Tag: startup

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World’s First #WomenVsCOVID19 Hackathon

On 24-26 April, as part of the #EUvsVirus event attracting 20,000 participants from around the world, the Digital Leadership Institute and its partners hosted the first-ever global #WomenVsCovid19 hackathon tackling the unique challenges facing girls and women from COVID-19 . With 160 participants, ranging from 16 to 70 years of age and representing over 25 countries, the three-day “Move It Forward” event brought together policy-makers and private sector actors to support teen and adult women in driving solutions to the address the coronavirus pandemic.

Move It Forward for #WomenVsCOVID19 participants enjoyed interventions from European Commissioner Mariya Gabriel, Ms. Julie Linn Teigland, Global Director for Women Fast Forward at EY, Ms. Anna Falth of UN Women, Ms. Pirkko Mahlamäki from European Women’s Lobby, and Ms. Bernadette Gemmell of the European Institute for Gender Equality. Miss Alai Miranda Blanco Lascurain, recipient of DLI’s 2019 European Digital Girl of the Year award, also inspired participants by sharing about her own 3D-printed invention supporting frontline healthworkers in Spain, vast majority of whom are women.

During the event, Move It Forward project teams also benefited from expert mentorship and digital skills trainings–including website development, smartphone app coding, and data visualization–in order to develop initiatives that tackle economic and social challenges impacting the world’s girls and women as a result of COVID-19.

Top #WomenVsCOVID19 projects, recognised by a world class jury including Ms. Charlene Lambert from Women’s Entrepreneurship Platform, Ms. Wendy Diamond of Women’s Entrepreneurship Day Organization, Ms. Jaya Jiwatram, of UN Women, Ms. Anne Ravanona of Global InvestHer, and Ms. Cheryl Miller Van Dÿck from DLI, were the following:

  1. All-Around Award: WAVE – A smartphone application tackling psychological abuse and delivering pan-European emergency-response for victims of violence against women and girls
  2. Innovation Award: Exit Tales – An animated documentary of COVID-19 stories from the perspective of migrant children
  3. Impact Award: Art Time with Grandma – An inter-generational art-making project promoting women artists and connecting kids and elderly women in order to combat isolation during COVID-19

DLI and partner Global InvestHer will support winning #WomenVsCOVID19 projects with incubation, mentorship, and training, and projects are also eligible for further support from the wider #EUvsVirus event that announced prizes for the top projects among over 1500 delivered.

Event partners also committed to supporting recognized projects and to continuing to support #MoveItForward in other geographies. The first #MoveItForward for #WomenVsCOVID19 event was live-streamed on the DLI Facebook page, and links to the separate sessions may be found below.

Thank you to all of our amazing partners who made this event such a success! Please do not hesitate to reach out to us to support future editions of #MoveItForward!

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Filmmaking Startup Event for Women

In celebration of Startup Europe Week 2017, the Digital Leadership Institute and its partners Creative District and others, are proud to announce the third FREE Move It Forward – female digital starters weekend bringing together teenage and adult women* from the greater Brussels region to develop digital projects promoting women in media. This initiative, part of the DLI inQube female digital accelerator, is supported by top technology companies, media organisations, and youth and women’s networks and communities. Its objective is to give beginner girls and women the skills to drive positive change and enable them to become digital entrepreneurs and leaders.

Participants:  If you are a teen or adult woman* interested in building your tech and entrepreneurship skills to promote better and more portrayal of girls and women in media, with a focus on film-making and story-telling, please “Apply To Attend” for this FREE event!  Applications are being accepted on a rolling basis and all effort will be made to accommodate everyone who wishes to participate.

For important logistical information about the event, please also see below.


Draft Programme:
Day One – 11 February (Saturday):

  • 8:00-8:30 – Registration & Coffee
  • 8:30-10:30 – Opening Plenary: Inspiring talks by Move It Forward Partners
  • Welcome & Keynote Presentations:
  • 10:30-12:30 – Workshop 1: Smartphone App Development for Android with Ms. Rosanna Kurrer, MIT Master Trainer / DLI
  • 12:30 – 13:30 – Lunch Break
  • 13:30-15:30 – Workshop 2: Build Your Online Presence with Squarespace with Maria Alfonso, Development Manager at DLI, and Oscar Rodicio, Mudita Communications
  • 15:30-18:00 – Brainstorming, Proposals, Idea Selection, Team Grouping & Project Work
  • 18:00-19:00 – Dinner
  • 19:00-22:00 – Project Work with Coaches

Day Two – 12 February (Sunday):

  • 8:00-8:30 – Coffee & Danishes
  • 8:30-10:30 – Workshop 3: Story-telling with Virtual Reality with Fabien Bénétou
  • 10:30-12:30 – Workshop 4: Launch Your Project in the Cloud with Ms. Madalina Lazar & Ms. Christine Gerpheide / Amazon Web Services
  • 12:30-13:30 – Lunch Break
  • 13:30-16:00 – Project Work with Coaches
  • 16:00-17:00 – Presentation Preparation
  • 17:00-19:00 – Closing Plenary: Project Presentations & Judging
Awards:
Prizes will be handed out for the top three projects presented on Sunday afternoon:
  • Overall Best: 6-month inQubation at DLI; 10 Hours one-to-one inQube Startup Coaching; Other TBC
  • Most Business Potential: 4-month inQubation at DLI; 8 Hours one-to-one inQube Startup Coaching; Other TBC
  • Most Innovative: 4-month inQubation at DLI; 8 Hours one-to-one inQube Startup Coaching; Other TBC

Coaches:  Move It Forward femaledigital starter weekends are supported by a worldclass team of coaches who generously give their time and expertise to help participants deliver awesome projects and enterprises. Please contact us if you would like to support our event as a coach.

Speakers, Judges & Coaches:

Ms. Julie Compagnon:  Ms. Compagnon is a Belgian artist heard for the first time on The Voice – Season One. She continues to make her way as a chronicler for the same television channel that discovered her without abandoning her dream of music. Julie is currently preparing her very first album: Between candor and power, humor and generosity.

Ms. Ségolène Martin: Ms. Martin is the cofounder and Managing Partner of Kantify, a technology startup enabling retailers to transform their data into value thanks to Artificial Intelligence. Ségolène manages the Business Development and Marketing of Kantify’s activities. Before Kantify, Ségolène cofounded Meetsies, a collaborative economy platform on social dining (1500 users and 3 cities in 8 months), and held several management positions in the fields of innovation, digital transformation and business development.

 

Ms. Marine Haverland:  Active in the audio-visual sector since 2008, and after a period with Versus production, in 2012 Marine Haverland found Aura Films, a platform for developing an producing new media projects.   Marine also organized conferences and education in the transmedia filed and co-founded Liège Web Fest, the first Belgian festival dedicated to  transmedia, web-series et Virtual Reality. Marine is presently in charge of new media, gaming and virtual reality for the screen.brussels cluster.

Ms. Ioana Matei: Ms. Matei is Executive Film Producer at Reality+ Film, a movie director and writer, and she currently working on the production Joanne.  She is also Virtual Reality Solutions Delivery Leader at Procter&Gamble and leader of Diversity and Inclusion for the IT Function in Europe.  Ms. Matei has a 13-year trackrecord with P&G with eleven years in Business Intelligence that includes hands-on analysis work, deployment of BI IT solutions globally, and design and re-transformation of BI services. Ms. Matei is passionate about coaching and mentoring with focus on woman in IT, and actively promotes creativity in the workplace by using movie and story-telling techniques.
 
Ms. Claudia Ritter:  Ms. Ritter has 25 years experience in senior management and business consulting. Her career has encompassed EU affairs, journalism, strategic communications, and organisational development. Her work with European media broadcasts, as well as in leadership positions at the European Commission and in other international organisations, gives her a strong understanding of international relations and strategic thinking.
 
 
Mr. Fabien Bénétou: Mr. Bénétou is a passionate virtual reality developer whose vision for VR is to allow us to better explore our thoughts and express creativity.  Fabien produces professional VR content, and regularly organizes workshops to share the power of this medium with people of all backgrounds.
 Mr. Geoffroy Verney-Carron is an experienced strategy, digital and project management professional, and a highly entrepreneurial individual who has worked in corporate and startup environments. Mr. Verney-Carron believes in building trust and its value over time. Looking for opportunities to help organizations run their activity like a startup, collaborate, innovate, take ownership and be agile.
Mr. Óscar Rodicio is a foreign-language enthusiast and has acquired experience in different fields such as translation, event management, communication, teaching, interpretation and PR, both as an employee and as volunteer. He is currently working on MuditaComm, a startup idea that aims at providing language and digital marketing services to SME’s and organisations.

 

Childcare:  We proudly work with Bsit to provide childcare for participants with children up to ten years of age, on an as-needed basis.  If you wish to take advantage of this service, please kindly indicate that in the application form.

Languages:  Workshops and inspirational talks will be given in the language of choice of the speaker with interpretation in other languages, as needed.  If you would like to support this event as an interpretor, kindly join the event as “Volunteer/Event Partner” or contact us.

Laptops: Participants will need a laptop to be able to fully benefit from this event. If you do not have access to a laptop please let us know to reserve one for you. We have a limited number available and are grateful for participants who can bring extra/s to share with others. Please let us know if you can support the event in this way.

Supporters:  Please see a list of our Move It Forward partners and sponsors below, and kindly contact us if you would like more information on how to support this event, or join us as a “Volunteer/Event Partner”. Opportunities exist for Move It Forward volunteers, interpreters, coaches, jury members, content and media partners, prize contributors and sponsors.

If there is any other way we can facilitate your participation in this event, please do not hesitate to let us know!

*anyone who identifies as a woman

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Refugee Women Move It Forward

As part of Code Week Europe 2016, on 15-16 October in Brussels, sixty teen and adult women–ranging in age from 15 to 55 and representing upwards of twenty-five nationalities–gathered at the Digital Leadership Institute’s inQube space for a Move It Forward “female digital starters” weekend. Through expert support and hands-on workshops on web development, app coding, the cloud and CRM, participants built and launched their own enterprises in support of women refugees and asylum seekers in Europe.

Ms. Anna Zobnina, Chair of the European Network of Migrant Women, who gave a keynote and took part in the event, shared the following: “When extremism and poverty attack women forcing them to flee their home, we should attack extremism and poverty by empowering refugee women to rebuild their dignified lives. And if we want to win, we have to be strategic and use the digital technology to fight violence and discrimination that women on the move face at every step of their journeys.”

Attendees of the Move It Forward event, twenty-five percent of whom were refugee women from across Europe, enjoyed an entire weekend dedicated to learning digital and entrepreneurial skills taught by DLI and its world-class technology partners, including Amazon Web Services, Onboard CRM and MIT AppInventor for Android.

On the final day of the event, the most innovative projects were selected for further incubation at inQube, and recognized later in the week at a European Parliament event hosted by KAGIDER, the Turkish women’s entrepreneurship association.  Recognized projects included:

Ms. Sanem Oktar, KAGIDER President said: “As the largest women’s entrepreneurship network in Turkey, KAGIDER is thrilled to ‘Move It Forward’ for female digital starters. We share the vision of economically empowering women to drive positive change in the world, and of enabling them to use technology to do that. We are therefore excited to showcase the successes of Move It Forward Brussels 2016 and to build on this with Move It Forward Istanbul in 2017.”

The first Move It Forward weekend took place in January 2016 with support of the Brussels Capital Region. Four of the final projects received expert support from DLI for a period of five months, and several projects are continuing today. To build on its success in Brussels, DLI and its partners are now launching Move It Forward in other cities around the globe.

The two-day Move It Forward event is a flagship of the inQube female digital accelerator, a DLI initiative whose mission is to redress under-representation of women in tech startup.

Event Sponsors and Partners

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Move It Forward for Women Refugees

On 15-16 October, in celebration of Code Week Europe 2016, the Digital Leadership Institute and its partners will organise the second FREE Move It Forward – female digital starters weekend bringing 100 teen and adult women* together from greater Brussels to develop digital projects that support women refugees and asylum-seekers in Europe. This initiative, part of the DLI inQube female digital accelerator, is supported by top technology companies, and youth and women’s networks and communities. Its objective is to give beginner girls and women the skills to drive positive change and enable them to become digital entrepreneurs and leaders.
Participants: If you are a teen or adult woman* interested in building your tech and startup skills for the benefit of women asylum-seekers and refugees in Europe, please apply to attend this FREE event at the following link: http://bit.ly/mifbru16oct
Applications are being accepted on a rolling basis and effort will be made to accommodate everyone who applies.
Supporters: Please see a list of our Move It Forward partners and sponsors below, and kindly contact us if you would like more information on how to support this event. Opportunities exist for Move It Forward volunteers, interpreters, coaches, jury members, content and media partners, prize contributors and sponsors.
*anyone who identifies as a woman

Draft Programme:

Day One – 15 October (Saturday):

  • 8:00-8:30 – Registration & Coffee
  • 8:30-9:30 – Opening Plenary: Inspiring talks by Move It Forward Partners
    • Welcome & Keynote Presentations:
    • Keynote: Ms. Yara Al-Adib – Service & UX Consultant/Deloitte Digital
  • 9:30-11:30 – Workshop 1: Web Development with WordPress (TBC)
  • 12:30 – 13:30 – Lunch Break
  • 13:30-15:30 – Workshop 2: Grow Your Business with Salesforce.org (TBC)
  • 15:30-18:00 – Brainstorming, Proposals, Idea Selection, Team Grouping & Project Work
  • 18:00-19:00 – Dinner
  • 19:00-22:00 – Project Work with Coaches

Day Two – 16 October (Sunday):

  • 8:00-8:30 – Coffee & Danishes
  • 8:30-10:30 – Workshop 3: Smartphone App Development with MIT App Inventor for Android (TBC)
  • 10:30-12:30 – Workshop 4: Launching Your Project in the Cloud with Amazon Web Services (TBC)
  • 12:30-13:30 – Lunch Break
  • 13:30-16:00 – Project Work with Coaches
  • 16:00-17:00 – Presentation Preparation
  • 17:00-19:00 – Closing Plenary: Project Presentations & Judging
  • 18:30 – Keynote Presentation: TBA
  • 19:00-21:00 – Awards Dinner & Networking
Awards:
Prizes will be awarded for top three projects presented on Sunday afternoon:
  • Overall Best: 6-month inQubation at DLI; 10 Hours one-to-one inQube Startup Coaching; Other TBC
  • Biggest Challenge: 4-month inQubation at DLI; 8 Hours one-to-one inQube Startup Coaching; Other TBC
  • Best Technical Solution: 4-month inQubation at DLI; 8 Hours one-to-one inQube Startup Coaching; Other TBC

Sponsors & Partners:
Thank you to the individuals and organisations who are making this event possib

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Brussels Women Move It Forward

On 23-24 January, forty teen and adult women gathered at DLI’s inQube space in Brussels to develop websites and smartphone applications, and to launch their own enterprises to tackle cyberviolence and promote online safety for girls and women. Participants of the first-ever Move It Forward Brussels female digital starter weekend — organised by DLI and subsidised by the Brussels Capital Region — came from across Brussels and around the world, to improve their tech skills and try their hand at entrepreneurship.

Says Bianca Debaets, Brussels Minister for Equal Opportunity and Digitalisation, and supporter of the Move It Forward initiative: “When women take up an active role in the ICT and business worlds, they are stronger. And that should reduce cyberviolence against women too. In that way, Move It Forward serves a dual purpose: It makes more women entrepreneurs and it empowers them digitally.” (Read a full press release about the Move It Forward event in Dutch here: Move It Forward Persbericht 2016.)

Attendees of Move It Forward Brussels, from 14 to 54 in age and representing upwards of twenty-two nationalities, dedicated an entire weekend to learning digital and entrepreneurial skills taught by DLI and its worldclass technology partners, including Tableau Software, Amazon Web Services, WordPress and AppInventor. With the help of a dedicated and talented team of coaches, participants developed innovative projects that they presented to a jury on Sunday evening for top honors. Jury-members included Ms. Maité Morren, Councilmember for Ixelles responsible for ICT, and representatives from European Schoolnet, Child Focus Belgium, DLI and AWS.

The two-day Move It Forward Brussels initiative kicked off on Saturday morning with a keynote presentation by Ms. Ellen Van den Berghe, 2015 Young ICT Lady of the Year in Belgium, and closed with an inspiring talk by Ms. Terry Reintke, Member of European Parliament who recently authored a report on Women and the Digital Society.

Top awards for the weekend were presented to ENAC, Detrolled and iCompassion-Ubuntu, each promoting a unique approach for addressing cyberviolence against girls and women. All winning teams receive several months’ inQubation and startup coaching at DLI and free membership for one year on the Amazon Web Service platform. Each member of the Overall Best project team also received Amazon Fire tablets. In addition, several follow-up workshops are already planned to allow inQube community members to further develop the digital and entrepreneurship skills they started learning at Move It Forward Brussels.

Organisations across Europe have expressed interest in organising Move It Forward events in their own cities, and future plans for the Brussels inQube community include taking on additional challenges faced by Europe’s girls and women, including immigration and asylum-seeking, health and nutrition, media portrayal, etc. Please contact us if you would like to learn more about the Move It Forward initiative, to partner with DLI/inQube, and/or to organise a Move It Forward event in your city!