Organizing a Women Hackathon
This piece is a work in progress based on my experience with the hackathons conducted by ICFOSS, Kerala and the Women In Tech Program by Rethink Foundation. This post would be updated periodically to include relevant information.
The need for all women hackathons
Currently only 20% of Hackathon participants on average all over the world are women. This is a low number and unfortunately similar in scope to the percentage of women pursuing high-level jobs in Computer Science.
How do we begin to build community around women in tech, outside of simply having more women pursue degrees? One answer is the emergence of all-female hackathons, a 24 or 48 hour timeframe over which women get together to pitch ideas, form groups, and begin to explore solving important technical challenges. There are technical workshops, panels and fireside chats, and project demos at the end of the weekend.
Organizing a Women Hackathon at GCE Kannur
Audience Profile
Female engineering students from first to final year of study, interested in developing coding skills and using code to build solutions.
Beginners (little to no experience in coding) and intermediate to expert students (have developed mini and main projects requiring code) are expected to take part.
Intended Outcome
To promote women in tech by -
* Providing a comfortable platform to learn while expressing doubts freely
* Providing an experience of building something using tech
Event Structure
Date: Feb 2–3
Expected no. of attendees: 60
WIT Modules
Would like to incorporate sessions on:
1. Opportunities available for women in tech + discovery
A 15 min discovery session could be carried out. Figure out a way to let participants publish their findings. Also — to be carried out individually or in groups?
2. Figuring it out + connecting with people in your field of interest online
Participants have already completed their build session. Experience sharing round: How did they learn to create from start to end? Resources utilized? Lessons learnt?
Brief discussion on career possibilities being considered. Follow up from previous days discovery — find people who have hacked them. Collect contact info.
How can these sessions be further refined at the execution level?
Preliminary research on hackathons and related links can be found here.
