GHC Codeathon for Humanity

I wrote a post about the Codeathon for Humanity held at GHC this year for the Open Source Business Resource (OSBR), a publication of the Talent First Network, in which I talked about the great strategies used by the organizers to ensure maximum participation and engagement.

I’ve just returned from the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing (GHC) in Atlanta and had the opportunity to experience my first open source mini-codeathon and learn about the humanitarian open source project, Sahana Eden.

Sahana Eden is an open source disaster management platform that can be used in a wide variety of ways to provide organization on the ground in the aftermath of a catastrophe.

Read the complete post here. A special thanks to Terri Oda for the photos.

OSBR also has a great issue on Women and Open Source, which is worth the read.

Career and Economic Opportunity in Open Source Software

As part of the open source track at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing (GHC) this year, there was an informative session on career and economic opportunity in Open Source Software (OSS).

The session served two main purposes -

a) to show that participating in open source projects can provide many skills that can be relevant in obtaining a job and building a career, and,

b) that open source does not necessarily mean free software and therefore, there are multiple ways in which to make a living from OSS.

I've provided a summary/transcript of the discussion in this session on the GHC 2010 Wiki, so below I list some of the key takeaways for me.

a) Building Job and Career Skills from OSS projects

1. Online and multi-site, multi-timezone collaboration and communication is perhaps one of the best skills you can pick up from an OSS project. Interacting with people of different cultures and in different physical locations can prepare you to handle multi-site activities that occur in many large companies today.

In my own experience, I find that being able to interact effectively with a geographically dispersed and culturally diverse team is an increasingly important skill in our globalized world. These kind of soft skills set you apart from those who have equivalent technical expertise.

2. OSS is a great way to slowly build up skills, be it programming, organizational etc. and be able to get feedback (it helps to develop a thick skin :)

I think this is something I will keep in mind when I think I need to build expand my technical skill set.

3. Flexible timings can provide women with the work/life balance that they might be looking for.

OSS might be a great way to keep in touch with the industry and keep your skills and experience up to date while taking a hiatus (like maternity leave)

b) OSS Business

1. Making money from OSS projects is not a bad thing, and shouldn't be seen as such. Indeed, many OSS projects become richer (in quality, and in participation) for having had a few high profile customers that were willing to pay for custom development

2. Providing complementary software, services and support is a widespread revenue model adopted by many companies that leverage OSS

In general, I was inspired to see such names as Cat Allman, Leslie Hawthorn, Stormy Peters and Margo Seltzer participating in the open source track and it serves to reinforce the quality of the content that GHC offered this year.

Cross-posted to the Carleton University Women in Science and Engineering (CU-WISE) blog

Grace Hopper 2010 - The Celebration Begins!

Less than a day till the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing starts in Atlanta!

I learnt about the conference last year (was too late to register) and ever since then I've been waiting for GHC 2010. Since this will be my first time at the conference, I've been reading blogs from veterans of the conference (check out the GHC blog feed) and following #ghc10 and @ghc on Twitter to get pointers on how to prepare for the week.

And prepare you must! The sheer volume of planned activities is mindboggling, leave alone those impromptu meetings and outings that are bound to happen. I've taken some time to look through the abstracts of the various seminars and mark those that are most interesting to me.

I'm especially excited about the track on Open Source as I am taking a course on Open Source Business as part of my Masters. I hope to share what I learn with my classmates. There will also be a chance to participate in open source development via the Codeathon for Humanity for the Sahana-Eden project. As a facilitator for this event, I'm looking forward to learning more about their disaster management software platform and how I can use my coding skills for social good.

The codeathon is a brilliant example of the conference theme of "Collaborating Across Boundaries" and my aim will be to look at the talks I attend in this broader context.

I'm also eager to meet many of the accomplished women participating this year, especially those interested in mobile platforms and wireless applications and those who (like me) have taken or are interested in a business career path after a technical degree.

The rest I'm leaving to serendipity :)

Originally posted on the Carleton University Women In Science and Engineering (CU-WISE) blog.

Grace Hopper Celebration 2010 - View from the Program Chairs - by Wendy Rannenberg

You might not realize it, but we started planning for this spectacular conference in July 2009. For us, it is wonderful to see the schedule come together, the letters of acceptance go out to the hundreds of presenters, the keynotes lined up, all just in time for us to start work on next year's conference.

Let's not get ahead of ourselves. This year's conference theme, Collaborating Across Boundaries, highlights collaboration across boundaries of: academics, industry and government; international borders; multidisciplinary aspects of computer science; K-12 and higher education. There are probably more but you get the gist. It is a very broad set of topics.

This is a milestone conference. Not only is this the 10th celebration, it is the largest and we have responded to your input by adding new tracks, new collaborations, all at an exciting venue. This year the program committee saw an increase in the number of papers, panels and workshops that were submitted for review. Wow. So many great ideas. We have seen an increased interest in the conference from both academia and industry, here in the US and abroad. We are truly getting noticed.

Here, in this first article in our "View from the Program Chairs" series we take a look at many of the conference features and a closer look at a new event, the new Career Fair, and the Open Source track as well as the Technical Papers track.

In response to requests from our industry partners, the committee has added a Career Fair to be held on Tuesday (Note that is a day earlier than usual! Be sure to mark your calendars.) The Career Fair will have simultaneous tracks where you can meet up with our many sponsors who are hiring and also where you can work on your resume. In addition to the Career Fair and Resume Clinic there will be a Women of Color Workshop on Tuesday.

On Wednesday we will have the Phd Forum and New Investigator talks, and lots of career development workshops for both industry and academia. These will be followed by the poster session and opening reception.

After that great start the conference will have 10 tracks for you to ponder on both Thursday and Friday. (remember, it is the10th anniversary). We highly recommend you attend the Newcomers session on Wednesday to get tips for selecting from the wide variety of choices. The tracks are focused on Academia, Industry, Technical, Student, Career, our Theme track, Invited Technical Speakers, a special Steering Committee track, an Open Source track and an HCI track. There are Executive Forums, Leadership workshops and more.

The Open Source technical track is being designed specifically for the conference by a team of women who are dedicated to increasing the number of women involved in the open source community. A series of talks and hands on exercises will lead you through the process of getting started and understanding the tools out there.

In addition to the Open Source track we will be presenting a special track on Human Computer Interaction (HCI). This will be highlighted in our next article, along with some of the other special topics and presenters that we have lined up.

All in all this is going to be a very exciting conference!


Wendy Rannenberg is the Grace Hopper 2010 Program Co-Chair

Systers code sprint at GHC 2009

One session I'm really excited about is the Systers code sprint. This was a late addition to the program, so I want to make sure you don't miss it!

Systers Code Sprint at GHC09
Time: 16:00-20:00 - AST, Thursday, October 01, 2009
Where: GHC09 - Room: Tucson A
[More information]

From coders to writers to artists to testers... we'll be looking for people with all sorts of skills. (And if you can't make it to GHC, you can stop by the IRC channel to help too!) Check out the current task list and see what might suit your expertise, or just stop by and see how you can help on the day, because new ideas are bound to come up. You don't have to stay the whole time, either, just stop by for as long as you can.

And if you'll indulge me for bit, let me tell you why I'm so excited about the Systers code sprint at GHC09.

The fact that it's a code sprint to help roll out some new stuff for Systers is plenty of reason to be excited, but this is extra special to me because one of the things we'll be working on is Mailman, which is a mailing list manager and open source project near and dear to my heart.

First, it's exciting to me because mailing lists have been a large part of the way I "meet" other women involved in computing, like the wonderful women involved with LinuxChix, Systers and many others. Mailing lists provide us a way to connect with others around the world. Many women in computing feel quite isolated, and it's wonderful to be part of a global community.

Of course, the joy of mailing lists is hardly limited to women in computing. They're used by universities, friends, political parties, and special interest groups of all stripes. They're also commonly used to help coordinate efforts for open source projects. Which brings me to the second reason I love Mailman: I'm a developer! I'm actually one of the core developers, plus I wrote a lot of documentation for it. So I'm always thrilled to see new ways in which people want to use it, and of course I love seeing people hack on the projects that I contribute to. And I admit, since I'm currently trying to work on helping improve the usability for the next version, I'm always out there asking people how they like it and what we can fix in the future.

So I'll be at the Systers code sprint helping out as a Mailman developer, but you don't have to be interested in Mailman to help out! There's lots of other good reasons to be interested. Hope to see you there!

Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing just around the corner!

Wow, I can't believe we're less than two months away from hundreds (thousands?) of technical women converging in Tuscon AZ for the next Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing conference!

I'm excited to be moderating a panel on Women in Open Source and being an official blogger again this year. I've been looking at the schedule and it is full of interesting talks! This is one conference I really have to set my schedule up for in advance, because once I get there, it's a flurry of activity and I really don't want to miss out on anything! This will also be my first year twittering at the conference (as an aside, I can't believe it took me so long to get on Twitter - I'm learning so much, meeting interesting people, and it takes so much less time than Facebook or LinkedIn).

I'll be arriving Tuesday night to make sure I don't miss out on any of the activities on Wednesday. I wish I could take part in the resume clinic on Wednesday, but that seems to completely overlap with the Becoming a Person of Influence workshop, which I don't want to miss.

Speaking of resumes, I hear there's a "new format" for them - it's probably time I did a complete update of mine. I hear plain text versions no longer suffice. Hrm, perhaps even if I can't attend the clinic, I should still have one ready for women to give me feedback on them.

What are you looking forward to most?

This entry originally appeared on Valerie Fenwick's weblog.