My Week Watching Grace Hopper from a Land Far, Far Away

The Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing is over for 2010. There was considerable enthusiasm for the event coming out of Atlanta in the form of tweets, blog posts, and photographs. Here’s a taste of what I saw from afar. If you were there and can provide additional links and photos, please leave a comment.

GHC10 banquet

Attendance was good as you can see in the banquet room photo. Summer tweeted the stats.

GHC 2010 stats: 960 students, 2147 attendees, 280 schools, 29 countries, 630 speakers, and infinite fun! #ghc10Wed Sep 29 22:28:50 via Twitter for iPhone

Grace Hopper 2010-30 dance party

They had a dance party. And they loved it. Gail Carmichael took photos and wrote about it in Dancing with Hundreds of Technical Women at Grace Hopper.

When I tell someone about the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, I start by explaining the dance parties. I tell them, “You wouldn’t think that an all-female dance would be fun… but you’d be wrong. There’s nothing like dancing with hundreds of technical women who let loose because there’s nobody around to feel stupid in front of.”

Not to make less of the dance party fun, but I’ll be happy to see the day when technical women can dance like nobody’s watching at a conference where there are men with everybody dancing to the same techno tune.

Reports on some of the sessions and panels made it into the Grace Hopper Bloggers blog. In addition to posting some bloggers on the site, there is a page called GHC Bloggers that lists blog posts from everyone blogging about the event on their own blogs. Cate posted a summary of what she did at CompSciWoman.

There’s a group pool on Flickr for photos. You can find additional photos on Flickr from Gail-Carmichael, geeklinda, and Terriko. Professional photos by US Event Photos are on Flickr. Musicword put her photos in a Picasa Album.

Grace Hopper 2010-11 free and open source table

As you might expect, there was representation from the Open Source community. In fact, there was an Open Source Codeathon. Read The Open Source Codeathon for Humanity (a blog post in pictures) by Terriko.

. . . building on some success last year, we had a codeathon at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing. This year, we were working on Sahana Eden, a free and open source disaster management system.

There was some doubt at Geek Feminism Blog prior to hearing the keynote by Duy-Loan Le from Texas Instruments. After the speech, vaurora posted Grace Hopper 2010 keynote update: Now “Cross-boundary Collaboration” with a more favorable opinion about it.

Kami from Nuh Likkle Bickle was Excited about the poken

Cool feature: Poken! They’re futuristic business cards, you hold them up to each other and they exchange sort of your business cards, but even more if you add social networks to your profile.

Kimberly Blessing gets the last word.

How does #ghc just get better and better each year? Because of @anitaborg_org and this awesome, GROWING community of women and men! #ghc10Sat Oct 02 02:40:21 via web

Additional information:

Photo credits: Gail Carmichael (Gail-Carmichael on Flickr), Linda Goldstein (geeklinda on Flickr)

Cross-posted in slightly different form at BlogHer.

One thought on “My Week Watching Grace Hopper from a Land Far, Far Away”

  1. Glad you were able to enjoy GHC from afar! We work hard to fill the online communities with as much of the conference’s spirit as we can. 🙂

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