Tag Archives: ghc09

A link roundup without a bicycle (2nd October, 2009)

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If you have links of interest, please share them in comments here, or if you’re a delicious user, tag them “geekfeminism†to bring them to our attention.

Open Source Community Development, Systers Code Sprint

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I’m involved in two very cool things tomorrow at GHC09 that I’d like you to know about:

I’m a late addition to a panel entitled “Open Source Community Development” — I just met most of the other panelists tonight, and I’m really thrilled to be involved:

Here’s the abstract:

The open source software movement has changed how products are developed, and how communities interact. The community of developers, writers, users, academics, managers and evangelists is critical to open source. In fact, the community is sometimes more important than the software. How do communities grow? Through traditional marketing? How is trust among engineers built? What shapes a community’s culture? What infrastructure does a community need? How do these needs change?

Right after our panel (well, actually, it starts just before the panel ends), Systers is doing a code sprint at GHC09. I mentioned this previously in a linkspam post here, and talked about why I’m so excited about it here.

The short reasons? Systers is a pretty awesome community of women, and I want to help them have exactly the technology they want. Mailing lists have long been one of the ways I “meet” other women involved in open source, and they’ve helped us form global communities. And, well, I’m a Mailman developer, so I’m always thrilled to have more participants on my open source project of choice.

Here’s a few more reason to come if those aren’t enough: this is a great opportunity to get some one-on-one mentoring from some great people, and maybe get yourself involved in an open source project or two.

And if you can’t actually make it at GHC09 tomorrow, don’t despair. One of our wonderful community bloggers will be summing up the open source community development panel and posting to GHCbloggers. And you can join in to the Systers code sprint remotely by irc! Details at the bottom of this page.

And if neither of those is your thing, there’s tons of great stuff going on, including a BoF with my own CU-WISE women, who will be talking about growing women in science groups.

Not at GHC? If you aren’t already reading http://ghcbloggers.blogspot.com, you should be — volunteers are already posting about the talks. (Including a post on the session I where I presented my PhD research!)

Write linkspam on it (26th September, 2009)

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Update (by Mary, 28 Sep): misskinx told us in comments that the workshop on dating violence is not a Carleton University event, it’s organised by the Ottawa Coalition to End Violence Against Women (OCTEVAW) and the Sexual Assault Network (SAN).

Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing

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This is adapted from a post I made to my local WISE blog.

Grace Hopper Celebration

I don’t remember the first time I heard about the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, but I do remember when I decided this was something I had to check out.

I was at a day-long meeting for one of our inter-university research groups. A number of the graduate students had been invited to give talks on our current research, myself included. The talks had been going well, and it was super-interesting seeing what other people were doing, since each university has a very different flavour to the research produced, even though we were theoretically under the same research banner.

During one of the breaks, I ran into one of the primary investigators in the women’s washroom. We were the only two women at this particular meeting (a bit of an oddity for me, since my research group at Carleton has many other women!) and we got to talking about, well, girl stuff. Science-y, intellectual girl stuff! I love meeting other female researchers. As we’re standing there washing our hands, she told me all about Grace Hopper and how much fun the conference was — a whole conference full of smart, interesting women, their research, their ideas! And then we laughed at ourselves, saying “Any minute now, the guys are going to phone wondering where we are and we’ll have to admit we’ve been gabbing in the washroom like teenagers…”

And then her cell phone rang. We grinned at each other and hurried back to the meeting.

The conference is coming up soon now: September 30 – October 3rd, 2009. Registration is open ’till the 25th, so there’s still time to sign up! I’m attending for the first time this year, and I’ll be presenting my research as part of the PhD Forum on Wednesday just before lunch, plus there’s tons of other interesting stuff on the program. If you’re going, please stop by to say hi!

And if you can’t make it, don’t despair: Grace Hopper has a bunch of volunteer bloggers (including me!) who will be covering GHC related topics before, during and after the conference, so you should be able to get a glimpse into GHC09 even if you can’t be there in person.

Upcoming events (August/September)

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You might have noticed we added a link at the top of the page to a calendar of upcoming events that might be of interest to geek feminists. The calendar is public so you can add it to your own Google Calendar if you like.

From time to time, we’ll also be highlighting some of them here on the blog too. The two main categories at the moment are a) women-centric geek events, and b) events seeking women speakers. If you’re a conference organiser and would like to reach out to women to submit proposals, feel free to let us know and we’ll add your event’s CFP deadline to the calendar. The same goes for anyone organising women-centric geek events: let us know and we’ll make sure you’re listed.

So, without further ado, some upcoming events around the world include: