Systers Celebrate 25 Years at Grace Hopper Celebration

2012 Grace Hopper Celebration (GHC) in Baltimore was fantastic! So many women and men supporting our mission in recruiting, retaining and advancing women in technology. After the conference, lots of blog posts are coming in about people sharing their experiences at the conference. What was most exciting for me personally is the celebration of Systers 25th anniversary at GHC. We had a variety of activities for Systers at GHC to celebrate our anniversary.

[1] AnitaB.org had a booth this year in the exhibit hall and space available for Systers to talk about our community and sell our T-shirts.

[2] We had a meetup on Friday afternoon just For Systers Only where Robin Jeffries, long time Systers’ Keeper, and myself presented a demographic information about our community and what’s next. In attendance was two of the Founding Systers, Dr. Anita Jones and Miche Baker-Harvey. They both came up and talked about their first experience with Systers and how it was formed in a bathroom at a technical conference.

[3] At GHC Friday night celebration, RockIT Science & Systers celebration, Maria Manning from RSA (the Security Division of EMC) who sponsored the Systers celebration. She gave away 2 SecurID USB drives. Afterwards, Robin gave a brief history about the community and we had a 25th Anniversary cake which Anita and Miche both took part in a cake cutting ceremony.

[4] The following day, Systers were among the many attendees participating in GHC Open Source Day. Terri Oda was leading the Systers GNU Mailman project with Robin Jeffries helping out with leading the UI side of the project. Terri honored Robin for Ada Lovelace day as Robin became Systers Keeper Emeritus. Personally, it was incredible to see the new UI for Mailman. Terri was great in helping Systers learn Python, find how to access the code and make small updates as the UI (me included) team tested and submitted requests. SDLC at its finest. We had a blast!

GHC was especially wonderful for me to see all the beautiful Systers face-to-face from the listserv. They were energetic, inspiring and engaged as always. Robin passed the helm of Systers Keeper at GHC. Although Robin is such a petite woman, I have big shoes to fill. But I’m honored to take on this role and especially thankful to Robin for her tutelage during this last year.

Happy Anniversary Systers!