"Geek girls" who love creating new technology are needed for a new Ballarat 'hackathon' event.
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Geek Girls Academy are bringing their #SheHacks workshop to Ballarat for the first time giving women the opportunity to create new technology and friends at the same time.
#SheHacks participants will spend a weekend with experts and fellow geeks, building a minimum viable product (MVP) to test against other technological innovations created across the weekend.
"We are bringing together a massive girl gang of women to build the internet together," said Girl Geek Academy chief executive and co-founder Sarah Moran.
"Hackathon events are a popular event in the tech community where we come together to build a piece of technology over a weekend ... something that may grow to be a bigger business."
Ms Moran said the Ballarat event over the weekend of February 28 to March 1 would kick off a statewide tour, culminating in the Girl Geek Academy's Marketplace Day in Melbourne on April 5.
The hackathon allows women to, instead of putting time and effort in to a big project and realising there isn't actually a market for it, develop a tiny piece of technology quickly and test it among the Girl Geek community to see whether the project could be successful.
"If we are, we can build it up to the next level," she said.
In addition to building startups, participants also build friendships and possible business partnerships.
The event is open for women aged over 18 with different skills sets.
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"We talk about three different skills you need to build - there's the hacker, hustler and hipster," Ms Moran said. "Hackers have coding skills and building skills, hipsters lean toward design or artistic flair and what a product will look like or feel like for people to use, and the hustler might be a business development person in marketing or a storyteller - if a company was going to succeed they'd likely be the CEO."
#SheHacks is supported by LaunchVic and Runway Ballarat and participants who want to turn their MVP in to a fully fledged startup will have the opportunity to join Girl Geek Academy's incubator.
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