What is the Circle of Computer and Robotics Sorceresses?
Why this strange name? :)
Why is the Circle for women only?
Care to join us?
What are your activities and what infrastructure do you have?
When and where do you meet and how do you communicate?
The Circle of Computer and Robotics Sorceresses is a computer, robotics and electronics club for women.
We meet on regular basis to hack, program, create, discuss and just enjoy ourselves by being social. Most of the time, the meetings are in Brussels, Belgium.
What makes the Circle kind of special is the fact that it is reserved to women being active in the ICT domain, in a larger sense.
Because we just wanted to make it “different”.
In earlier days of computers and “computer inter-connections”, before the time of the public internet, great programming and hacking skills were actually referred as “Great Kung-Fu”. Yet, Kung-Fu is rather a fighting style, so we decided to describe our skills in a softer manner – “Magic”.
It’s a nice game, it’s fun and we still have both feet on the ground :-)
The Circle is in no manner a feminist group. However, we do have the pretention to advocate women and girls in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) and we participate on events around all this.
The reason for making the group exclusively female is simply because it’s “different”. The discussions are different, the projects are different, the ideas are different. The aim is simply to have a good time and discuss our “adventures” in our male-dominated working domains.
We also gladly accept male guests to present projects and technologies, or to join us in dedicated discussion rounds.
So, no discrimination and no offense intended :-)
Every woman is welcome in our Circle. However, there are a few conditions after all.
First, the Circle is a group of women active in the programming, ICT, electronics and robotics domain. We are doing real projects and we do discuss real technical topics. We all like our tablets and smart phones, but we are not a group of “geekettes” in love with Social Networks, Facebook and Twitter.
We would like you to have a real technical profile. Of course, we accept professionals as well as “hobbyists”. If you are a mother that loves hacking Linux kernels, programming robots or being active in FLOSS projects in your free time, you are very welcome in our group. Your level of expertise is no importance. Just be yourself, come to learn and to share.
As Brussels is a very international city, our members are of many nationalities. Generally we communicate in English, but you can use any language as long as you do not exclude anyone from a conversation.
If you feel like to saying hello, get more information or join us, please just contact us. If you know another member of the Circle, please don’t forget to mention it. It would be easier as well if you could tell us some words about you or link us to one of your public professional profiles.
Our activities are whatever we like to do.
We meet to develop, discuss, learn, share and have a glass of wine together. We visit conferences, participate on FOSS projects, write blogs and communicate with other women in ICT initiatives. We also organise computer and robotics session for young girls.
The Circle has a large stock on hand:
All what an alchemist’s heart is asking for :)
Our activities are planned on our mailing list, which is reserved to members of the Circle. The list is private, you can use nicknames, but we don’t accept anonymous participation, which means that the list manager knows the person behind the alias.
Everyone can organise happenings and decide to make them public. Of course, there is no obligation to make the event a women-only adventure.
The important thing is to have fun :-)
