Valerie Aurora liked Linda Babcock and Sara Laschever’s book Women Don’t Ask so much that for a number of years she ran the Valerie Aurora Women in Computing Book Scholarship, buying or contributing towards women’s purchases of the book.
I wondered if other people would be interested in doing the same. If there’s a book or work on feminism, diversity or geek variants thereof that you think readers of this blog would really benefit from, consider founding your own scholarship and let me know in comments here. Depending on response, I’ll put up a second post with a list of scholarships, and perhaps re-run this every six months or so.
Leave a comment here to offer a scholarship. Things I need to know:
- The name of your scholarship.
- What books (media, texts) your scholarship is for, and why people should read (view etc) it.
- What your contribution will be: will it be a copy you’ll ship to them (any limits on where?), a gift voucher from a retailer for its value or some portion of its value?
- Is your offer for particular applicants? For example, is it for women? (A few notes here: I would strongly encourage you to rely on self-identification on this, and also if you’re thinking about gender restrictions, consider non-binary gender identifications.)
- Any firm expiry or limitations (for example, expires end of 2009, limited to 10 copies…). You can of course withdraw your scholarship at any time.
- How people should contact you in order to take up a scholarship. You do need to provide some way of being directly contacted: I will put up a post listing the different scholarships and linking to their webpages or providing other contact details for them, but I won’t handle correspondence for you. Setting up a webpage would be be best, that way you can update it when your offer expires.