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Hi there,
Firstly, I’d like to say thank you to everyone who has contributed to my GoFundMe so far. I started off with a goal of £1,300 on 29 April, and thanks to your amazing generosity we’re just just £178 away from £4,000!
Much of the news below comes to because of the generosity of Ada Lovelace Day’s supporters, so thank you all! And if you have a tenner, please do consider donating so that I can do more to keep Ada Lovelace Day going and continue making progress on my woman-focused eco-sitcom, Fieldwork.
ABC: Art, Biodiversity and Collaboration
If you’re in York this week and free on Wednesday 4 June 2025 from 6.30pm to 8pm, why not come along to ABC: Art, Biodiversity and Collaboration, a panel discussion that’s part of the University of York’s Festival of Ideas.
Tickets are free, although booking is required.
Join artist and art curator Dr Helena Cox, digital culture lecturer Dr Richard Carter, biologist and artist Dr Veronica Ongaro, photographer Paul Shields and me as we discuss about the relationship between art and biodiversity and share a bit about our own projects.
I’ll be talking about Fieldwork, my eco-sitcom which aims to engage the public with solutions to the biodiversity crisis, explain a bit about what ecologists do all day, and normalise the idea of women working in the field. Some *cough* years after I was out in the field as a geologist, it’s still seen as unusual for women to be out in the countryside doing sciencey stuff!
Fieldwork at an art/science knowledge sharing workshop
Thanks to my involvement in the ABC: Art, Biodiversity and Collaboration event, I’ve also been invited to take part in an environmental art knowledge exchange workshop at the University of York later in the month. I’ll be joining a group of artists, academics and civil society campaigners to explore the role of environmental art and activism in the UK.
It’s amazing to see that the ideas behind Fieldwork are resonating so strongly, particularly at this stage of the project where it’s just a newsletter and a pilot script. I’ve spoken to nearly twenty ecologists, rewilders, birders, bat researchers and others as part of my background research, and so many of them have said that they feel it’s incredibly important to find new ways to reach the public and share both solutions to the biodiversity crisis and the hope felt by a lot of people working out in the field.
Catch up on Ada Lovelace and the Future of Women in Tech
A couple of weeks ago, I was honoured to give an online talk at the Nottingham Tech for Good Festival. I gave attendees a very short history of Ada Lovelace, her parents and her contributions to the history of computing. I then talked about why diversity, equality and inclusion is still really important and what steps you can take to improve DEI within your company.
The recording is now available so you can watch it at your leisure if you missed it last week:
I had some really lovely feedback about it, so I hope you’ll enjoy it as much as the attendees on the day did.
What’s next for Ada Lovelace Day?
I’ve been thinking a lot about what we can do for ALD this year. The day is Tuesday 14 October, so keep that in your diary!
I don’t have the resources to organise an event, but I have been thinking back to the online content festivals that I did throughout the pandemic and am feeling a bit inspired!
My idea is to organise a retrospective and ask people who’ve been a part of Ada Lovelace Day over the years — whether as an attendee, speaker, sponsor or indie events organiser/participant — to write about why they took part and how it helped them and their community. I’d then schedule their posts to be published on our website over the 50 hours of Ada Lovelace Day.
Over the 16 years since I founded Ada Lovelace Day, I’ve never taken a look at it from the outside in and I think it’d be great to explore the impact that the day has had, to perhaps inspire the next generation of campaigners and supporters!
What do you think? Would you be interested in taking part? Please do leave a comment and let me know.
That’s it for now! Please don’t forget to take a look at the GoFundMe and chip in if you can.
All the best,
Suw