Features, Gender, News, STEM, Technology, Women - by roningirl - October 10, 2011 - 00:27 Etc/GMT-2 - Be first to Comment!
Yours truly had the singular honor of being among some very elite company last week at a private luncheon organized by Vice President Neelie Kroes and her amazing team. The details from an original post on our greenlight for girls homepage:
On 4 October 2011, Cheryl Miller, European Director & Technology Chair of the greenlight for girls Foundation, had the honor of speaking on the topic of “Women & Technology” at a private Luncheon hosted for 25 female MEPs by Commissioner & Vice President Neelie Kroes. Alongside riveting personal stories about the contribution of women to an inclusive and digital Europe — as shared by the UK’s Digital Champion, Martha Lane Fox, and Annie Chen & Fiona Herring from Google– Cheryl emphasized the importance of positive female role models to encourage “girls of all ages” to contribute more actively to designing and buiding the future.
“We are obliged to provide girls the knowledge, tools, self-confidence and role models they need” said Cheryl, “in order for them to be able to save the world.” This vision is at the heart of greenlight for girls work to “promote science, technology, engineering and mathematics to girls of all ages and backgrounds, around the world.”
Vice President Kroes recently bestowed an additional honor on greenlight for girls by awarding the foundation a purse from her Compostela Prize for promoting understanding and cross-cultural communication.
A follow-up blogpost on the Luncheon event by Commissioner Kroes, entitled “Putting Girlpower into Technology,” may be found here, with pictures here.
Features, Gender, STEM, Women - by roningirl - September 9, 2011 - 00:20 Etc/GMT-2 - Be first to Comment!
On 10 September 2011, Ms. Neelie Kroes, Vice President of the European Commission and Commissioner for the Digital Agenda, will honor greenlight for girls ASBL with a prize purse in the name of the International Compostela Group-Xunta de Galicia Prize being awarded to Ms. Kroes this year for playing “a relevant role in the development of world values.”
For its XV edition, the Compostela Prize Jury unanimously decided to award the prize to Ms. Kroes in acknowledgement of her work “in fostering communication among different cultures and mutual understanding,” in the spirit of the Prize and the Group itself. Commissioner Kroes has chosen Greenlightforgirls.org as the benefactor of the 6000 Euro purse attached to the Prize.
Cheryl Miller, Founder of ZenDigital.be and European Director and Technology Chair of Greenlightforgirls.org, will be on hand to present Ms. Kroes with her award, and to formally accept the prize purse on behalf of Greenlightforgirls.org, at the Compostela Prize ceremony in Braga, Portugal on 10 September 2011.
The Compostela Group is a consortium of nearly seventy member universities worldwide whose main aim is to foster cooperation and promote dialogue in all fields related to higher education.
greenlight for girls ASBL is a Brussels-based, international NGO promoting science, technology, engineering and mathematics to girls of all ages and backgrounds.
*Original Title: “VP Kroes Names Greenlight for Award Purse,” reposted from greenlight for girls ASBL website on 8 September 2011.
Features, Gender, Social Media, STEM, Technology, Women - by roningirl - July 26, 2011 - 02:56 Etc/GMT-2 - Be first to Comment!
I am happy to announce that, starting 1 July 2011, yours truly is officially responsible for coordinating the Belgian National Point-of-Contact for the European Center for Women and Technology, the premier European organization promoting Women in Science, Technology, Engineer and Mathematics.
An excerpt from the official ECWT news brief is included below, and of course, I’m thrilled to field questions and inquiries about this new direction, and urge you to stay tuned to learn more about our important work supporting the ECWT in Belgium, and beyond!
[S]ince 1 July 2011, Cheryl D. Miller is responsible for coordinating the Belgian N-PoC of the ECWT.
Cheryl is Founder of Zen Digital Europe and European Director for greenlight for girls, and has twenty years of international experience in the technology and ICT sector. She has worked around the world for blue-chip companies in Strategic Communications, Organizational Change Management and ICT Best Practices. Cheryl possesses a Degree in International Relations, Law and Organizations from the Georgetown School of Foreign Service, and an International MBA from The Moore School at South Carolina, the top-ranked International Business program in the US.
Zen Digital Europe is a consultancy in ICT and Sustainability, also addressing gender and environmental issues, and works to promote digital and social media to achieve the goals of the European Knowledge Society. Through Zen Digital, Cheryl was recently responsible for developing and executing the social media strategy for the 17 June 2011 ‘Women for Smart Growth’ Workshop of the Digital Agenda Assembly, in Brussels, to which Cheryl also contributed with a highly successful presentation on ‘Women Role Models in the Digital Age’.
Zen Digital Europe will be assuming the role of ECWT Belgian NPoC from Isabella Lenarduzzi, CEO of JUMP, and I am excited to have the chance to build upon all the amazing work Isabella has done so far to promote women and STEM in Belgium!
Features, Technology, Women - by roningirl - October 3, 2010 - 18:39 Etc/GMT-2 - Be first to Comment!
After an irresponsibly long interval away from this space, to justify my absence by saying “I’ve had my hands full” would be an understatement! Aside from taking on some fixed clients for eComms work, delivering a 6-month long EU Commission study on “Initiatives for ICT-enabled Low-carbon Cities,” and contributing to Brussels Region’s involvement in an “eco-points scheme encouraging low-carbon citizen behavior,” there have been TONS of other very worthwhile initiatives competing for my increasingly precious time. One such is the following.
Earlier this year, a group of amazing women and I started up a foundation called “greenlight for girls” whose mission is to encourage girls of all ages to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. All very noble in and of itself, of course.
In the meantime, we’ve launched our first “Greenlight for Girls” event, which will be held at the International School of Brussels on 20 November 2010 (REGISTRATION LINK HERE!). The event targets 300 Dutch-, French- and English-speaking girls from all over the Brussels area, aged 11-15, and aims to encourage them to study Science and Technology by linking Sci/Tech with fun and creative careers — including everything from digital music to DNA research!
So far, we have an amazing group (of mostly women) who have volunteered to lead workshops for the girls, and an equally impressive gathering of partners who will host projects in our Experiment Lab area (including minifizz.com, The Creative Stores, Turtlewings.be, The School of Robotics, European Schoolnet, PolarConservation.org, etc.).
Someone from the cabinet of Commissioner Neelie Kroes, or Ms. Kroes herself, and the Belgian Applied Physics & Photonics scientist, Irina Veretennicoff, will speak at the two event plenary sessions.
Away Magazine, the International School of Brussels, and Boston University/Brussels are providing sponsorship for Greenlight for Girls. Naturally though, we are always eager to connect with new partners and sponsors — including anybody who’d be interested in helping provide lunch for the girls! — and, as always, we would welcome everybody’s support on our Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and LinkedIn pages.
So that, among other things, is the reason for my inexcusable radio silence here. And, of course, when the Greenlight for Girls event is done, we all still have TEDxBrussels 2010 on 6 December to look forward to! *whew*
Features, Sustainability, Technology - by roningirl - December 10, 2009 - 01:39 Etc/GMT-2 - Be first to Comment!
The following article, featuring yours truly and my newest initiative with Vin Sumner — Greenshift Europe — is included in a Copenhagen Climate Change Conference publication for New Europe magazine this week. Your feedback welcome!
“Greenshift Europe is a movement promoting ICTs to fight climate change,” says Vin Sumner, CEO of UK-based Clicks & Links, and an expert in applying information and communication technologies to address climate challenges. Sumner and Cheryl Miller, founder of ZenDigital.be, have recently joined forces behind Greenshift Europe to promote ICTs for building “smart,” sustainable communities across Europe.
“First and foremost, we aim to lower the footprint of ICT itself,” says Sumner about the principles behind Greenshift Europe. “Then, we look at how ICTs can make the way we do things today, like powering our homes and public buildings, smarter and more energy efficient. And finally,” he adds, “we plan and build ICT infrastructures in our communities, like free, public broadband networks, which help transform our behavior in a direction that will have less impact on the environment.” The last of these, according to Sumner, represents the ultimate, digitally-driven, green “shift.”
Announced this week by EUROCITIES, a Greenshift Europe and City of Manchester-led initiative called the “EUROCITIES Green Digital Charter,” [download pdf here] builds on the Greenshift principles, and calls on European cities to publicly commit to deploying ICT projects to fight climate change. Emphasizing the role cities can play as important catalysts for achieving climate goals, signatories of the Charter pledge to undertake specific actions using digital technologies “to increase energy efficiency, facilitate emissions reductions and forestall climate change.”
“The EUROCITIES Green Digital Charter might be seen as a kind of ICT ‘component’ of the Covenant of Mayors,” says Cheryl Miller, a veteran ICT consultant who has partnered with Sumner to promote Greenshift Europe. “Covenant of Mayors signatories have committed to surpassing the European climate goals for 2020,” says Miller. “And both the European Commission and EUROCITIES acknowledge the important role ICTs can play in enabling cities to achieve their climate objectives,” she adds. The European Commission DG Energy launched the Covenant of Mayors in February of 2009, and today it has almost one thousand signatories.
At the launch of the EUROCITIES Green Digital Charter last week, Leader of the Manchester City Council, Sir Richard Leese, explained that while signing the Charter is good for the environment, it is also potentially good for a city’s economy. “One of the greatest means for innovation lies in exploiting ICTs to contribute to a greener digital world,” said Sir Richard.
With fourteen major European cities signing up to the EUROCITIES Green Digital Charter in the days leading up to the Copenhagen talks — including Manchester, Reykjavik, Stockholm, Vienna, The Hague, Birmingham, Ghent, Nantes, Genoa, Zaragoza, Murcia, Lisbon, Bristol and Tallinn — the Charter would seem to represent a kind of green “shift” in Europe which many welcome.
