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A WomenInTech Starter Kit:

Starting Out Hip, and Keeping Things Hopping

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Your Facilitators

Donna Petherbridge, Associate Vice Provost, Distance Education & Learning Technology Applications�
Debbie Carraway, IT Director, College of Sciences�
Jill Sexton, Associate Director for Digital & Organizational Strategy, NC State University Libraries�
Mardecia Bell, Chief Information Security Officer, NC State University�
Gwen Hazlehurst, Assistant Vice Chancellor, Enterprise Application Services

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Session Outcomes

Start your own WIT!
Partner with others to make it work!
Use our “toolkit” (and make it yours!!)

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How did we get started?

We’ve known each other a long time.
The WIT idea had been tossed around before but with some pushback about timing.
Several of us were asked to be on a group together to review all IT positions across campus in fall, 2018 with our HR colleagues
We realized that this entire group was women
That weekly work really created a camaraderie that we didn’t want to lose, so we thought “it’s time”
Started with a presentation at the University wide IT Community Day in November 2019

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What does it look like?

Website: go.ncsu.edu/wit�
Meetings

odd months: morning coffee/open conversations with “theme” �(sample agenda)
even months: afternoon invited presenter
bimonthly: executive team check in/planning session�

Location:

pre-COVID - student center/presentation rooms
COVID - Zoom
post-COVID - imagine doing a combination of F2F and online�

Contacting people

Google group (womenintech - over 100 members)
Twitter & Calendar entries on website

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What’s in our Toolkit?

We pulled together a folder of resources to share, with a “Start here” page that has additional information and points to specific resources.

[Jill]

What if you want to start your own affinity group, but you’re not sure where to start? We are sharing with you a Toolkit of materials we put together during our first year in the hopes that you’ll find something in there to be useful. Use it wholesale, or take only what you need. The “Start Here” readme provides a useful overview of the content

What will you find in the Toolkit?

An outline of the steps we took to establish a presence on campus and social media platforms
Scheduling ideas that have worked for us, both for the executive team and for our public group meetings
Email templates that you can adapt to invite the community to your events, and example conversation starters that we used to promote active discussion in our meetups
Examples of methods we have use to gather feedback and generate ideas for future meetings
Presentations from our programs and events that you can use as is or adapt for your own events

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Future Plans

Keep things moving along/make time for this group through COVID crisis (community too important to not keep going)�
Involve “newer” folks to keep the group “hip” - our leadership team is fairly diverse in organizational membership and backgrounds but we all are very experienced�
Keep asking the community what matters to them and what they want to hear about�
Rotating Leadership to get new voices (we need to do this)

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Contact Information

Email:

womenintech@ncsu.edu

or any of us individually

pether+wit@ncsu.edu

dlcarraw+wit@ncsu.edu

jksexton@ncsu.edu

mardecia_bell@ncsu.edu

gwen_hazlehurst@ncsu.edu

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Questions? Feel free to keep asking in the chat!

Thanks for attending!

Your session should:

What actions do you want them to take during or after the event?

What motivates your audience to take these actions?

We hope you are excited about starting your own group . . . .

Or that you found something you can use for an existing effort . . .

We will continue to place resources in the shared folder.

We hope that you can also keep your group hopping along!