 You pretty much covered everything I wanted to say over here, so my name is Linda, I come from Helsinki, nowadays work and live in New York. Here I'm here in Dublin as the digital champion of Finland and I wanted to tell you three stories. First, why code is poetry? Second, why code is literature? And why all of this matters to Europe? I'm just going to get started on why I became interested in programming. I'm 14 years old. I'm Natalie in love with Al Gore, who is the then Vice President of the United States. I'm 14 years old, this is 2001, and I have no way of expressing all this energy and enthusiasm I have for him except for making a website for him. And at the time we didn't have any fancy website making machines and I needed to learn HTML and CSS to make this happen. And this is probably the first and also the last finished website ever made for Al Gore. It's not online anymore, happily. But what this experience taught me was that you can express yourself online and I was pretty good at HTML and CSS and then for years and years and years I just fiddled around with them but then I never made the jump into actual programming world. And I truly love Facebook and Tumblr and Pinterest and all these services that come up but they are doing something really, really profoundly wrong for my generation of women. They are making us curators instead of creators. So we just reblog stuff, we like things, we passively consume internet instead of being a part of creating the internet. I have friends who build really amazing companies and technology solutions and web apps and so forth but none of them are girls. I come from Finland and I want to tell you three stories about Finland. So first of all we have an amazing engineering culture. Most of the backbone of the whole internet was built in Scandinavia with companies like MySQL, SSH, Linux, Git, IRC, all by Finnish and Scandinavian engineers who wanted to build something for everyone so they didn't make it for profit only. Second we are one of the most equal countries in the world so we have women as a president, Finnish women in general are really like, there's no glass ceilings over where I come from. And third of all we have a track record of being able to make societal change. So in 100 years we went from being a very poor country into being one of the most liveable countries in the world. And yet we face the exact same problem as everyone else, we have no women building the internet. And this is something I set out to change in 2010 when we organized the first Rails Girls event. And Rails Girls is a two-day event for total beginners in coding giving them the first experience in software craftsmanship showing them how web applications are built from concept to actual code. And the first event was done because I wanted to teach myself coding so this was like for my 25 friends in Helsinki and a few other friends who knew how to program and we made a really fun experience where we wanted to show that coding is not mathematical, coding is not lonely, it's not like for introverted people, it's social and whatever profession you have in life you are going to benefit from knowing the basics of code. Turns out a lot of other people want to be doing this too. So today I think Rails Girls has been in over 90 countries ranging from cities like Belo Horizonte in Brazil, to Berlin, to Tokyo, we had one in Dar es Salaam in Tanzania just recently. And I think why this happens is again the free-finish things we had. So the culture of open source, instead of trying to make this into a business where people would pay for us for licenses or anything like that, we just open sourced everything. We put every single thing you need to organize an event online. So there's the instructions on how to get local coaches, there's instructions on how to get sponsors, there's instructions for every single thing you can think of like posters, balloons, quirky little name tags, they are all found over there. The second thing, understanding engineering culture. So all Rails Girls events are grassroots organization events. They are done by local developers who all of us probably think are really like weird and introverted and don't want to be helping out, bring more women into technology. Turns out they do want to do that. We've never ever had problems when we ask, go to a city and ask, hey would you help install Ruby on Rails for 100 girls this Friday and help coach them the next day. The boys and girls are always ecstatic about this and Rails Girls has spread in less than two years in over 90 cities just because people want to be doing a change. And that's the whole third point about where this finish heritage shows in the Rails Girls movement is that like pace of change we're able to show. We have a community of around I'd say a thousand people at least who are actively involved in organizing these things. It's really cool to see Croatian coaches go into Berlin to teach others and have people all around like Tokyo Girls helping out Brazilian boys to teach Rails for these girls. And it's a very lively and organic community that helps one another. And the pace of change is so fast that reporters sometimes ask that, okay so what is, like is there a Pinterest already built from a Rails Girls participant? Not yet, but the mindsets are already there and this movement has reached so many people that even though they wouldn't become coders in one day, they at least have the foundations and fundamentals and they know other people in their local community who know how to code. The last initiative that I wanted to talk about in Rails Girls is Rails Girls Summer of Code. So we see all these enthusiastic girls come into an event and during one weekend shop they code something, they deploy something, they see their stuff like but we never get them to be a part of the overall like open source community. So this was an initiative. I wasn't even a part of this that much. I just like over so the things went well. This was a bunch of really amazing volunteers from Berlin who put together a campaign to get beginner girls who just completed their first Rails Girls event who maybe continued for a few weeks on coding. They put together a campaign to get them to work for a whole summer paid on open source projects that power this whole coding movement. So Ruby on Rails is a programming language that powers stuff like Twitter or used to power Twitter. Groupon I think uses it. So many like millions and millions of companies use this programming language and the basic building blocks of this are built by volunteers, open source maintainers and committers and now these girls, 10 of them will be able to use the whole summer to be a part of building this like from grounds up this whole programming language and they come from all over the world from India to Argentina to Poland to I think no Irish representatives, also no Finnish representatives so that shows how global the movement has begun and it was less than 10 days that like this whole 80,000 euros was collected and all like no formal organization behind this, no formal nobody got paid to do this, it was all the grassroots enthusiasm and people wanting to help. Maybe we can like... Thanks a million, that's a wonderful background stuff. It set me off, you answered a couple of our questions already there but one thing that's interesting and we were just chatting about it there before is things like Code of Dojo which is sort of our own homegrown and maybe that's why you had no Irish people there. But actually you and the foxes here who's the co-founder of the LA Code of Dojo I mentioned it to you there and it has kind of gone international as well. A lot of the kids there are very very young. In Rails Girls is there a sort of a typical age group or where do you start or how young do you think people should start? I think Rails Girls was again intended for... I was 23 when I started Rails Girls and hence the name also which gets us a lot of... I'm not a native English speaker so I didn't know that there's like a connotation with the world girls that is negative to a certain age group or like certain amount of people. What we usually see is people ranging from 16 to over 60 and could I change things again? I would probably think about the name again because again girls gives you the idea that it's younger girls but yeah. And everyone, I was talking to you, you were quoting Steve Jobs and the privilege of meeting Steve was his co-founder of Apple and he's begun programming and getting kids programming as well and he's well aware of your organisation and he was saying that he thought that you should get kids from the age of 10 and then the real programming can only be done after the age of 11 or 12. I could show my next project so that kind of touches on that. Code is literacy and how code is the most important language of the 21st century. The reason I think this is important as a subject is because code is the fastest way to change a society at the moment not legislation, not policy making, it's code. And companies like Amazon and Spotify and Facebook are changing how we see friendship, how we see money, how we see knowledge, how we see books so fast and so rapidly that it's just mind blowing but then also really scary because it's a very, very narrow group of guys in their 20s, white or Asian, who are driving all of this change and that's why we should all be able to code. Not because coding per se would be so important but it's because it's the tool of the 21st century to change stuff and also because it's really amazing to see something come out of nothing that you can build. And one of my friends said that if the three most important languages of the future are JavaScript, I know English, Chinese and JavaScript and that's how important coding is but I think that I totally agree with this statement but in addition to saying that I think if JavaScript is the newly more franca of our generation it's not only enough that we learn the grammar and the basics and like repeat stuff over and over we should also learn to write poetry with that language and that's where I think the age comes in that if we teach women my age to write four loops it's a little bit too late, it should start much earlier and my sort of project that I've been working on on the side has been a children's book project that teaches you sort of the philosophical backgrounds of coding not per se like the arithmetic stuff that happens but sort of the mindset and thinking that happens in coding and it's this story of a little girl called Ruby and she travels all around the world and she meets these amazing, amazing figures like the androids that are really... I think she was Irish. Pardon me? I think she was Irish. Yeah! I think she's Danish, Japanese, Finnish probably. She's really opinionated and quirky and strong little girl and she meets all these characters like the androids who are really chatty, a little bit messy she can't really because they are all yelling at the same time and they want to be doing all these different things and she meets the snow leopard who's beautiful and wants to be alone and doesn't want to play with the other kids and she meets Tux the penguin who speaks in a weird language and she knows that this guy is really smart but I don't really understand what he's saying and Firefox who just wants to throw parties and stuff like that so this book teaches the kids about sort of the stuff that happens behind the code like how these companies are different from one another how profoundly they are changing our culture and society at the moment. Long answer. Very interesting. You're currently community manager with Code Academy. I know I've heard that Code Academy say things like that education is broken. It can refer us back to this again and I know for example the founders of Code of Doge their philosophy is that it's almost better if it's outside the formal education process. What are your thoughts on that? Well, you know these kind of coding movements is it better that they be outside schools or should schools be teaching coding? I think schools should be teaching coding I think coding should be like it shouldn't be its own little domain where you learn ICT skills you learn Microsoft Office but it should be applied across curriculum so when you're doing knitting lessons or craft lessons you're actually learning sequential thinking and when you're learning philosophy Bernard Russell's logic of all programming languages when you're learning philosophy you're essentially learning code when you're learning French you're learning a new language and that same learning mechanism can be applied to JavaScript or Python or Ruby and definitely it should be taught in schools. And you mentioned an example to me earlier is it Estonia? Yes, Estonia. I think Europe has a really cool advantage of having a lot of small nations that can turn fast so US education system and I think our founders talk about education system needing to be outrun because it's so slow to change and move but European countries can drive fast change and Estonia is doing an amazing initiative where they are teaching all of their a whole generation of 7 year olds next fall are going to start with coding like every single kid in Estonia is going to learn code Iceland is doing something similar and Netherlands is doing something similar there's a lot of stuff happening in Europe we should talk with Gilles Bavine who's going to be here tomorrow morning he can tell what French people are working on, very good and you've touched on it a few times there but as regards that entrepreneurship that we need the kind of start-up environment that we need in Europe when you're coming back before how does it compare to the Silicon Valley, New York etc here in the likes of Dublin, Berlin Helsinki it goes nicely Europe, this is the scary figure so this is a Mackenzie study 250,000 new jobs needed to be created in Finland only to level out the budget deficit like no new jobs created per se just to level out things in the next 10 years and 250,000 jobs is like a huge amount of jobs and then another nugget of information I think this is from the Kaufman Foundation and they say that almost all new jobs are created in companies less than 5 year olds and this doesn't mean that companies like Nokia wouldn't employ people in the future but it means that companies like Nokia won't be creating new jobs and we need 250,000 new jobs just to level out things and this is I think where the entrepreneurship thing comes to life and I've had the privilege of being able to work both in Silicon Valley I used to run a program for all the university and Stanford University and now being in New York and I absolutely adore the way Americans do things but I think we still have a lot of our own competitive strengths and I think somehow I don't think the biggest human endeavours can be private I think there's a lot of like culture and compassion and history and depth of thinking in Europe that we are we're going to be able to build really amazing companies as long as we can learn from the Americans and we take all that stuff we teach our whole continent to code and then we just run faster than everyone else and I don't want 25 year old California kids deciding what my friendship should look like no offence they are doing a wonderful job over there but I think it's a sad thing if my generation's biggest problems are ad clicks and stuff like that it should be something bigger and I think Europeans traditionally have been good at thinking big things and I mean at a policy level are there things that governments should be doing I mean obviously the coding element, the education element there are more things they could be doing to encourage young people to be creative and think as you discussed there think poetically and creatively and think of making things rather than being consumers of Facebook I think it's good to leave Europe to be honest like everyone asks me how can you be the digital champion of Finland and live in New York and I think it totally makes sense first of all because that's the way you learn by going to places and meeting people who think not like you and I hope that one day I'll be able to spend some time in Shanghai, in Tokyo, everywhere and bring all of that back to Europe so that would be my first suggestion for European young people to leave Europe for a while and then come back and then appreciate all the quality of life and the things we do over here and the policy level things in all honesty that's why I'm here like I know nothing about policy level changes and that's why it's such a privilege to be working with people who have made their whole career in this world and learning from them and tell us a little bit about the time I just wanted to make sure of the people of type just tell us a little bit about Finland you know and your role as digital champion of what Finland is doing to compete in this new landscape I think Finland is in a really interesting position now because we so everyone has heard the story of Nokia where like our dreamfans like our whole society was geared towards Nokia, our university made people for Nokia like when I started business school every single kid wanted to go work for Nokia and that's great but I think it's good actually that Nokia is doing so well now because that has forced us to come up with other creative solutions and one sector that has been really well after the Nokia decline has been gaining and we've had Rovio which is the maker of Angry Birds Finnish people normally say that we are not sales people, we are not good at marketing but Rovio has totally like turned that over they are amazing at marketing, they are amazing at logistics and then there's another company called Supercell that does tablet gaming and they are making 2.3 million dollars a day I think at the moment they are less than two years old as a company and they employ 80 people and they are just doing like world-class things in a very contained small space and we are we have this like ecosystem of gaming companies now that just help each other out and do world-class things within Helsinki and the most important thing that they do is that they employ people from all over the world so Supercell I think I don't remember the exact numbers I think they have like 70 employees and 50 nationalities or something like that so that's really good and that's what Helsinki needs like more not a policy level opinion but my personal opinion I think that's beauty of New York is that everyone from everywhere in the world comes over there and that's what Helsinki needs to