Systers Anita Borg Fall 2015 Pass-It-On Award Winners
Systers Pass-It-On Systers Anita Borg Institute
Project Title: FOSS Saturdays at IBM
Project Description: The FOSS Saturdays at IBM is a two-day hackathon run over the course of that introduces high school and college-aged female students to programming and the hackathon experience in an agile development environment. Over the course of 10 months, area students will learn about creating projects using free and open source tools. In addition, they will have exposure to female computer scientists and technical managers in the Houston area.
The fundamental premise of this program is that girls and young women in computing can accelerate their understanding of principles learned in the classroom or through self-study with focused engagement over a yearlong period. The primary outcome of this program for students is to attract at least 30 more students to careers in computer science. The primary outcome for professionals is to create a network of over 50 women in computer science in the Houston area and a forum where they can connect with other women in technology over cool projects.
Project Title: Ray
Project Description: Our project aims to build a wireless-enabled wearable technology devices that will alert the wearer’s social network in event of assaults or harassment and allow the network to plan interventions. The interventions are designed to protect the user from potential harm, by providing location information to the social network and also by alerting local law enforcement agencies. The wearable incorporates GPS and GSM technology to collect data, and provides information on where and when the user was attacked. The wearable tech will be powered by a community of “enablers” — composed of emergency response teams and law enforcement professionals. The project is expected to gain momentum in India, a developing country that has the one of the worst records of human rights violations; 92 women were raped every single day in 2013, nearly one in three rape victims in is under the age of 18, where every 20 minutes, a woman is raped and where a child goes missing every minute and 40% of them are never found.
Project Title: Code Winter 2015
Project Description: Computer science has a lot of potential to create positive change for Burma’s socioeconomic climate, however, it is still not a popular choice for Burmese high school students. Project proposal: Partnering with a local high school (Pre-Collegiate Program) to have a 5-day “code week” during school holidays in Yangon, Burma for ~15 underprivileged Myanmar high school-aged students (targeting at least 50% women and girls) where they will be exposed to computer science and its relationship to the humanities and social sciences (Digital Humanities etc) through mobile app making, hardware hacks and talks by established local software engineers. Will be the first of its kind in Myanmar.
Project Title: Introducing The Fun World of Open Source To Women
Project Description: The numbers says quite clearly that there are very few women in open source. I have done my bachelors from an all girls government technical university in India. If you go on discussing about contributing to open source most of them find it intimidating. Most of them are scared of contributing to open source projects. Most of them think that it is too tough to get in, too tough to get started and they won’t be able to do it. That’s what I used to think as well.
I plan to organize workshops for the women engineering students. The main aim to make them believe that contributing to open source projects is not tough, scary or intimidating. It is really easy to get started and people are friendly, most of them.
These workshop will help women engineering students know more about open source world. What all programs are there to get women into open source and that they are so friendly to beginners. What all comes up when you start contributing to open source project. There is so much to learn while contributing. Where to start from? how to approach mentors? I plan to cover all the basic questions.
Project Title: A Workshop for Open Source Development
Project Description: Before getting into the university, I didn’t know what open source was, and this is the case with many of the students in my community. However, ever since 2013, a lot of students in my community developed a growing interest in the field of open source when students from my university first participated in the Google Summer of Code (GSoC). After having participated in GSoC in 2014/2015, I got asked a lot of questions about contributing to open source software in general. This project will help to address some of the questions and doubts concerning open source. The project is a one-day workshop for people, especially students in their teens or older, particularly those who have no previous experience or knowledge relating to open source. Participants will learn about version control, internet relay chat (IRC) and mailing lists netiquette, code reviews, documentation and working in a team from various parts of the world. The workshop will also provide the opportunity for the participants to liaise with open source communities where they can continue to contribute after the workshop. The workshop will be open to anybody in their teens or older willing to learn but the target audience will be the females of the community.
Project Title: Shonabondhu: A solution for Flash Flood
Project Description: Floods are responsible for the loss of precious lives and destruction of large amounts of property every year, especially in the poor and developing countries like Bangladesh, where people are at the mercy of natural elements. In flash flood, water level rises and falls quite rapidly with little or no advance warning. Typically, flash floods occurs in areas where the upstream basin topography is relatively steep and the concentration time of the basin is relatively short. In Bangladesh flash floods generally occurs in the north-east, south-east and Chittagong region. A lot of effort has been put in developing systems which help to minimize the damage through early disaster predictions. Field monitoring by people is still used, but sensor monitoring is being adopted by more monitoring stations.
Our research involved in the design & implementation of water monitoring system that provides a solution to remotely monitoring water levels, early warning of events, sending notifications when critical water levels are reached and accessing all information via a website. It enables people to obtain readings remotely instead of having to travel to each monitoring stations to collect data and gives protection of the safety of monitoring personnel under certain dangerous circumstances. The system consists of the field sensor module, GPRS/GSM wireless module, data collection software module, web console module and distributed servers. The field sensor module acquires the real-time data as water-level information from river stations.
The data is then stored to distributed web servers and represented to website so that everyone get the status of water levels. The proposed monitoring system presents useful characteristics as large network capacity, sensor hardware compatibility, long-range communication, rechargeable battery and capable of taking challenge to natural environment threads like weather conditions and various type of water mixed up with others materials.
Project Title: “La Vie en Code” Blog
Project Description: In July 2015, Nicole launched a blog project, “La Vie en Code” at http://www.lavieencode.net. The aim of this social media project is to target women and minorities who are interested in careers in web development, but frightened by the jargon and air of specialization around the industry.
In posts such as “Code Speed Dating”, where she posts a roughly 5-minute read to introduce a web development language, anthropomorphized with relatable qualities one might desire in a partner, such as being “stable”, “exciting”, or “powerful”.
In other words: we’re having fun, and not apologizing for it.
In “Conversations with Black Women in Web Development”, I had a fireside chat with a fellow Wellesley alum who self-educated her way to a freelance front-end web design career. She is also working with young Black girls to help them make websites for their parents’ businesses.
“What I’m Working On” is my place to ramble and rant about my ongoing learnings, making light of complex technologies and showing examples of where they might be used in websites readers already frequent. It doesn’t mean that I’m a master at these technologies yet — it just means that I am here, and I am doing it. And so should they, if they are even remotely interested.
In summary, “La Vie en Code” has taken on a form, in short period of time, that I never imagined could happen so quickly. Women, and women of color, are out there, and they want to talk about careers in technology. They want to talk about them with other women of color, who can serve as mentors to them. They want to feel encouraged, supported, and celebrated when they meet their goals. And this is my calling!
Project Title: AboCoders
Project Description: The overall aim of AboCoders is to reduce poverty in Nigeria and by extension in Africa and the chosen strategy for this is ICT which affects all sectors and has the potential to aid economic growth.
AboCoders hopes to increase communications and community access, improve the standard of education in Nigeria and widen the scope of educational paths available to young women as well as create more livelihood opportunities by providing the beneficiaries with skills that can earn them a living. Combining the effects of all three will lead to poverty alleviation.
The objectives of the project are specifically:
• To encourage the interest of girls in STEM fields
• To increase digital literacy in young girls in Nigeria
• To increase female involvement in the creation of ICT solutions in Nigeria
• To create a community of highly competent female coders who can create secure & sustainable livelihoods
The project is expected to train 60 young girls between the ages of 15 and 18 in Northern Nigeria on software coding, mobile app creation and website designing in the space of a year.
Project Title: SheTech
Project Description: Chepnet.org is a community-based, not for profit organization based in Bomet and Narok counties, Kenya dedicated to improving women and girls livelihood through use of technology. We are working to close the gender gap in technical fields, which are still perceived as male fields and particularly in a rural set up where women and girls have no access to tech infrastructure and resources to learn. We train, inspire and equip them with this skills and how to practically apply in their day-to-day operations, technology affects all sectors of economy like leadership, media, agriculture, fashion, law among others thus this skills are vital.
Our aim is to advance rural women in this new era of technology and to invite and inspire more girls to pursue careers in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM), which are still male dominated.
Technology enables them to stay in touch with the current affairs, it socially enrich their lives, help them keep in touch with family, for entertainment, climatic changes, learn child health care and thus this will improve their livelihoods just to name but a few benefits of being able to be connected. We aim extend support, community services, technology and innovation space beyond the city and to the villages to aid social, economic, political, and technological development.
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