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>> female speaker:okay, good afternoon, everybody, and welcome to champions ofchange for tech inclusion. we are really excitedto have you here. it's been a long time planning. and thank you, those of you whobared the circus today when we had the fire drill. so thanks for persevering,staying with us, and we have a really greatprogram for you today. so i just want to take amoment and say thank you again,

and i'd like to welcomems. valerie jarrett. she is the senior advisorto president obama. she is also the chair of thecounsel on women and girls. she is a huge champion for techinclusion and has been a real advocate for thissince the beginning. so i'd like to invitevalerie to the stage. thank you. [applause] >> valerie jarrett:well, thank youvery much, katie,

for that kind introduction. good afternoon. we are so excited tohave you all here. look at this room. it's the highlight ofmy day, seeing you all. i love champions of change, andi just want to say how pleased i am to be withyou for a moment. i want to acknowledgeour special guest, baratunde thurston, whoi had a chance to meet.

where did you go? where are you? there you are. shout out to you formoderating our panel. we appreciate that. and of course congratulationsto the champions, who i also had achance to just meet. you are literally rockstars, and we are so, so appreciate of what you'redoing to transform technology.

all of us care so deeply aboutmaking sure that our young people have theopportunity to dream big. and as i always say: youngpeople start out with that twinkle in their eye anda dream in their hearts, and it's our job to make surethat they can reach that full potential. and that's what thisafternoon is really all about. whatever theirbackground, our children, all of our children deserve thechance to reach for the sky

and pursue whatever theyput their minds to. and live up to theirfullest potential, including working on stem. i saw this potential first-handback in april when we had a science fair hereat the white house, and let me tell you whatan experience that was. did i feel not that bright bythe end of seeing what all these young people had invented. i visited 30 exhibits that day,and i spoke with students about

their projects, and they wereso excited to be in the white house, and i was so excitedto see what they had invented. and it was everything from someyoung women who showed me a rocket that had launched a rawegg -- i won't tell you what happened to the egg afterthey launched it -- but it did actually work successfully. they designed the rocket. it actually did not crack. there was also another youngwoman who hoped to make a device

that strengthens the eyemuscle and improves vision. and so far hertesting demonstrated real evidentiary proof. and it wasn't even a complicatedcontraption, if you will. it was really verysimple, but it worked. and she was about 13, i think. so let me tell you,a lot has changed since i was back in school. we weren't doing any ofthe kind of really cool stuff

that those youngpeople were doing. i also had an opportunityto meet, of course, parents and teachers, and wecontinue to lift them up as well because those are the ones who are nurturingthese young people. and i hope that as parents andteachers and mentors and role models we willcontinue to do that. this is really allabout our young people, and i'm just delighted to seeso many young people here today.

but it's also importantly aboutthe future of our country. the president has said thatgetting boys and girls engaged and excited about stem is soincredibly important to the future of our nation. it is part of what makesthe united states globally competitive, and it alwaysbegins with the young people. just yesterday, president obamagave a speech in tennessee at the amazon facility, and he wastalking all about how we can create jobs forthe 21st century.

how can we make sure that ouryoung people grow up with the skills that they need to havethat ability to have that globally competitive edge? and those jobs aregoing to be, eventually, filled by our young people, solet's make sure that they have the skills thatthey need for them. and, as we know, the studentsof today are going to be the inventors. they're alwaysthe entrepreneurs.

they're the businessleaders of tomorrow. we'll all be workingfor them one day. so let's figure outwhat we can do to nurture them and lift them up. we know that students withstem skills are going to be the driving force towardsthat competitive edge that we all want. they're going to be at the topof creativity and innovation and entrepreneurship.

we also know that as a nationour diversity is one of our greatest strengths. i spoke at a naturalizationceremony yesterday, and there were over 92countries represented. over 700 people. and i'll tell you, watchingthose folks of all ages taking that pledge and oath to ourcountry and standing and giving the pledge of allegiance to ourflag just reminds you that this is really what ourcountry is all about.

it's about diversity,it's about innovation, it's about strength andcharacter and commitment and selflessness and dedicationto our community. and as, we also knowthat as a nation, we have to do whateverwe can to nurture that. it doesn't just happen byaccident; it takes real effort. and that's what we'recelebrating here today with our incredible champions of change. so i speak a fairamount about engagement,

but -- as i said -- thischampions initiative is one that we really take a greatdeal of pride in. because we are recognizing justordinary americans who are doing extraordinary things. and when you go back home, wehope that you'll tell everybody that the white house andpresident obama recognized your efforts. and it's amazing how thechampions for change initiative gets more regional press than ithink anything else that we do.

because when you go back homeyou are celebrities because you came here and wewere able to recognize everything that you've done. and so that's why the techinclusion champions of change is what today is really all about. we have an amazing groupof folks who are sparking imagination and captivatingyoung minds all across our country, from teaching computerscience to high school students to encouraging youngwomen and urban teens,

teaching them how to code -- andi have no idea what that code means; one day someone'sgoing to teach me how to code. i'll be looking forward to that-- to writing children's books to providing low income studentswith programing classes. our champions aredoing phenomenal work for the youth of tomorrow. so i hope that youknow that the president is so very proud of all of you. and that he is right therealongside of you with your

efforts to make sure thatwe are bringing stem to underrepresented communities. so, for example, he launcheda private public initiative to move students to the top ofthe pack in math and science. and this effort is knownas educate to innovate. and it's a campaignthat has generated over $750,000,000 towards stemeducation efforts. and i spoke with ursula burns,who is the ceo of xerox, yesterday who said she reallywants to redouble our efforts to

making sure that we are gettingyoung people -- particularly young girls --interested in stem. she tells an amazing storyabout growing up poor and having absolutely no idea what itmeant to be an engineer. she had an aptitudefor science and math, and she landed aninternship at xerox. and now she's the ceo. and so we know that if weopen up those doors and those gateways to people whenthey're very young,

we can actually capture theirimagination and provide them with the opportunityto reach their dreams. another woman, ellen coleman,who is now ceo of dupont, told me once that her dream asa child was to be an astronaut. she wanted to go in space. and that's what reallydrove her into engineering. so she said, "well, inever made it to space, but i am one of the fewwomen ceos in the country, which isn't bad either."

so even if you fall alittle short of that dream, you might end updoing all right. so we have committed to creatingstem education and mentorship opportunities forour young women. so another example would be ourscience oriented agencies such as the epa and the department ofenergy have stem programs that are specifically targetingyoung women and girls. and we're training teachers tohelp prepare students across the country for the rigorof those stem courses.

but we can't do it alone, whichis where all of you come in. so those of you whowe are honoring today, those of you who arefans and supporters, and other folks who arecommitted to the innovation that stands firmly behind stem,i just thank you on behalf of the presidentand our administration. you're terrific partners, andwe are so proud of you all. so thank you very much. congratulations.

>> female speaker:okay, thank you verymuch to valerie jarrett. i now would like to introduceyou to a man who needs no introduction, i think. but i'm honored todo so anyway as well. baratunde thurston isgoing to be your m.c. and your moderatorfor today's event. baratunde is the ceo, cofounder,and hashtagger in chief of cultivated wit. he wrote the new york time'sbestseller "how to be black,"

and served for five yearsas director of digital for the satirical newsoutlet, the onion. when he's not delivering keynotetalks at gatherings such as south by southwest, le web, pdf,he writes a monthly column for fast company and contributesto the mit media lab as a directors fellow. he's cofounded theblack political blog jack and jill politics. he's advised the white house ona variety of digital activities.

and he has more than 10 years ofexperience in stand-up comedy, so i have no doubt he will notleave us all smiling, laughing, learning, and lovingtoday's event. so with that, i'd like tointroduce baratunde up to the stage. >> baratunde thurston:what's up, y'all? put your hands together. just clap as muchas you have in you. good, good.

we'll do better later. that's a good warm-up. i am pretty obviouslyhonored to be here. i'm going to keep myremarks very brief. i wanted to clarify somethingthat valerie jarrett said. she talked about this rocketexperiment with a raw egg that was launched, and she didn'treveal what happened at the end of that. the truly innovative thing isthat that egg turned into

a full-grown living chicken andjust flew off into the sunset. it was very, very powerful. nasa is looking into it. it's kind of under-wrapsresearch right now. i probably will be taken awayafter this session is over for revealing state secrets. it is really good to be here. i grew up in this town, andi want to thank you, katie, for having me here.

so i actually care about thisissue on a pretty significant and serious level. it's a part of myown family history. my great-grandfather was bornright across the river in virginia, born into slavery,and taught himself to read. that's like a revolutionaryact, just the power to consume information. i still don't understandhow someone does that. you know, but you want to learnso much that you kind of

dive into it and go for it. and he ended up movingto d.c. in 1896, almost 100 yearsbefore i was born here. he had two daughters, and one ofthose daughters was my maternal grandmother, laureen martin. she was thefirst black employee at the u.s.supreme court building. she worked in clerical services. and my sister --i have an older sister --

we didn't know this until 2005. tragically, afterour own mother died, we started goingthrough her stuff. not in a criminal way, just sowe could go through affects when someone moves on, and we foundthese newspaper clippings of our grandmother with jimmy carter. and this newspaper article inafro american celebrating the first negro woman to work insidethe supreme court building. and that's a weirdfamily secret to keep.

right? like, are we on thesame page on that? because normally it'ssomething embarrassing. like, "oh, we don't talk aboutlouisiana because grandma has a warrant," you know, "for runningmoonshine back in the day." but in this case,it's like, "be quiet, she's a civil rights hero. don't tell anybody. that's awkward."

my mother came along and prettymuch rebelled outside the walls of the very institutionsmy grandmother worked at. she was always in thestreet protesting something. the revolution wasn't televisedbut it was photographed heavily in black andwhite with all kinds of head wraps and dashikis. and she brought my older sisterand i up in the columbia heights neighborhood just north of herein the '80s under, you know, very strange maritalcircumstances

i think we're all familiar with. my mother nevergraduated from college. she took some classes at the university ofthe district of columbia. she took classes atmontgomery community college. i attended some ofthose classes with her. she was a domestic worker. she cooked food, she deliveredphone books to buy our house. and she saw the future.

she somehow got a piece of itand she started working in the office of a controllerof the currency. she became a systems analystand cobal programmer, with no degree, withno code academy, with all these champions here. she was a championin her own right, and so i'm very personallyconnected in regards to this because she mademy life possible, she made my sister'slife possible.

my sister runs a yogastudio in lansing, but she was 20years a journalist. digital news director atthe lansing state journal. i was digitaldirector at the onion. we had the same job, excepti lied a lot more in my job. it was really quite an honor. so that is the contextwith which i'm here, and honored to kind offacilitate the greatness of these champions.

i'm also runningthe rocky theme song on loop in the back of my head. so if i bust out at anytime, that's acceptable. thank you all for being here. i'm going to ask panel 1 toplease come to the stage and take your seats. and we will get into it. i have some questions. and i just would love toknow, right here, how are you?

what's your name? everybody say,"what's up, debbie?" thank you for beingwith us, debbie. can we get a roundof applause for these guys taking their seats? i'm going to change his over. check, check. cool. so very, very briefly just soyou -- i don't know if you

can read the nametags from thatdistance -- we have rebecca garcia at the far end. she is the cofounder ofcoder dojo in new york city. we have ruthe farmer. she's the director of strategicinitiatives for the national center for women & it. we have jeff epps, directorof it at the richmond county schools in hamlet,north carolina. and by the way, we'reall wearing these rings.

jeff's students madethese with a 3d printer. so, thanks for the free jewelry. >> rebecca garcia: ifyou look at my hand, my finger was too smallso i couldn't wear mine. >> baratunde thurston: oh, no. i'm sure they canship you something. >> jeffries epps:they'll reengineer it. >> baratunde thurston: yes. carlos bueno who is an engineerat facebook but is here

primarily because of thechildren's book he wrote called lauren ipsum , whichteaches computer programing and critical thinking skills. so i hope congress takes upthat book and applies it. >> carlos bueno: come on, now. >> baratunde thurston: andwe have kimberly bryant, the founder and executivedirector of black girls code. there's no super-formal intro,but the first question i have, we can just go down the line.

when did you realize thattechnology was this catalyst, that it had some special power,and how did that lead you to do the work that you do? why technology? >> rebecca garcia:why technology? so, earlier i gave my storyof how i got interested in technology, but reallythe quick, you know, five second story was we runfree coding classes for youth in new york city, and this is goingon across the globe

with coder dojo. and we had a little girl alsonamed rebecca, smaller than me, who was attending our coursesfor a couple of months. and she had never heard ofcomputer science before. she had never had anyexperience with it. and she attendedfor a few months, learned html and cssand some programing. her parents came tous later that month, or later a couple of monthslater, and said, "you know,

she came to us andsaid, you know, 'is this something ican do for a living?' " this nine-year-old girl, shelater went on to develop her first android application,and she's been a really big inspiration. to see the changein one child's life, and to see that changeripple throughout the globe, i think is really important. it's that sparking theimagination and creativity

that they can use coding andtechnology as an art. >> baratunde thurston:what was your [unintelligible] >> rebecca garcia: well, unlikemost everyone else at this table, i am not atechnical person. >> baratunde thurston: what? where are the guards? >> rebecca garcia:i'm not an engineer, but i manufacture engineers. >> baratunde thurston:woah, woah, woah, what?

hold up. >> rebecca garcia:so i, actually, for me it was two things. one, in college as an undergradi took rhetoric of women from dr. jane ward at lewis and clarkcollege, if you're watching. and that was the first time --as a sophomore in college -- that i heardabout all of these women like sojourner truthand ida wells. and i was like, "how come i'venever heard of these women?

and now i'm20-years-old in college. this is ridiculous." so that hit me then. and then later i took ajob with the girl scouts, and i actually walked out of abig high paying job to work for half as much money at thegirl scouts of oregon. and intel offered a grant, andit was to launch an engineering program for girls. and i just found that thismissing piece of girls in

technology and girls' voices intechnology fit perfectly with my own personal feminist agenda. and it's the one placewhere we're not advancing, we're backsliding seriously. so that just struck for me, andit seems like the place i can have the biggestimpact right now. >> baratunde thurston:okay, thanks. jeff? >> jeffries epps: my ah-hahmoment came 30 years ago

when i was 14. i keyed in my firstcomputer program, which was a hangman program. and it didn't work. i realized that i didn'tread the directions properly. i had to press enterafter every line. so after i followed thedirections, the program worked. and for me it was a verypowerful moment because i realized that computerswere powerful.

and it made me powerful. and i wasn't the mostathletically inclined kid. i couldn't shoot a basketball, icouldn't hit the broadside of a barn with a ball, icouldn't throw a football, i wasn't very fast. but i was, it made merealize that i was smart. so whenever i look atyoung people, i see myself. i see a coder. and it's my mission now thatevery student that i meet

and every student thatwe reach out to, that we introduce them to codingbecause they might find out that they're pretty smart as well. >> baratunde thurston: carlos? >> carlos bueno:so i learn slowly, so my ah-hah moment took about10 years start to finish. i saw from the inside threeindustries get dissolved and transformed by technology. i used to repair electronicsand then they became

too cheap to repair. i did illustration untildesktop publishing came along and killed that. and i did desktop publishinguntil this little thing called the internet camealong and killed that. >> baratunde thurston:so whatever you do, we should stop doing that. >> carlos bueno: just run away. >> jeffries epps: he'sthe harbinger, man.

>> carlos bueno: it took mea long time to realize that i couldn't just keephopping sideways. i had to keephopping up a little. because otherwise those thingswere just going to eat me. you had to keep going. and why kids, thattook another 10 years. when i thought back and realizedthat the first job i had repairing electronics,i was 12-years-old. i was working for my parentsin their family business.

and it's kind of remarkable thatkids can do that if you don't tell them to it wastoo hard, right? so we just nottell our kids that. >> baratunde thurston: kimberly. >> kimberly bryant: yes, so, forme i think what resonated with me this morning was hearingvalarie jarrett talk about ursula burns and her journeyto becoming the ceo of xerox. that's one of mypersonal heroes, but that wassimilar to my story.

i graduated in aninner-city high school, and i really had no clue whatengineering was or those people were not walking aroundin my neighborhood. but i had an aptitude for mathand science and i was kind of led down the path tobecoming an engineer. so throughout my career of beingin tech companies and consumer products companies inthe engineering fashion, some 20 years after findingmyself in the bay area and in the heart of silicon valley, andworking in the middle of lots of

opportunity, but being able tolook outside my backdoor from my biotech company and see bayview hunter's point and a neighborhood that'simpoverished. it's a neighborhood that lacks,and a neighborhood with lots of black and brown kids thatwere like me 20 years ago. so it was clear to me in sortof a light bulb moment that we cannot lose another generation. we can't affordit as a community, we can't afford it as a nationto have a generation left behind

without having access totechnology and tools that really changed my life and that'sgoing to change everything we know and think we know today. >> baratunde thurston:all right. thank you. just for those of you onthe live stream as well, whitehouse.gov/live, hello. the hashtag is #whchamps, and wewill try to check the feed and see if you guys have questionsfor this panel and the next, and that goes for thepeople in the room, too.

we have a question that wassubmitted in advance from alexander howard. he's from d.c., formertech writer at o'riley, and he posted this. i think it can beaddressed by anyone, so whoever just jumps infirst can take the bulk of it. what's the biggest challengeyou face in building a career in technology? who or what helped youovercome that challenge?

and what's the most effectivething that others can do to help other folks overcome thatchallenge of building an actual career in technology? what was the hardest part,and who helped or what helped you through it? >> jeffries epps: i want tosay the hardest part for me was thinking logically interms of writing code. if then, when this. in high school, it was mycomputer programing instructor,

mr. stewart. he allowed me tofail my way forward. >> baratunde thurston: you hada high school cs instructor. >> jeffries epps: i did. >> baratunde thurston:where was this? this was at terrysanford high school. bulldogs. >> baratunde thurston:that's not very common. >> jeffries epps: itwas a special class.

there was three of us. and my guidance counselorrecommended me for the class because by the time i becamea senior i knew pretty much everything that they couldteach at our high school. but mr. stewart wouldchallenge us every day. we wrote programsfor the front office. and interestingly enough,our toughest assignment was a program that the people in thefront office could take names and addresses ofstudents, type a letter,

and then have the computeraddress that letter to all of the students. >> baratunde thurston:wait a minute, what? that's crazy. what? you could send messages? >> jeffries epps: and we nowknow that to be a mail merge. it's a mail merge system. and we wrote one in high school.

and that was a pretty amazingfeat when this company called microsoft came outwith it, and we, a couple of high school buddiessaid to me, "we did that first." >> baratunde thurston:did you sue? >> jeffries epps: we tried. it didn't work out. but for me that's what it was. he allowed us tofail our way forward. and what i learned from that ismr. stewart drew a line in the

sand between mediocrityand greatness, made us step over to greatness,and dared us to go back. >> rebecca garcia: onething he said that, though i'm not a technicalperson, is he recommended him. and i think that's one of thekey things we need to work on, is who's being pushed andwho's being recommended. it costs you nothing to tell akid they're good at something. just write on theirpaper, "great job. you're good at this.

you should think aboutthis as a career." it doesn't cost anything; it'sreally, really easy to do. and just making that choice topush kids or make that comment is really, really important. >> kimberly bryant: i would sayfor myself the hardest thing was surviving as a woman of colorin electrical engineering, and an even more smallerfield, power engineer -- like, we're around, like, power polesand working at power plants. >> baratunde thurston:so that's not, like,

just all women all the time? >> kimberly bryant: no. >> baratunde thurston: no? >> kimberly bryant: sothat was extremely hard. but just navigating thewhole process as a woman in a male-dominated industrywas incredibly hard. and even, you know, staying init throughout more than 20 years and being able to moveup through the ranks. and i think for me one of themain drivers for creating black

girls code and supportingother organizations like girl development or tech girls orother organizations like nc wit, ngcp, that support gettingwomen is making so that is no longer reality. because it's hardto be the only one. it takes a tremendous amountof grit to get through that and stay with it. so i would say supportthese organizations that support women in tech.

that's what i would say. >> baratunde thurston: okay. yeah, rebecca. >> rebecca garcia: so for meone of my biggest challenges was taking the next step. and i think i've seen a lotof people both, you know, youth and adults,who are afraid. they're afraid to take thenext step with their code. you know, they come out ofschool or they're interested

in learning and they don't knowwhat the next step is in technology education. and for me, i tookthat really big step. i knew that i wanted to work ata non-profit and i wanted to do technology, and i decided atthe time that i wanted to leave school to do it part-time andwork full-time at a non-profit. so i left to go workat do something, where i learned that youcould combine, you know, social change andtechnology together.

and, you know, now i see a lotof these kids struggling with the same thing. "is my code good enough?" and, you know, life isversion control, right? life is version control. >> baratunde thurston:money quote. >> rebecca garcia: oh, no. somebody's going to tweet that. >> baratunde thurston:that's good.

it's good. >> rebecca garcia: no, butlife is version control because you're constantly trying tobecome the next better version of yourself, and how are yougoing to do that if you're not failing forward. >> baratunde thurston: youtalked about challenges within the code for someof these students. we've got a questionfrom techã³woman, which i think gets to thedifficult side of a lot of the

work that many of you do. for communities with challengesincluding gang activities, youth acquiring weapons, drugdealing, prostitution even, how can youth improve theirquality of life for themselves and their peers throughthe use of technology? can they? is it even an apt question. >> jeffries epps: exposethem as early as possible. with regard to gangs, you haveto take away the customers.

and they're hangingaround our schoolyards. if we can entice our studentsand make it very appealing for them to enter these techprograms -- and when i say appealing, we can't just say,"do you want to be an engineer?" "hey, do you think maybeyou'd want to design a ring? or a bracelet? or something like that?" take them into a lab. show them how it happens.

show them how you go fromconcept to digital to physical. that's going to takemaybe half an hour. i guarantee you, then,you'll get them hooked. and once we can start gettingthem into these programs and off of the streets where they'renot targets for gang activity, you'll start to see anincrease in engineers, in software designers,or even manufacturers, and less gang activityout there in our schools. early.

early exposure is the key. >> kimberly bryant: ithink there's, well, one, there's a tremendous growthright now in online programs and online opportunities. you can go to the code.orgwebsite and it will direct you to all kinds of different ways that you can beginlearning this. not that code iseverything in technology. i just want to say that.

it's a lot more thingsthan just coding. but also that i find that simplytelling kids what the monetary rewards are when youget out of college is pretty darn attractive. >> baratunde thurston: yeah. >> kimberly bryant: so therecruiting for first-year interns at some of thesecompanies is comparable to athletic recruiting. and they're paying upwardsof $30 an hour for interns

in silicon valley. so it's pretty attractive toa group of students in eighth, ninth, tenth gradewhen you say, "okay, you want to make $30 an hour? this is the pathyou need to take." >> rebecca garcia: i thinkone of the big things is also, you know, finding rolemodels and mentors. because that is whatchanged it for me, was finding other people whowere like me who were interested

and also other youthwho were interested. so similar programs likethe ones we run, you know, serve to have those rolemodels and mentors available. but also, you know, so manypeople don't realize that they can be that. you know, this is sort of like acall-out to all of the big tech companies out there. it doesn't mean you have tobe a teacher but, you know, you could be an important partin somebody's life in inspiring

them to see that there are otherjob opportunities out there. >>baratunde thurston: carlos, whatinspired you to write this book? >> carlos bueno:well there's kindof two things, one is that computer science-- computer science itself is really young and thatmeans it's very messy. we actually don'tknow what we're doing. we don't know what's easy,we don't know what's hard, so we need some way to force usto explain it in a more simple way and that's justa general thing

because it's a young field. the other one is that kids area lot smarter then we generally give them credit for and we needto push these ideas out in the main stream and thatmeans put into fiction, put it into play ground games,really make it a part of popular culture so i tried to useone problem to solve another. kids are really rough on the egowhen you're trying to explain something and it turns out youdon't actually understand it. [laughter]

so that's howyou make yourself fail so you actually do it better. >> baratunde thurston: we gota particular question for you kimberlyfrom sharif jackson [phonetic] who asks which strategies haveyou developed at black girls code to deal with potential pushback as you expand to different cities and i think the moregeneral version for all of you is how do you scale this up,you're working in a particular school, you've got one book,you're in new york city with

coder dojo, you're with nciwt,so let's start with your specifics of regional expansionbut i want everybody to weigh in how does this effect more? >> kimberly bryant:so for black girls code, i'm not sure about the questionin terms of where's the push back is --we haven't had push back from the communitythat we serve. well you probably wouldn't ifthat's the community that you served, so i don't reallyknow how to answer that,

so there's more demand ithink for programs like ours, we are the only programthat really does focus on specifically girls of colorand we have probably 50, 60 cities on our waitinglist for emergency chapter. and so we've taken an approachto just expand by creating local independent tied to ourcorporate headquarters chapters in different cities witha core group of supporters [unintelligible]community organization partners, corporate partners,

k-12 partners as well asuniversity partners to kind of incubate our programs. that's what we're doing indetroit with wayne state, that's what we're doing incities like the bay area and cities such as atlanta, where weworked for -- with georgia tech and spellman and et cetera. so really tapping into communityresources and making it a community effort anda community movement. i think that is what hasmostly fueled our growth

as an organization. >> baratunde thurston:what about someof the rest of you, how do you move the big needlefrom your local position? >> ruthe farmer:well so ncwit is a nationalcoalition of 450 organizations, it was specificallybuilt to address the lack of women in it and by itwe mean all forms of moving information and communication. and that is a full pipelinecomputing community k through 12 so it's actually the only placethe entire pipeline is getting

together really in earnest andso it's become this incredible network to leverage. and when i joined ncwit in 2008,they had this aspirations in computing award and it was beingawarded once a year to 30 girls and i was like that'sawesome but we need 30, 000 girls so i franchised it andi leveraged all these partner that share ourvision, universities, k-12 organizations,corporations, so in new york city, bloomberghosts the aspirations

in computing award at theirfacility and the girls have this amazing experience. georgia tech does it in georgiaand in puerto rico because i think they want togo to puerto rico -- and all over the countryso in five years, we've gone from 30 girlsa year to over 1,000 girls a year and so i thinkthe key to getting to scale is to leverage their resourcesthat are out there, don't build another network.

you know you wouldn't start abusiness without doing market research to seewhat's out there, don't start a youth program ora non-profit without doing the research to see whose out therethat you can use and leverage because there are organizationsthat have massive networks, big distributionchannels, you know, if you got a product to sell,you're going to sell it at target, you're not going tostart a set of retail stores, so let's think abouthow we can leverage

what's already out there. and put the content you wantinto the network instead of creating a new network. >> rebecca garcia: coder dojo'sis really lucky that we're global and i'm very lucky tobe a part of the new york city chapter but i'm not part of thenew york city chapter alone and what's really great is thatwe get to harness this global network of sharing problemswith each other and you know new chapters that want to start up,reach out, and say like "well,

you know, do i needto like raise money? do i need to find a space?" and you know for us it's inkind donations, it's space, it's leveragingwhat's already there, like you mentioned instead oftrying to just like search for all this money and do allthese things right away, we start small and that smallbut simple has worked really well for coder dojo, right nowthere's currently about 200 chapters in 23 countriesacross the globe.

and i've had the privilegeof advising some of them and helping them start off in, youknow, countries from mexico, spain, ireland, all over andi think harnessing that local community is really important. >> male speaker: i thinkthere's one thing that might block scaling ideas, you know,just the usual stuff about getting peopleto hear about your project or getting people to run it -- >> male speaker: we still thinkas programming as a profession

and not a skill or not a thingthat you do in the service of some other profession,there's very few profession statisticians in the worldbut there are millions of professionals who use statisticsto win in whatever it is they're doing andprogramming is that way. the -- i don't think thereshould be a hundred times as many professional programmers,there should be 100 times as many professionals who programand that's -- it's a kind of inversion of the concept that wehaven't really gotten to yet and

that can keep people fromthinking, well, you know, i don't want a jobin silicon valley or i don't want to do that all day. well you don't do that all day,you do that to win and whatever it is you care about. >> baratunde thurston:yeah, in all of your workwhat surprised you the most? it could be a positiveunexpected thing, it could be a negativeunexpected thing. but you've entered this, you'vegot your own professional

background, you've hadyour own life lessons, you've launched out in manycases to start a thing or to join a thing, what did you notforesee that seemed significant to you? >> carlos bueno:how quickly the children --the students learned to swim and what i mean by swim -- >> baratunde thurston:i thought we're talkingabout programming. just throwing kidsin the pool -- >> carlos bueno:and when i talk aboutthe pool, i talk about --

i'm talking aboutthe technology pool, i'm talking aboutcomputer programming, i'm talking about 3d printing,3d scanning, video game design. when you bring a group ofstudents into a computer lab and you basically say "here givethis a try keep the tires on it, tell me what you think" and thenyou come back 30 minutes later and you say "how'd you do that? where'd that come from? how did you make that?"

or a week later they come backand they show you something extraordinary thatthey've created. whereas basically we've thrownthem into that pool and they've learned to tread water andeventually they learn to swim. >> ruthe farmer: the crux ofour program is how we find the girls, so my idea is find thegirls with potential and move them forward is through an awardand recognition and there's six of them in the room, raise yourhand here, one of mine, yeah. and they're actually my bestambassadors but the one thing

that struck me the most washow incredibly impactful being recognized was on them andwe ask a survey at the end, it's five questions or sort ofleading open ended questions, "because of this i am more,""because of this i am less," 76 percent ofgirls use the words "because of this awardi am less afraid, embarrassed, orashamed of being in technology." and the fact that young peopleare somehow ashamed or afraid of being in like the most lucrativefield that exists right now,

we've clearly got a messagingproblem on the national level about what this means and on thepersonal level in the schools among the peers and so itreally struck me how much having someone outside you say,"you're on the right track, you're doing the rightthing" helps to keep them in. >> kimberly bryant:i would just addreal quickly one thing that's been a pleasant surpriseis the power of parents in the work that we're doing. we just kind of stumbled onparenting engagement and our

programs because we would have aclass on a saturday and parents would not leave, they would sitaround and they would hover, and we would lobbythem and carol them -- and they would not leave. so like we got to do somethingproductive with these parents if they're going to stay. >> male speaker: that'slike the opposite situation. >> kimberly bryant: absolutely,they don't leave and then -- >> kimberly bryant: and then theparents wanted to learn

how to code and then -- and we started to teach them andso they built video games and you know -- then we had fullparent tracks of how they engage or student and how they supportyour child once they leave black girls code and that's been oneof the most positive and most impactful additions to ourprogram is really tapping into that parental support and givingthem the tools they need to support their child. >> rebecca garcia:i think one of the biggest,you know, pleasant surprises

has been like what you weresaying earlier is that seeing how the kids can takethis and run with it and use -- see it, change theperspective that it's just an analytical enoughmathematical sort of thing, we were really surprised, wetook our curriculum which was how to make -- you know picksomething that interests you and make a web page. it was hard for them to picktheir own interests but when we said "hey, we're going tomake choose your own adventure

stories, the kidswent nuts with it, they were like i'm goingto make my, you know, story board do this, dothat, and they loved it. and seeing how passionate theycould become about things like that was just -- it blew my mindand made me realize that it is a creative, you know,creative sort of art. >> baratunde thurston:yeah, i wanted to --there's another question which address where you'redelivering some of these students to onthe other side,

it's from christinalouis halpern [phonetic] from new york, an advocateof a lot of these things, can change happen simply if moreminority youth and girls learn to code or do corporations,incubators, accelerators, university, engineering,and business programs need to change as well? she suggests the answeris obviously yes. so if you think it's yes,what concrete steps do tech organizations take now torecruit more of the people

you're manufacturing? >> ruthe farmer:well yes, absolutelyyes, and it's not change the universitiesthat need to change, it's the corporations,the league is biggest in the work force, women quitat twice the rate men do, so if we can just retain thewomen we already got into technology, we save600,000 right there. >> baratunde thurston:do you know whatis causing the fall off? >> ruthe farmer:you know if we knewthe answer to that,

we would have solved it. there's a lot of differentfactors that come into play, culturally,financially, economy, lots of things going on. but we actually have spent thelast nine years doing original research and finding theresearch to not only fix the pedagogy in theclassroom, fix it in the -- at the college level, createstrategies, test things, we've got 250 universities thatare out there testing things,

and then they bring it back tothe group and they share and the same with our corporate members,our corporate members are trying things and changing things,looking at employee evaluation processes, how do you writeabout a woman versus how do you write about a man onan employee evaluation -- >> baratunde thurston:so you're talkingto america right now -- ruthe famer:we're talking to america -- >> baratunde thurston:and what are -- you haveall this original research, give me one to three thingsthat people listening can do.

>> ruthe farmer: okay, one tothree things that you can do, one, understand what stereotypethreat is and pay attention to it in not only the way youinteract for yourself but the way you interactwith other people. try to be blind in yourassessment processes, you know, they've shown that if you takethe name and the gender off of a rã©sumã© oran audition that more women and more minoritiesare chosen to succeed. so think about those processes,are they truly, truly fair?

and i really would love to seemore technology professionals collaborating with universitiesand collaborating with schools in ways that are appropriateso you can't just walk out of google and go teach a class,just the same as i can't walk into google and be an engineer,so i think everybody has the perfect skill set for whatthey're doing and if we can work together to collaboratei think that's going to take us a long way. >> baratunde thurston:do you want to quicklyexplain stereotype threat?

>> ruthe farmer:so stereotype threat is holdingyourself back because of a -- you don't want to fulfillthe stereotype about you, so no taking a math classbecause you've been told girls aren't good at math. and they've actually proven thatthey took a group of stanford and said we're going to have youtake this math test but they had a group of asian male engineersover here and they're like we're just going to see if it's truethat asians are better at math and because they said thatbecause they set up that

stereotype that actually causedthose white male engineering graduate students who shouldhave no problem with their math confidence to do poor on thetest and so thinking about things like are you askingsomeone their race before they are asked to do a task andthen are you not asking for an assignment because you don'twant to prove that women really can't do this -- >> ruthe farmer:so that's kind of thecrux of it and we have a lot of resources on it if you'reinterested in reading more.

>> baratunde thurston:anybody else wantto jump in with -- >> kimberly bryant:i just had toadd to this question and so i agree with christina and the answeris yes and yes. and i believe that you knowbeing in technology we work in a industry being that biotech,nanotech, whatever tech has it, there's abundance there, there'sso many resources so it makes no sense that we're ina place such as the bay area not to nab on the bay area --

>> baratunde thurston:talking to you san francisco. >> kimberly bryant:there's all theseresources in our backyard and we look outside and maybehunter's point and we have neighborhoods where theattrition rate for students of color is over 60, 70 percent,that shouldn't happen. that shouldn't happen,there's resources there. tech companies haveresources, they have people, they have equipment, they haveaccess like google to go in and lay fiber in neighborhoodsthat don't have it.

so it's a simple question whereyou have companies that have -- are big as a nation in terms oftheir evaluation that they don't put money back intoorganizations to be the pipeline, if you want a pipelinethen you have to grow it and i'm not talking about startingat high school or college, i'm talking about first grade. feed these organizations,support these organizations that are building the people that aregoing to run your companies in the future, just do it.

just like nikesays "just do it." it's the right thing to do. >> male speaker: i'd like to --i say yes and yes, as well -- i'm going to share two realworld experiences with our program, i want to start withthe young lady by the name of alexis, alexis is an africanamerican girl in our 3d design academy, when i met alexis whenshe a freshman in our early college and when we introducedher to 3d design, i asked her, alexis, "what areyou interested in?"

and she said "i reallylike interior design." so we introduced her to theconcept of taking blueprints of houses, erecting 3d models, andthen creating the furniture that goes into the rooms, anddecorating these rooms. alexis became so good at this,she became the best 3d modeler i had, she ran circles aroundour boys, sorry guys. but we then approached a localrealtor that builds custom homes as well and said we have ayoung lady that will take any blueprint you have, createa 3d model of the house,

furnish it and publish it tothe internet so that all of your customers can visit your websiteand walk through that house as if it were already built. alexis ended uptaking as a result, she ended taking a computerscience -- computer programming course, visual c in high school,and i'm proud to say and alexis if you're watching, alexis isnow going to the university of -- east carolina university innorth carolina as a computer science major, so we'rereally excited about that.

you go girl. last but not least, talkingto the corporations now, so if you're in the roomor if you're watching, make the investment in ourschools, public schools, all schools, ourbudgets are dwindling. we cannot afford to pay softwareinsurance licenses and upgrade licenses for software. we're trying to buy books, okay? and i'm going to call outgeomagic -- 3d systems geomagic,

they are partneringwith our program, they sent us copies of theirsoftware at no cost to us. we exposed our students,they're learning 3d scanning, 3d printing, and 3d designwith their software. they are also -- asa matter of fact, tomorrow i have to fly out ofhere tonight because first thing in the morning they are sendingan engineer out to work with our students to show them howto use the software better. make the investmentin our schools,

it's intellectual property, we're not asking youto send cash. cash is good but if you can'tsend cash, send the software, and maybe send some supportout there to show our students how to use it. that investment has ahuge return over and over. >> baratunde thurston:thank you all panel one. i'm going to ask you guys totake your name tags and exit the stage behind me.

panel two if you could bringyour nametags and replace these humans with your humanness. audience if we could justclap while we swap bodies. big yes, it's like a talk show. this is great, this is great. we haverunners and [unintelligible] that was tremendous -- oh,that was your wife, cool. cool, deborah, and everybodyon the stream, hey, we're at the white house.

am i just -- we're allthinking it, right? we're at the white house, y'all. excellent. all right, i'll do again aquick pass on identifying whose on stage and we'lljump into our question. far end of the stage wehave seth reichelson, a teacher at lakebrantley high school, named teacher of theyear a lot of times, his programming studentsdo very, very well.

we have to his right,cheryl swanier, associate professor fortvalley state university, department of mathematicsand computer science. to her right, wehave deena pierrott, founder and executive directorof i-urban teen program in vancouver, washington. to her right, we havemr. kevin mitchell, the lead volunteer atscripted and to his right, we have theresa freet,an organizer

for developers for good. and to my left just toswitch up the directions, we have kathryn finney, founderand managing director of digital undivided. so i will toss to the farend with the similar opening question, you've had a lotof time to think about it, you're tech ah-ha moment, howthat lead in some ways to what you're doing now and by theway what are you doing now? >> seth reichelson:well my ah-ha momentwas getting invited

to the white house. i look at that sign and ireally can't believe i'm here. and i'd just like to, you know,really thanks -- thanks for inviting me and giving mea reason to wear my suit. i've worn it twice and i'm justvery happy to wear it right now. >> baratunde thurston:congratulations. >> seth reichelson: thank you. >> baratunde thurston:you look good in the suit. >> seth reichelson: do i?

>> baratunde thurston:you should cometo the white house more. >> seth reichelson:i tied it once, the lady at the store tiedit and i'm still wearing it. >> baratunde thurston:he's teaching our future guys. he's teaching the future. >> seth reichelson:with me, i kindof -- i just really -- it's the most exciting class to teach in high schoolis ap computer science and there's so manyresources and it's so much --

changing so much that it'sjust -- it's infectious, my excitement, andit just happened. >> seth reichelson: a virus. >> baratunde thurston:all right, cheryl? >> cheryl swanier: so i've beenin computer science for almost 30 years now, i have abackground in computer science in terms of a bachelor's and amaster's and trying to complete phd in computer sciencealthough i have a doctorate in education right now.

i worked in corporate for almost15 years and felt like i reached a glass ceiling and then ireinvented myself and became a k-12 high school math teacherand i decided this is not it. so i transitioned into -- >> baratunde thurston:do you want to expand on that? what exactly happenedin high school? >> cheryl swanier:and so i transitioned -- >> baratunde thurston:the answer's no, she doeswant to expand on that but we've all been in highschool's so we can imagine.

>> cheryl swanier:and so i transitionedinto [unintelligible] and then i started to teachcomputer science at fort valley state university five yearsago and my advisor at aubrey university at thattime, warren gibbert, he suggested that i start anacm organization and acm stands for association of computermachinery and i did as he advised me and from that istarted to get involved with nsl bbc grants through warrengibbert such as artc, a force, art stars, in an effort toincrease the number of women

and minorities in computing. and consequently i had theopportunity at fort valley state university to meetthree young students. one student by the name of kevin who is from a rural town insouth georgia, quitman, georgia, which happens to by my hometownand i didn't even know it and he had never flownon an airplane before and so my first conferencethat i took my students to was an arts conference atmicrosoft in redmond,

washington at their main campusand from there i started to grow the studentchapter [unintelligible] acm and we started to dooutreach with the local middle school and the high school and istarted teaching my students how to conduct research at theundergraduate level and from there they began todo summer internships, reus at different institutionsand my last year which was my fifth year -- well reallythe year before last, one of mystudents received an reu

at carnegie mellon university -- >> baratunde thurston:what's an reu? >> cheryl swanier:research experiencesfor undergraduates -- >> cheryl swanier: wherethey go to an institution, research one school,and do research with a professor here -- >> baratunde thurston:okay. >> cheryl swanier: and sowhen my student got the reu experience at carnegiemellon university,

that was really my ah-ha moment. here we're at this hpcusmall hpcu fort valley state university in a rural communityand i had the opportunity to mentor this undergraduatestudent in computer science and they go from hpcu tocarnegie mellon university, that was huge, in myworld that was huge. >> cheryl swanier: and now thatstudent is a phd student in hci, human computer interactionat clemson university. and so from there

i've had several other studentsto work at [unintelligible] -- >> baratunde thurston:oh, great. >> cheryl swanier: now -- and i have students who areworking like i said working on their phds and i have studentswho are working for ge leadership program -- >> cheryl swanier: so thosetypes of experiences -- >> cheryl swanier: havebeen my ah-ha moment. >> baratunde thurston:thank you.

>> baratunde thurston:danielle? >> deena pierott:yeah, i was wondering whenmy turn was going to be -- we're talking, that'sokay, it was interesting. >> baratunde thurston: wow. >> deena pierott:my ah-ha momentcame kind of by accident but even though i don't --i say things don't happen but it happens [unintelligible]because i'm not a techie. i'm like roots, i don't have atech -- don't get on me -- >> baratunde thurston:i'm with you, i'mon your side literally.

>> deena pierott:i don't have atechnology background, i'm an entrepreneur buti'm very innovative. i was a commissioner in thestate of washington under governor [unintelligible] commission on african americanaffairs and all of our ethnic commissions were looking at theachievement gap issue especially in our black and brown youth. and so focusing on that andstill trying to figure out what can we do, what can we do?

a friend of mine who was one ofmy mentors or as i say/sponsor has started a chief informationofficer counsel in portland and was going to start one inseattle and wanted me to be a part of it and i'm like "i don'tknow nothing about technology" and he said "i know but you'reinnovative" and i'm like "okay, well let's do this" and so assoon as i walked into the room, i looked at a whole group ofwhite males and i said people know me, people in vancouver,washington, you know me, i said immediately, "what'swrong with this picture?

where's the diversity? am i the only personof color in this room?" and they said "yeah." i'm like "okay, we'regoing to change that." so now i do all of the --when we have our summits, i do all of the diversity,women it, you know, youth of color in it,those kinds of things. so when i saw that disparity andthen there's the achievement gap issue, i thought to myself,how can i marry the two?

so i created the iurban teentech summits that we hold them on different university campusesand we reach out to -- and i think i'm probably the only onehere that focuses on -- we have an intentional focus on africanamerican and latino males ages 13 to 18 and the ones a littlebit more marginalized maybe at the risk of dropping out of highschool and we try to create a technology spark on theuniversity campus so they can feel what that feels like to beon that campus and hopefully see themselves there one day.

and so we've had companies likenike -- i'm over in that pacific northwest area, nike, intel,you know, walmart, lyca, they've been participating intrying to show these different workshops digital animation,cyber security, gaming, now we're changing our modelingto different industries. stem created careers in healthcare, transportation, energy, those kinds of things, thenwe have a year-long process, we call it tech tours, wetake them actually onto the employer's campusto see how technology

is used in their industries. so we started that and now we'rein our year three and we've had over 700 youth thathave participated, we have an intentionaloutreach to boys, however, we have almost equal parodyof girls and youth with disabilities that participate. >> baratunde thurston: awesome. >> deena pierott: yeah. >> baratunde thurston: now tothe white male to your right --

>> deena pierott:oh, yeah, yeah -- >> baratunde thurston: hello kevin, what wasyour ah-ha moment? >> kevin mitchell: thank you-- so >> baratunde thurston: you're doing great, man. you're doing great. >> kevin mitchell:thank you, thank you. >> baratunde thurston:we've got you surrounded. >> kevin mitchell: so mine was-- probably i could thank my

father, he's a engineer at thejohns hopkins university applied physics lab, when i was about 10years old he took me to like a career day, bring yourchild to work day, and showed me all of thecool technology they had, it was anything fromlaser systems, to radar, to satellite dishes, to,you know, space technology, missile defense, allthese kind of things, but the thing i was like mostfascinated by was he sat me in front of his work station whilehe was on a phone call and he

knew i was a pretty nerdy kidwho was really into star trek and loaded up a star trek fansite on the internet and this was '92, '93, so this was reallybefore it really gained -- >> baratunde thurston: therewere no pictures -- >> kevin mitchell: yeah and i no ideathat something like this existed and being able to share apassion with people and have access to that level ofinformation just really sort inspired me in my career. and then i was lucky enough inhigh school to have some really

good mentors in technology. i want to call outreg hahn and todd marks, who are two reallygood teachers that i had. and i saw the potential for howmuch you could change students' lives if you got people thatwere in technology that were passionate about thesekind of things involved. and you could get thesekids excited about things, and that's -- so that's whyi ended up joining up with scripted and we bring volunteersto high schools in new york city

to teach programming classes andalso to provide students with internships at local companies. and we've seen a huge amountof interest from the local development community. and it's beenreally inspiring -- >> baratunde thurston: great. >> kevin mitchell:-- to see that. and i think having realworld mentors, you know, that have real world experienceis really what can change

the lives of a lot ofthese students. >> baratunde thurston: thanks. theresa? >> theresa freet: so i come tothis from more of an education and a non-profit background. and all of the coding that iknow i taught myself to do. so i can't say badthings about, you know, the various pathways thatyou take to get here, but i think the ah-ha moment forme was just everything that i've

done in the past four or fiveyears was either being radically changed by technologyor could be vastly improved by technology. it's just touching every areaof life, whether it's social, business, every industry tech ischanging the way that it works and often improveshow it could work -- >> theresa freet: -- and so ithink i was kind of pushed into tech and into workingwith developers for good. and it's a kind of parantoric

code montage by thefounder of both of those. vanessa hearst is afriend of mine and has been for over 13 years, and -- >> baratunde thurston:what does that mean? she pushed you into tech? >> theresa freet: well, so -- >>baratunde thurston: physically. >> theresa freet:yes, physically. >> baratunde thurston:physically intolike a blood code.

>> theresa freet:yes, physically shepushed me into the pool. luckily i met her swimming, so when we were younger,so that's fine. >> baratunde thurston:if you're just tuningin that makes no sense. >> theresa freet: yeah. >> baratunde thurston:if you're just tuningin that's your fault. >> theresa freet: but her --she's really passionate about using software and usingprogramming as a form of helping people and as that software isabout humanity and that really

was the draw for me, that usingcomputers to help people is such a great way to amplify impact. >> baratunde thurston: right. kathryn. >> kathryn finney:good morning or goodafternoon everyone. i want to wake someof you guys up, i see. we're here at the white housetalking about tech inclusion, you've got to get excited. yay.

like come on, like wake up. woo, chime in. >> baratunde thurston:we just did jazzhands at the white house. >> kathryn finney: we didjazz hands at the white house, that's pretty awesome,like off my bucket list. my ah-ha moment, it feels likei've been having ah-ha moments for like the past30 something years. i don't want to date myself. my father was a high schooldrop-out brewery worker who

happened to find himselfat a local program, a local organization called oic. and for those of you outthere who know how oic, it's a -- sort of anopportunity center, had locationsaround the country. this was the early '80s. it was well-funded by thereagan administration. and it was there to sort ofhelp displaced factory workers. and my father found himself inthe data entry class that just

happened to be taught by someperson from ibm who found himself in the middle of thehood of a walk-in -- this was really the hood, like thiswasn't the cute outskirts, it was the hood -- who took anhour out of his time to teach people data entry. and my father, whowas forward-thinking, even though he wasa brewery worker, even though he didn'tgraduate from high school, he saw the connection to this.

and the guy who was teachingthe course was like, "hey, maybe you should comeand stop by, you know, ibm. we're looking for interns." now mind you, he had two kids,was working part-time unpacking boxes from a truck,he had a wife, that's important to knowas a wife, he had a wife. and yet he took anunpaid internship at ibm. that unpaid internship led toa data entry job at digital equipment, again, kind ofdating my family a little bit,

which then led to a position asa senior software engineer at microsoft. and then when he passed hewas a senior engineer at emc. and that path had a huge impacton me because i saw just that opportunity, someone taking anhour out of their time to go deep in the hoodand just teach a class. he had no idea whathe was sparking. and my dad's success then ledto success with not only my immediate family, butother people as well.

so fast-forward 20 years,i had started a blog with one of the first female [unintelligible] bloggers, as you can tellby my sparkly shirt here, and found a way to turnthat into a business. and i thought,"well, you know what? i want to develop products." so i entered one of the firstincubators and in this incubator i faced really stiff, stiffchallenges that had nothing to

do my intellect, my idea,nothing to do with my background. it was all based uponmy gender and my color. and i thought, "wow,if someone like me, ivy league educated with thispedigree and you have all these like skills and connections,is facing this challenge, what happens to everyone else? and through the help of anorganization that i work with and i advise called blogher --i don't know if you guys know

blogher, but represents 45million women -- i was really encouraged to startsort of a conference. it's like i know there's morepeople out there like me, there have to be more. and so we foundeddigitalundivided and focus100, which is our signatureconference happening october 4 through october 6 this year --i hope to see you all there, including you baratunde -- >> baratunde thurston: wow, yes.

>> kathryn finney: --and so we started this. we didn't know whatwe were going to get. we didn't know if anyonewas going to fund us. we had no idea. and what happened was withthis conference we sparked this whole community. we went to every organization,we shook every tree finding any black woman who founded,thought about founded, was thinking aboutfinding a tech company.

we actually have many of ourfocus fellows here right now -- i see some of you over here,one back there -- who was at focus100. and as a result, wecreated our own network, we created our own ecosystem. and what was interesting aboutthis is as in the process of creating our own ecosystem, wegot other people to come in. one of our major foundersis andreessen horowitz. i don't know if you guysknow andreessen horowitz,

but andreessen horowitz fundsalmost everybody who's making money or who sells themselves. >> kathryn finney:from facebook to instagram -- >> baratunde thurston:major capital company. >> kathryn finney:major vc firm who's a majorsupporter of us, also kapoor. but we also built partnershipswith a lot of businesses. so amex and microsoft anddell and all of these other companies, ogilvy, have comeon and really worked with us in what we're doing.

and so, like i said, i've beenhaving ah-ha moments -- i'm having one right now, it's likesuper-cool with the white house sitting in the background --and i'm so excited to be here. and hopefully you will allapproach me afterwards so that we can talk about howwe can get you involved. >> baratunde thurston:in an orderly fashion. orderly fashion. >> kathryn finney: in an orderlyfashion with digitalundivided. >> baratunde thurston:thank you, kathryn.

i wanted to give this panel achance -- if there's anything you heard in the firstsession that you felt like, "i've got to jump in here. america's not going to completewithout my answer to that question." >> deena pierott: iforgot what they were. >> baratunde thurston:okay, that's -- >> seth reichelson:i wasn't paying attention. >> baratunde thurston: --you weren't paying attention.

thank the teacheragain at the -- >>female speaker: [unintelligible] >> baratunde thurston: hejust had to keep his tie on. i get it man. it's hard out there. >> baratunde thurston:look, we have a question that came in from denise barreto from lake in thehills, illinois. and she says, "i love allthe work you're doing,

especially deena pierott." she's also the founder of aninternational women's network i'm part of. "my question is this, what canwe do in our communities to expand or extend the workyou've started in years?" >> deena pierott: oh, wow,great, great question. i've got to pay her later. thank you, denise,if you're watching. i think that -- well,for me with our programs,

we are expanding to variouscities and universities. but when we move intothose communities we try to create a community cluster, community partners. you know, i don't want tobe the do-all to end-all, meaning if there's a program inthat community it's -- that does tutoring, i don't want to-- i don't need to create a tutoring program. i'll partner withthat community,

local communityorganization, or school, and share and network theirinformation with our families and students. and the same wherewe're at right now. we have partnerships with localorganizations to help spread and create this, what i calla collective impact. so if anyone in differentcities want to have our program, that focuses again on latinoand african american males, in their cities,just contact me.

it's easy to do. we create a localplanning team in those cities that help make it happen, so. >> baratunde thurston: anybodyelse want to jump in on this? all right. we just actually had a questioncome in off the the internet. "how can we createthat technology spark? you talked about the spark,maybe even unintentionally, certainly unforeseeable,of this ibm employee,

how do we create that techspark for more students, including at-risk youth?" this is from the healthpolicy group on twitter. >> kathryn finney: well,i think it's pretty easy. the ibm guy took an hour of histime and he came into the hood, that's what he did. and i think if we have morepeople taking that time, just an hour, we're nottalking about, you know, dedicating your lifeto it like we have.

but just taking anhour out of your time, going into and working withsome of these programs, you'll be amazed about thespark that you can generate. i mean, we see it even with ourprogram at digitalundivided, that people taking an hour -- we have folks,you know, david tisch, who's like a big-time vc, justspending an hour mentoring one of our companies. and then we see the impact ofthat company being able

to get funding later on. it's just reallyabout taking time. i mean, i think that's evenmore important than money, to be perfectly honest. >> cheryl swanier: iwould like to add to that. today here in the roomwe have girls inc. and they're sitting in the back. and they're from columbus,georgia, where i'm from. and i mentor these girls intechnology and they thought it

was so important to come here. and some of them are eveninterested in computing and want to major in computer science asa result of the efforts that my students and i at fort valleystate university conduct, you know, with these studentsand computer from teaching them how to write code, to teachingthem how to develop websites, as well as robotics programs. >> seth reichelson: i don't knowhow you could stop the interest. everybody has a computer,she's on smartphone.

i personally have about 64 gigsin my pocket right now and i don't understand how youcould not want to see what's underneath the hoodand create something. computer science is the onlyclass where you can go with zero entry and create. >> baratunde thurston:what's your technique? you're teaching in high school. >> seth reichelson:i teach high school. >> baratunde thurston: yourstudents win all these awards.

>> seth reichelson: yeah. >> baratunde thurston: what haveyou found through your own trial and error, amongst otherteachers and with students, what's working most, maybe thatyou didn't even see when you first started? >> seth reichelson:i teach everyone. i don't care who youwho, i'll teach you. i don't care. >> baratunde thurston:i mean, you don't haveto say it like a threat.

"i'll teach you somecomputer science. i don't care who you are. i'm right here,it's cool, like -- >> seth reichelson:and with that diversity -- >> seth reichelson: -- you justget things from all different angles and you win -- >> seth reichelson:-- and you win a lot. >> baratunde thurston: does thepervasiveness of tech -- you talk about the pocketof the 64 gigs,

the fact that we'vegot all these social, digital platforms that it'sthe way we find our friends. >> seth reichelson:you don't -- >> baratunde thurston:is that a natural gatewayinto this for your own students? are you able to -- >> seth reichelson:oh. >> baratunde thurston:-- convert theirinterest in facebook and snapshotinto, you know -- >> seth reichelson:oh, yeah, absolutely.

>> baratunde thurston:-- building things? >> seth reichelson:i mean, they say girlsaren't into computer science but they're alwayson the computer. you punish kids now by tellingthem you can't play with your computer. they -- the interestis all there. >> seth reichelson: and tocreate, well, they love it. >> theresa freet: i thinkit's about leveraging that. i mean, it's easy to say like,of course everybody wants to be

on a computer, but you have tobe able to say, "this computer, this is what it's doing,this is the outcome of it." of course every student who hasa smartphone or everyone who doesn't wants a smartphone,and they want to do all the incredible things on theirphones and they want to be able to use whatever appeveryone else is using, but being able to connect forthem that those -- like this is how those apps cameinto existence, this is all the cool stuff goingon in layers underneath it,

and these are the people whoare making this stuff happen? that's how you get themexcited about it, not just, "here's a phone. it's cool. look at all thestuff it can do." get them excited aboutthe process of doing that. and also start getting peoplemore interested in what computers are solving, whatthe problems are solving. everybody cares about something,everybody has an issue they care

about, and everybody wantsto do something with that. so if you can kind of get peoplestarting to think about what they could do with programmingskills, not necessarily, "i want to be a programmer, iwant to be a person who solves this problem and i'm goingto use computers to do it, " i think that wouldbe hugely impactful. you're sitting in the same seatof the last person who had a very similar sentiment. there's somethingabout that chair.

>> theresa freet: i was likecheering in my mind when carlos. >> baratunde thurston:the carlos buenosmemorial chair, yeah. >> kevin mitchell: i think oneof the best things you can do is get role models in thecommunities that have a passion for these things becausethat becomes just infectious. i mean, we've seen it with ourprogram where with have people come in and they're just reallyinto this technology, you know. they do it for a living andthey want to share this. so there's a lotof interest there.

and the kids, like whenthey see that, "oh wow, this person's like really intoit and they seem like a cool person, they're not, you know,some stereotype of a, you know, a computer programmer," youknow, it really inspires them. and then they feedoff of that passion. and then they can do things -- >> baratunde thurston: butby stereotype of the computer programmer, you meanlike a really cool -- >> kevin mitchell:yes, absolutely.

>> kathryn finney:i also think that wecan't -- we have to be -- >> baratunde thurston: let'sjust -- we have a moment she's able to accept that. >> kathryn finney:it's a moment, yes. thank you for these gifts,man, you're amazing. >> kevin mitchell:you're welcome. >> kathryn finney: i thinkalso we have to not -- -- i think we have to becareful about putting our own limitations on our kids.

if you say to -- if you ask akid, "can you program, you know, an app?" many will say, "ah,i don't think so." but if you ask them, "canyou jailbreak my iphone, " most of them willbe able to do it. and so, we'llkeep it in the 100 -- >> baratunde thurston: becausethey believe in data liberation. >> kathryn finney: dataliberation, exactly. so we have to make sure thatwhat we're talking about and how

we're engaging our kids issort of where they're at. most of them are mobile. and one of the things thatwe notice what we do at digitalundivided is that a lotof the programs are focused so much on laptop anddesktop-based programming, which is still where a lotof the programming happens, but the kids are onmobile, they're on tablets, they're not on desktops,they not for the most part on laptops either.

so i think the challenge for usas adults who are in this space, is making sure that we'reengaging them where they're at. >> kevin mitchell: yeah, i mean,we had the same experience where we had students that weasked them, you know, "what are yourfavorite websites?" and they were like, "well,can i list the favorite apps on my phone?" >> kathryn finney: yeah. >> kevin mitchell: sothat's where, you know,

that's where the technology'sgoing and that's where people are using it, so. >> deena pierott:i want to say, too, that besides only just sparkingthe interest in the youth, sparking that interestin their parents as well, because we have a heavy, veryheavy parent involvement piece. and so we work with them aswell as at creating that spark. you know, to keep that,you know, that spark going. >> baratunde thurston: what aresome of the most significant

constraints, difficulties,challenges in the work that you're doing? you talk aboutsolving problems -- >> baratunde thurston:-- what of your ownproblems do you need solved? >> cheryl swanier: a bigchallenge for me working at a small hpcu is funding and havingthe access to capital to be able to do the things that ireally, really want to do. so a lot of the times when i dothings with my students in terms of outreach or in-reach, ilook externally for funding.

so that's my biggest challenge. >> seth reichelson: ido have any roadblocks. you can't stop me. >> baratunde thurston: again,you're talking in these threatening terms, man. like i just feel likeit's this ominous tone. >> seth reichelson: you canonly just hope to contain me. this magneto over here. >> seth reichelson: i'llteach everyone in this room.

>> baratunde thurston: andthen he makes it dirty. >> baratunde thurston:but seriously -- >> seth reichelson: thoughseriously, there is no cost. if you have a computer there'sso many resources from national science foundation -- >> baratunde thurston:but, but let me slow down. let's not thinkjust about money. maybe it's -- maybe theconstraint isn't money, maybe it's access, maybeit's physical space,

maybe it's imagination,maybe it's a particular -- >> seth reichelson: okay -- >> baratunde thurston:-- supervisor or -- >> seth reichelson: -- whenyou teach 300 students, physical space is limited. i think that's agood problem to have. so -- >> baratundethurston: all right. >> theresa freet: one of our -- >> deena pierott:oh, i'm sorry, i was goingto say, the same as cheryl

that one of the challenges, and i'm pretty much likeseth where i can't be stopped, do i just do it anyway,with or without funding? >> female speaker: exactly. >> deena pierott: but, however,and i've got to give props to my community, vancouver,washington, because we have like little orno funding for this program, but our communitycomes together to make a lot of this stuff happen.

we also have a large network ofchief information officers that pool together and theparents to make it happen. but we have them anyway. and they're amazing. but it's -- but wecan do even more amazing things with funding. and i know that that'sgoing to be coming. >> kathryn finney: for us, ithink the challenge is that we're always coming up againstthis whole idea of patterns.

i don't know how many of youare -- know about that term, but it's a term that's thrownout sort of in the silicon valley vce-angel world,which is, you know, funders tend to fund people whohave been successful before. and the people who have beensuccessful before have been mostly, you know,26-year old white guys. and that's because that'swho they funded before, so it's this cycle. and we find ourselves comingup against that and directly

challenging that ineverything that we do. and we find that the way we sortof get over that barrier is with numbers. i'm a researchepidemiologist by training, so i love bio-statsand i love stats. i'm that weird person. >> baratunde thurston:political bio-stats. >> kathryn finney: right, so i'malways like numbers, numbers, and what we found is that ifwe could come and say, "look,

40 of our companies who camethrough focus100 last year, of our 40 companies, 20 percentreceived angel or venture funding. that is, what, 200, 2,000 timesmore than the 1 percent that's supposed to receive fundingin the general population. that number pops. and so what we found is to-- the way to address these challenges is come with numbers. you can't argue with numbers,that's the beauty of coming from

this sort of, tech,science, stem background is the numbers don't lie. so someone like seth, imean, he has a success. his students have won awards. you cannot deny that number. and that's what we found tobe really effective in sort of directly challengingsome of those challenges. >> baratunde thurston: wehad a particular question. this is from christopherwest in new york.

and i think it may be best forboth danielle and theresa -- but i could be wrong -- i'd like tosee any of the honorees address how tech is and will beused to help perpetuate the greatly-needed changes toour food system as a whole, because you're doing developersfor good and you're in vancouver where food is extra delicious. >> deena pierott: and it is. >> baratunde thurston: i thoughtmaybe this could apply to you. who do you see as beingleaders in this movement,

what support pillars doyou think need to be? everything all right? >> seth reichelson:voo doo donuts -- >> theresa freet: and we'retalking about voo doo donuts. i'm sorry, we got excited. >> baratunde thurston:: i shouldnever have mentioned food. >> seth reichelson:they marry people there. >> seth reichelson: they do. >> baratunde thurston:so, theresa, um.

>> theresa freet:this is actually -- >> seth reichelson:you can look it up. >> theresa freet: --something that i am -- >> male speaker: itcomes with free donuts. >> theresa freet: -- incrediblypassionate about -- >> seth reichelson: yeah? >> theresa freet: both voo doodonuts, which are delicious, but perhaps notgood for you, maybe. but i do a lot of work withdifferent organizations

that are trying to improvethe food system, or trying toimprove food access, and education and schooleducation around food. and i think on theground level, technology, in the same way that itis in any other field, just the ability toreach more people, the ability to manageyour data better, the ability to use whatever datayou're collecting and use it in a way that's helping you figureout what kind of strategy you

should be -- you should have,all of that is really helpful. but at the same time, there'sincredible things going on. i mean, our agriculturalsystem is really broken. and i was reading recently, ithink, in an area in macedonia, their farmers are now gettinglike sms messages that tell them when like certain types ofpesticides are -- or when certain types ofbugs are coming. so they maybe don't haveto use blanket pesticides. they can prepareon a smaller scale.

so i think that we're at thisinteresting point in both food and tech, and in every industry,where people are coming up with incredible methods for solvingthe problems that we have. i mean, like text messaging isa very cheap but interestingly effective way to solve differentproblems and to disperse information and -- >> theresa freet: -- just theproblems that people -- because people care about stuff -- somany people care about different aspects of the food industry.

and the more that theyunderstand technology and the more that they understand howthey can use it to solve the problems that they are about,that's what's going to change both the food industry orany other industry really, that we're coming up with all ofthese problems that we're facing that are kind of loomingat us as we move forward. >> baratunde thurston: cool. we had a questionfrom the room earlier. i didn't get to it at the lastpanel, but what role should men,

and especially maleleaders of tech companies, play in expanding stem educationand including women and underrepresented minorities? men or women. >> kevin mitchell:well, since i'm a man -- >> baratundethurston: suggestion, yeah. >> kevin mitchell:i can speak to -- >> baratunde thurston:don't mess itup for us, all right? >> kevin mitchell:yeah, i'll do my best.

>> kevin mitchell: one thingthey can do is encourage your employees to get involvedin the community. you know, have volunteeropportunities and give them that ability. you know, i know someorganizations that -- it was actually just a meeting we didtrying to get 20 hours a week -- or excuse me, 20 hours a year --from their employees to go and do volunteer stuff and getinvolved in the community and give back.

and i think that's a big thingthat can be done, you know, just to expose people andto get your, you know, your employees to be involved. >> deena pierott: i justwant to -- i'm going to comment on that, too because -- >> baratunde thurston: please. >> deena pierott: -- i really doa heavy lift on trying to find, especially african-american andlatino males, professionals, to come and be mentors andvolunteers at our events because

it's very important to me thatour young males see these men. in fact, when we have --intel usually comes out, their engineers areafrican-american employee network, usually comes out anddoes little mini tech fairs. and when the guys come in theroom and they're looking preppy, they're looking sharp, they'vegot the ipad things going on, i automatically look at my men-- at the little boys in the room and i see them lookingat them, almost fearful in a way, you know.

but then after a while theystart warming up and getting closer to them, you know,and wanting to be like them. you know, so when i see thathappening i'm like this is the perfect outreachi'd like to have. seth? >> deena pierott: i knowhe's going to say something, that's why i'm -- >> baratunde thurston:surprise me. >> seth reichelson:i've actually beentrained by n.c. wid

over four or five years on howto be more accommodating to females in computer science. and while i was a good teacher,they taught me tricks and -- >> seth reichelson: --how i was unintentionallyreinforcing stereotypes. so that's ruthie farmerwith n. c. wid and the coons. >> baratunde thurston: so here's-- again, this is -- we have -- >> seth reichelson:it was a conscious effort to change those. >> baratunde thurston: sincewe have such attention focused

right now, especially withpeople not in the room, can you go a little deeper andgive us some examples of things that you were doingunintentionally -- >> seth reichelson: okay. >> baratunde thurston:-- of things that youadded to your techniques to be better atyour job. >> seth reichelson: i actuallydid a lot of things wrong [laughs] let me just -- i'll tellyou somebody's

whatthey did wrong -- [laughter] they thought it was the greatestthing to have like a six-foot statue of like mario brothersmade out of disks and stuff -- >> seth reichelson: --kind of like, you know, just tell me how great itwas and i just said, "what? take it down." so in my room i have art,i have plants, i have fish. i want a girl to come intomy room and identify with what's going on.

the thing that i did was theschool -- it was the knights and they said, paint a shield ofwhat your club is about -- >> seth reichelson: and ipainted the iron sheik with java tattoos on its arm. and it was really, really funny,but i'm not really sure how many girls are going to look up anidentify with the iron sheik. so, yeah, i've done alot of things wrong. >> seth reichelson: thatwas the other guy, though. anybody want toweigh in on --

>> kathryn finney:why's everyone looking at me? >> seth reichelson: well, youwere close to the moderator. >> kathryn finney: the glasses. >> baratunde thurston: the glassis -- the glass is just amazing. >> female speaker: mesmerizing. >> baratunde thurston: we had avery interesting question about the sort of historicalcontext of tech and science. this is from techwoman. "sometimes science and tech areused in ways that are harmful to

women and minorities, suchas historical accounts of the tuskegee experiment and the morerecent reports of incarcerated women being sterilized while inthere undergoing incarceration. what kinds of messages do youhave from minorities and women as they enter stem to preparethem for witnessing and being recruited for projects inwhich they don't agree. and even more broadly, how doyou escape some of the negative legacy that may be applied tocertain communities around this topic.

>> kathryn finney: one of thethings that we do is we have a saying in our company,"we keep it 100, " and i know how many of youunderstand what that means, but that means -- >> baratunde thurston: i wantyou to explain what it means. >> kathryn finney:"keeping it 100, " means -- i just means keepingit -- telling the truth, keeping it, you know, as clearand fact-based as possible, is that a good --

>> baratunde thurston:that's great. >> kathryn finney: --great explanation of it? and so what we say to peoplewhen we interact with women, no matter wherethey're at, is like, "you don't havea choice anymore. this -- to be in stem, tobe engaged in technology is no longer an option. you have to." even if you wanted to be aworker at mcdonald's you must

have some computer skills. mcdonald's uses heavilycomputers in taking orders and things like that. you have to be engaged. it is not a choice. and once we get past thatdiscussion of whether or not there is a choice, whether ornot you can still be afraid of technology, we run into a lot ofpeople who are actually afraid of tech, for various reasons,both historical, cultural,

social, economical. and we have a real frankdiscussion about what that means when you are afraid of tech. that means that you'regoing to make less money. that means that you're not goingto be engaged in news and data and things thatare coming through. and then we -- afterthat discussion, then we have adiscussion about how you are engaged in technology.

you, you know a lot ofour folks use twitter, a lot are engaged inapps, a lot are texting. and like that's technology whatyou're doing, like right there, that you're engaged. and once we get sortof past that barrier, then we notice peoplestart to become more open, start to be more engaged, andstart to be more curious about these things that arepowering the programs, things that are powering whatthey are doing on a daily basis.

>> kevin mitchell: i'veactually seen, you know, kind of what you're sayingwhere these -- the computing technology is invading every,you know, every industry. it doesn't matterwhat you want to do, you're going to beexposed to this. this is something we've tolda lot of our students is, you know, even if they comeinto it and they're like, "i don't know if i reallywant to be a programmer or a full-time technologist,"like learning this can just be

a huge boon to your career. i mean, i have friends -- >> baratunde thurston:what ages do you work with? >> kevin mitchell: we workwith high school students, so anywhere fromfreshmen to juniors. i mean my -- the co-founderof scripted, maurya, gives an example of, you know,she was doing some work at her job, where she was doing a lot of stuffwith excel spreadsheets

and learned how to automate thisprocess that used to take her hours and hours to do. figured out how toautomate it and saved herself a bunch of time. so, you know, even if, youknow, you had someone that's not wanting to focus on technologyas the sole part of their career, learning this is goingto help your career no matter what you choose to do. >> seth reichelson:yeah, computer sciencecan be used for good.

if ethically you don'tbelieve in something, and you're my student, i wouldexpect you to get out of it. computer science -- like girlsare into dolphins and saving dolphins. you could use computerscience to save a dolphin. you could use computer scienceto do any career you want. so, ethically, get out. you know, tuskegee-- that's horrible. >> baratunde thurston:yeah, yeah, we agree.

that came out weird. that was my moment. we have a veryspecific question -- >> seth reichelson:you're welcome. >> baratunde thurston:with that -- thanks, seth. we're just going to dothis together forever. >> male speaker:we could just all get off. >> baratunde thurston: lisaphilips from seattle studies social welfare at theuniversity of washington,

and this goes to a laterstage in this process, but i think that it'san important question, for her specifically, butalso as a general point: "i'm thinking of a career intechnology and education and work in a much differentfield; what's your advice?" and so much of what we'retalking about -- we've heard hints of parents,mostly youth-focused, mostly getting people early, butnot everybody made that choice. >> seth reichelson: if youtell her, i'll teach her.

>> baratunde thurston:dear lisa, stay away fromseth reichelson. no, find him. find him in florida and learn. but, yeah, so someonewho's looking for that change later, they agree. they're seeing this. we're selling them. now what? >> kathryn finney:it's so interestingin, like, the work we do.

we have a lot of folkswho -- who were engineers, who are now becomingentrepreneurs and taking that part. we have people who weren'tengineers but who had great ideas in terms of what theywanted to do in sort of technology, and who aredoing sort of interesting things with that. my advice to her would be, findyour interest first that has nothing to do with technology.

like, what excites you? what gets you up in themorning and you're like, "yes, i can't wait to do this"? like, whatever the topic may be,find that topic and then find a way to make ittech-enabled, maybe to build a company around it. or look at companies thatare in that field and who are tech companies, andthat's your way in. so if your passion is education,there is a lot

of edu-tech companies out there. in fact, edu-tech is one of thehottest fields in technology right now. if your passion is healthcare, you love to help people, you have a background in healthcare, go into health tech. you know, technologyis not this big, monolithic sort of scarycloud that, you know, no one can get into. you know, there aremany different segments.

and find the segment thatyou are passionate about, and then find the tech companiesor come up with the ideas that help you connectthat to technology. >> theresa freet:i would say, also, i think we'vetalked a lot about, you know, using technology, but notnecessarily that being your job. if that is what youwant your job to be, i think that we need to becareful about not just getting everyone into technology andteaching everyone how to code, but how do we -- how do webridge the gap between teaching

everybody how to writejavascript or teaching everybody how to write html and cms,and making them hirable? and so i think that -- >> baratunde thurston:keep going. what do you mean? keep going. >> theresa freet:i think -- so thecompany that i work for, codemontage, is kindof looking at that gap, at getting people aportfolio of work. how do we take the knowledgethat people are -- or how do we

take all this passion and allthis interest and turn it into something that somebody at acompany wants to hire you to do work for them? because it's very hard to gaugehow many code academy badges means, like, you're aqualified software engineer. that's not really --they're very far apart. so i think, moving forward, wehave to be really careful in not just pushing under-representedminorities into tech, but making sure that they havethe support network to become

experts, because it's going tobe damaging if we have all these beginners and then suddenlywe've got all women and under-representedminorities in tech, but suddenly they're thepeople who are, like, just maybe kind of gettingit, but not experts, and not owning their field. >> baratunde thurston: deena? >> deena pierott: but wealready think that those under-represented minorities andgirls who are interested in tech

up there because theywant to be there, not necessarily because somebodyhas, you know, made them, you know, be acomputer scientist or to just study computing. we want those girls andunder-represented minorities who are genuinely interested becausethey'll be more productive in the field. >> female speaker: ijust wanted to say, too, to the person that wrote in, ifshe's looking at transitioning

from what she's currentlydoing into technology, to do what kathryn said, tofind out what your passion is, and then also whatindustry is that, and then look for peoplewithin that industry. look on linkedin. find out who's in that industrythat you can contact and have informational interviews with. and people are always sowilling to help, you know, especially if you're lookingat getting into that field.

so try to create someinformational interview questions. meet with those people. start networking. and it is so easy tomake that transition. you're in seattle. i'm in that part of the world. >> baratunde thurston: uh-oh. >> female speaker:that's silicon forest.

it's a hotbed. >> baratunde thurston:that's silicon forest? wait, there's another one? you got the valley,the alley, the prairie. >> female speaker: yep,that's what we are. pacific northwestis silicon forest. we have all thosetech companies there. so it would be an easytransition for her. tell her to look me up-- mosaicblueprint.com.

>> baratundethurston: all right. >> female speaker:a little fun there. >> baratunde thurston:i'll write her back afterwe're done here. >> kevin mitchell: i wouldadd onto that and say, you've already taken the firststep -- the fact that you're interested and you're into it. so that's, like, thebiggest thing you can do. and the two thingsi would say is, don't be afraid to try and fail.

you know, allow yourself,like, challenge yourself. and you may not get -- you know,if you're trying to write some program, you may not getit right the first time, but you're going to learn a lot. you might go down a lot ofavenues that are dead ends, but you're going to learnso much from doing that. and two is to take advantageof the resources that are out there. i mean, we're very lucky tolive in a time where there's

so much information outavailable on the internet, and it's something we tellour students all the time. if you don't know how to dosomething, you know how does? google does. so just learn to use theresources that are there and take full advantage of them,because it's just a huge wealth of information that's outthere to help you with this. >> baratunde thurston: iwould love you guys to help, to paint a picture a littlebit, go beyond what you're doing

right now, go beyond anylimitations -- i know you have none, but some do -- andthink out 20 to 50 years. >> female speaker: oof! i might not be alive then. >> male speaker: you'llbe fine; you'll be fine. >> female speaker: you think so? >> baratunde thurston: butjust project out a little bit. what is different about theworld that you're operating in, about the world thatwe're operating in,

because of the typesof work you're doing? i'm not saying be arrogantenough to say you're going to change the whole planet, but ifthis movement is successful -- you're a champion of change,you're represented here by these folks -- what is different20 or more years out? give us a flavor of that world. yeah. >> male speaker: well, i thinkin about four years we should have about 10,000 computerscience teachers

in 10,000 schools. that's what we're hoping for. and right now the accessisn't there, and it will be. >> female speaker:i also think, well, one, we are going tochange the world. i know we're notsupposed to be arrogant. >> baratunde thurston: no,no, you can be confident. >> female speaker:be confident, right? but i think if we look 20 to 50years from now and we look at

sort of the demographicalchanges that are happening, i think one of the thingsthat's going to happen is, being a developer is going tobe like being a brewery worker. it's going to be thenew sort of blue collar. and i also think that skillsare going to trump pedigree. it's not goingto be so important where you went to school. it's not going to be asimportant that you went to stanford or mit or harvardor yale or what have you,

but it's going to be moreimportant what skills you actually have. can you do the work? can you code? whether you are 13or 35 or 55, like, how well of a coder are you? and i think those are thechanges that we're going to start to see. >> male speaker: i've actuallyalready started to see that.

i mean, i have colleagues thatwent to school for english degrees and then just found apassion for developing -- some of the best developersi've worked with. some of the other developersi've worked with don't have anything other than ahigh school education, but they used the resourcesthat were available to them, and now they have jobs, youknow, making really good money. i think it's really hard topredict where we're going to be in 50 years, because thetechnology moves so fast,

and you're seeing theseexponential returns, you know, on things. and that's whatmakes it so exciting. so anyone that wants to getinvolved in this, you know, it's sort of likethe new wild west. it's the frontier,and it's just hard to predict what's going to happen. >> female speaker:i would say that, for me, that there wouldn't be a programlike mine in existence

because we wouldn't need it. you know -- i know. look, i'm talking myselfout of a business. but no, really, for me, iwouldn't -- there wouldn't have to be these kind of programs. it would be -- societywould be so inclusive, and it would be so equitable,that we wouldn't need these kind of programs.

>> baratunde thurston:anybody else? >> male speaker: i'm just hopingin the next 10 to 50 years the mets will win the world series. and the jets mightwin something, because i haven't been alivefor a super bowl victory. >> deena pierott: because oneof my goals is to increase the number of girls andminorities in computing, i would like to see in the nextfive to 10 years more girls >> baratunde thurston:go ahead, theresa.

>> theresa freet: yeah, i'llclose out quickly, i guess. but i think -- i think icompletely agree that, you know, in the next 50 years we won'tneed to champion tech inclusion because we won't even -- theterm "tech inclusion" will be kind of outdated. and everybody willknow how to -- like, it won't be a question ofteaching people to code. it'll be a question of, how iseverybody using their individual coding and their individual techskills that they know because we

do teach everyone how to do it,and because everybody already has these skills. and so we're notsolving that problem; we're solving all the otherproblems using those skills. >> baratunde thurston:that was perfect. can you please give it up forthe panelists too, please? >> seth reichelson -- oh, what? sorry. >> female speaker: i've got tojust do a shout-out to my friend

blake who has not beentaking my picture. get your iphone outand take a picture. >> baratunde thurston: oh, isthere a situation right now at the white house? i feel like i am withinmy powers to say, could y'all handle that after? seriously, thank you allso much for joining us. you can feel free toleave the stage now, and i'm going tointroduce our closer.

we have closingremarks in 30 seconds, as i move fromhere to over there. you can clap them off thestage; it'll be more natural. people at home -- it makes itlook much better for the people at home if you're, like,throwing stuff on the stage and really excited. so i want to thankthe panelists. my role here is about donein maybe 15 to 48 seconds, so thank all ofyou for being here.

thanks, those ofyou who tuned in. we're going to bring this homewith someone who has probably the best job titlethat i could imagine, maybe the most aspirationaljob title for the theme of this room, which ischief technology officer of the united states of america. that doesn't meanhe'll fix your email. that means he's thinking aboutbig things, big problems. and i had the pleasure ofmeeting him at a conference

in los angeles. a lot of the people i've knownwho have transitioned from the private sector into governmenthave often found some frustration, shallwe say, at the pace, or lack of pace, of change. and i asked him, expecting himto pile on that same gripe, "what's the most -- you know,have you found it very difficult to get things donein your position? you're in the executive branch;you have to deal with congress

and all kinds of stuff." and he said, "no, i've nevergotten more done in my career. i've never had morefun in my career, to have the support of thiswhite house and be able to do the things that we're doing. we've had hack-a-thonsat the white house. it's a real pleasure." so he actually restored my faitha bit in this whole democratic process, at least for fiveminutes while we spoke.

and he will probably infectyou with that same sense of possibility in the practicalapplication of some of these ideas. so thank you all for having me. please give it up fortodd park, cto of america. come on down. >> todd park: hello! how has today been? fantastic, fantastic.

well, thank you somuch, baratunde, for that very kind introduction,for being such a fabulous mc. and congratulations once againto all of our champions and to everyone here in the roomwho has contributed to the awesomeness that's spreadingacross the country in terms of connecting more and more kids,more and more folks to tech skills and opportunity. the president has said, in fact,there's nothing more important he can imagine to the future ofamerican than connecting every

kid to stem skills, techskills, and opportunity. we know that every kidfrom every background, from every walk of life, shouldbe able to see themselves in whatever career, whateverfield they want to be in. and that's exactly whywe're all here today. the president, as thefather of two daughters, wants to ensure that the samedoors of opportunity are open to everybody, all students,regardless of gender, economic background, race.

and he views this goal ofbroadening participation in stem fields as fundamental to thenation's future prosperity and well-being. he understands that our abilityto actually meet the demands for a growing workforce in scienceand tech fields depends upon the success of this endeavor. he knows that our ability toinvent the industries and jobs of the future depends on thesuccess of this endeavor. the future of americadepends on this endeavor.

and all of you in the room,the champions and some of the others, have contributed somuch already to that critical initiative. the diversity of america is ahuge asset for us as we compete on a diverse global stage. we need more americans acrossall kinds of backgrounds, all walks of life, to actuallyconnect to tech skills and opportunity and actuallyparticipate in the tech economy and help drive thefuture of the country.

so we're personally incrediblypassionate about that. folks like the president andvalerie jarrett and so many of us here in the white house,we've launched the white house tech inclusion effortto help catalyze, mobilize efforts toadvance tech inclusion, connecting everyone to techskills and opportunity. and the whole kind offundamental ethos of this effort is that it's actually notsomething that government can do by itself or really anyonecan do by themselves, right?

it's an all-hands-on-deckeffort that's required. the president frequently talksabout the fact that the greatest challenge, the greatestopportunities we have as a country are ones where we haveto take them on by banding together as sisters and brothersacross the public sector, the private sector,the academic sector, and now the private sector, toactually do together what we actually cannot do separately. and tech inclusion, connectingeveryone to tech skills and

opportunity, is exactly oneof those all-hands-on-deck challenges, opportunities,and efforts. there is a whole bunch ofaction going on in this space. you heard about a lot of ittoday in terms of the exciting, groundbreaking, historic workof our champions for change. there are additional initiativesi just want to touch briefly upon that you mayhave heard about. so one example is, ihad the great pleasure, with others hereat the white house,

of hosting five past winners andcurrent finalists for the google science fair. let me tell you what, these fiveyoung women, ages 13 through 16, were astonishing, astonishing. they've done more in their 13or 16 years than i've done my entire life. one, the elder stateswomanof the crew, was 16, has already invented a neuralnetwork powered test for breast cancer that has, like, a 99percent plus accuracy rate,

which is just astonishing. and she's just getting started. just imagineif we had a million -- millions ofyoung women like this, right? it would be a different -- itwould be a different country, right? it'll be -- it'llbe a different country when we actually get that to happen. another example is,just this spring,

the presidentannounced connected, which is a -- who herehas heard about connected? okay, fantastic. for the rest of you, this is very excitingnews for you, right? so what's happening is thatthere's an initiative the president launched that willwithin five years connect 99 percent of american studentsk-12 to high-speed broadband, minimum 100 mbs per second,and the target's going

to be a gigabyte, right? along with state-of-the-artwireless within each of the schools, it will also actuallyinvest in training up teachers in online teachingand learning skills, and also has challenged theprivate sector to develop tablets, to develop content, todevelop software that can really turbo-charge learning,personalize it, and catapult us into a whole newera of educational achievement -- super, super exciting.

another example is u.s. 2020, an initiative that wasactually borne out of a workshop held at the whitehouse last year. and this has a reallymind-bogglingly awesome goal, which is, by 2020, deploy1 million new stem mentors in american schools. all of us can remember a momentwhere someone loved us enough and cared about us enoughto actually help point us to something that got us engaged inwhat we're actually now doing.

and there's a whole bunch ofevidence that injecting more mentoring into schoolswill create more amounts of inspiration that will actuallycatapult a whole new generation of kids into scienceand tech careers. so the way this is workingis, it's a nonprofit, and what's happening is thatcompanies are joining u.s. 2020, tech companies,and saying, "i commit as a ceo of thiscompany to have 20 percent of my tech workforce spend 20 hours ayear by 2020 mentoring in

high schools, middle schoolsacross the country, " with a particular focus onschools that have been hard hit and kids that really, reallyneed the outreach the most. so these are just a fewexamples, a few examples. and this tapestryof initiatives, like the ones ijust talked about, like the ones you'veheard about today, comprise to me an emergingecosystem of awesomeness, an ecosystem of effort toconnect everyone to tech skills

and opportunity. and it's just incrediblyexciting to see how it's going and growing. so i hope today has beensuper inspiring for you. i hope you'velearned a few things. i hope you've met new people. i hope you plotted newinitiatives to launch. i can't thank you enough, thechampions and other folks in the audience, like ryan seashore, orfolks actually watching online,

like mitch kapoor andfrida klein kapoor. i can't thank you enough foreverything that you have already done, and i thank you even morefor everything that you are about to do, for everythingyou're about to do. because while we're offto a great start, right, let's make the future happenalong the lines of what our panel actuallyarticulated, right? let's actually make techinclusion a basically redundant phrase, because we will haveactually built an inclusive tech

ecosystem that not only createsequal opportunity for everybody, but that createsa much brighter, more prosperous future forthe united states of america. so thank you so much foreverything you're doing. may the force be withyou as you do it. god bless you, andgod bless america. rock on.