came from the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies' School of Gender, Sexuality and Women's Studies, the interdisciplinary Science and Technology Studies programme, and the Politics of Evidence Working Group, Robarts' Centre.

Bryan Gaensler gave his talk, titled, Gender, Equity and Inclusion: a Cosmic Perspective in the spectacular Bergeron Centre for Engineering Excellence. Our goal in future years, is to diversify the gender of our speakers, so as to obtain the kind of gender balance in this prestigious annual lecture, that other Canadian science meetings have been failing to do. Dean of Science at Ryerson University, Imogen Coe, gave the inaugural Ada Lovelace Day lecture at York University in 2015.

2016-10-27-03-59-45-1We thank Dorothy Birtalan (right) for helping us to organize this year's wikipedia editathon. Dr. Priti Mishra, who attended the editathon both years, was the lucky winner of the raffle prize -- a mug with John Dupuis' mug on it -- from the recent #SciComm100 art initiative at Science Borealis.

Our model for the Wikipedia Editathon acknowledges that Keele is a commuter campus. We scheduled the event, in both 2015 and 2016, on a Fall Reading Week Co-curricular day, and invited anyone coming to campus, to drop by for a short or long time. This approach differs from the Wikipedia Editathon model requiring people to register for an entire morning or day. We have been in touch with Suw Charman-Anderson about drafting guidelines for how to make a drop-in style Editathon work.