Back in December ’09 a friend of mine and I decided to found a community for women working in IT in the Aarhus area. We named this community Ada Aarhus after the famous female “programmer” Ada Lovelace. The idea for this community started at a geek girl themed night at the JAOO conference in October ’09.

The community started out with three main focus points:

1. Recruiting more women to work in IT (presenting role models and work on concrete projects)
2. Coaching and mentors (facilitate the contact between mentors and mentees)
3. Networking (share stories and network in the IT-business in general)

And in addition we defined what Ada Aarhus is NOT: a place to go and cry about being a minority in the IT-business. The women in Ada Aarhus love to be in IT even though we are not shy about talking of the problems that arise being a minority.

The first meeting was set up through Facebook and we invited all our female geek friends and they invited their friends and so on and we got the local union to invite their female members… We were 10 women at this first meeting, WOW. We decided to meet every two months and after a couple of meetings we elected (asked) some people to run this community with more than 50 members on LinkedIn and almost 50 members on Facebook.

Now we are on Facebook and LinkedIn and we are working on a network site with blogs, messages and profile pages, so that we can network online as well as offline. Any woman living in the Aarhus area willing to call herself a woman in IT  is welcome to join us on LinkedIn or Facebook.