Building a Tech Community: The Windows Insider Program with Dona Sarkar
Dona Sarkar
FULL SHOW NOTES
https://podcast.nz365guy.com/106
- Personal and professional background – growing up in Detroit, taking up computer science, working at Siebel, etc.
- Upcoming speaking engagement at a conference on digital inclusion
- Journey to working with Microsoft
- Career highlights in the past 14 years
- Being a woman in tech: changes she has seen, her thoughts on the topic
- How she encourages open-mindedness when people don’t come from a highly diverse background in a corporate team
- About #DotheThing – what it is, her principle
- Thoughts on encouraging students about the future possibility of careers that don’t even exist
- The meaning behind #NinjaCat
- Releasing code to the Insider Fast ring – wanting to have in cocreating product and making a better world using technology. Is it starting to flow over into other technology areas inside Microsoft?
- Building a 16.5-million-people community – keeping the communications and the engagement level up; how they maintain the momentum year in and year out
- Dona’s Ten Commandments for Community
- Thoughts on the future of the Windows Insider Program
- Advice to teams wanting to kick off a program from 0 and build a tech community
Books Mentioned
- #DotheThing by Dona Sarkar – https://amzn.to/2J5DBhb
Resources
- Windows Insider Program – https://insider.windows.com/en-us/
- Ghana Digital Roadmap Conference – https://microsoftcaregh.com/2019/05/16/ghana-digital-roadmap-conference-microsoft-windows-insider-chief-dona-sarkar-shares-simple-yet-often-overlooked-insights-on-digital-inclusion/
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Dona Sarkar
Dona Sarkar believes the 7.6 billion people we share this earth with can and SHOULD develop technical skills to help achieve their goals–tech is the ultimate equalizer.
She spends her days engineering software with a global community of 16M people as the Chief #NinjaCat of the Insider Program at Microsoft.
Dona spends her nights:
– writing fiction and non-fiction books to help young professionals have the careers of their dreams
– running an ethically made fashion line called #PrimaDonaStyle tailored in Nigeria, Kenya and Seattle
– coaching entrepreneurs in emerging markets on how to turn ideas into profit
– sharing these stories on stages all over the world
– coming up with more exciting schemes
Her favourite FAVORITE job is being a bossy big sister to thousands of amazing humans who want to #DoTheThing.
She was recently named one of Fast Company’s 100 Most Productive People in Business and Cosmopolitan Magazine's Businessperson of the Year. She loves making new friends and invites everyone to say hi at http://donasarkar.com
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