Category: women

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.

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

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.

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.

Additional information:

• Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing Announces Record-Breaking Turnout
• Tech Women, a new initiative to enable women in the field of technology from the Middle East and North Africa to reach their full potential
• Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology
• Usable Security
• GHC10 Wiki with session notes, slides, and session related content
• Katie Siek posted her slidedeck from the Imposter Syndrome Panel at Slideshare.

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

Cross-posted in slightly different form at BlogHer.

GHC10 is the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing for 2010. It runs from Sept. 28 to Oct. 2 in Atlanta. The conference is sold out, which is a wonderful thing to hear. This video from 1986 lets you learn something about Grace Hopper — like why she deserves to have a conference named after her — and be entertained at the same time.

For complete details on how to follow the conference events, see my post GHC10: Going? Watching? Here’s where to watch from home at BlogHer. I also created a daily paper for the #ghc10 hashtag at The #ghc10 Daily Newspaper.