Grace Hopper Open Source Day

Saturday, October 6th | 8:15am – 3:00pm

Hilton Baltimore Hotel: Holiday Ballroom 4-6

Open to 200 attendees on a first-come first-serve basis

FOLLOW US ON TWITTER: #ghc12 #opensource

Description

Please join us for the second Grace Hopper Open Source Day!

We are thrilled to be holding the second Grace Hopper Open Source Day in Baltimore, and we are even more excited that you are interested in joining us! The purpose of Grace Hopper Open Source Day is to give attendees of the conference and some of our friends from local universities the opportunity to code, network and contribute to the greater social good.

This event is limited to the first 200 people who sign up. In order to participate in this exciting event, you need to follow two simple steps:

Step 1. Register for the Grace Hopper Celebration for Women In Computing Conference: You must be registered to attend the entire conference OR Saturday-Only to participate in Open Source Day.

Step 2. Read over the projects and sign up on the GHC Open Source Day wiki. This event is limited to the first 200 people who sign up

What is Open Source Day?

Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) adoption and usage is becoming widespread and many employment opportunities require experience on FOSS projects. It can be daunting to know how to contribute to an existing FOSS project or release your individual software tool or application under an open source license.

We invite you to come spend the day coding for humanitarian causes in a dynamic, collaborative environment. At the end of the day participants of all skill levels will walk away with new confidence when engaging with an existing FOSS project or starting their own community developed software project. They will also walk away with the satisfaction of knowing they helped make the world a little bit better for those in need.

We have several projects joining us who would like your help during Open Source Day and who would welcome you as a long term contributor to their projects. Contributing to open source projects is an excellent way to expand your network, build a professional portfolio, sharpen your coding and documentation skills and have fun!

Participating Organizations and Projects:

Listed below are the organizations you can work with during the 2012 Grace Hopper Open Source Day. Please read through each organization’s project(s) and choose one (and only one) organization you would like to work with. Then, sign up for Open Source Day here. Please contact ghc-opensourceday@googlegroups.com if you have any questions.

Google Crisis Response

Google Crisis Response makes critical information more accessible around natural disasters and humanitarian crises. This initiative is a project of Google.org, which uses Google’s strengths in technology for humanitarian efforts. Google Crisis Response did develop a few open source tools to help the crisis management ecosystem. For example, the CAP validator tool. Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) is an international standard that government and emergency agencies use to encode alerting information for public broadcasting. The CAP validator is an open-source tool that lets these agencies verify that their alert feed is compliant with the latest CAP standards. Participants would be able to add new features to the CAP validator tool.

GNOME A11y

The GNOME Project was started in 1997 by two then university students, Miguel de Icaza and Federico Mena, with an aim to produce a free (as in freedom) desktop environment. Since then, GNOME became the most popular desktop environment for GNU/Linux and UNIX-type operating systems. The GNOME Accessibility Team works to ensure the GNOME Desktop and the software therein can be used by everyone, regardless of age or ability. Its efforts include the Orca screen reader, the GNOME Shell magnifier, the Accerciser testing and debugging tool, and the ATK and AT-SPI2 libraries. The desktop has been utilized in successful, large-scale enterprise and public deployments, and the project’s developer technologies are utilized in a large number of popular mobile devices.

Kids on Computers

Due to unforeseen circumstances, Kids on Computers will be unable to join us. If you were looking forward to working on this project, we would recommend that you sign up to work with the Shared Learning Collaborative (SLC). Shared Learning Collaborative’s work on personalized learning to benefit kids in K-12 is a good fit. We apologize for any inconvenience and hope that the SLC or one of our other organization partners will work well for you.

Sahana Software Foundation

Sahana Eden is a flexible open source humanitarian platform with a rich feature set to provide effective solutions for critical humanitarian needs management, either prior to, or during, a crisis. Eden can be rapidly customized to adapt to existing processes and to integrate with existing systems. Eden is designed for most organizations and agencies engaged in humanitarian activities, including UN agencies, NGOs and government agencies, and provides solutions to challenges involved in resource management, information management, coordination, decision support and stakeholder communications. Contributions to the Sahana Eden project – whether through providing a bug fix, or feature enhancement or contributing a new module – will support our mission of saving lives by providing information management solutions that enable organizations and communities to better prepare for and respond to disasters.

Shared Learning Collaborative

Our schools face the tough challenge of ensuring high-quality education for classrooms full of individual students with unique knowledge, abilities and needs. The goal of the Shared Learning Collaborative (SLC) is to help teachers more efficiently enable effective, personalized instruction. The SLC is an alliance of states, foundations, educators, content providers, developers and vendors who are passionate about using technology to enhance education. The SLC technology will support the implementation of the Common Core State Standards and help states and districts provide teachers with the instructional data and tools they need to make personalized learning the norm in every classroom.

Systers / GNU Mailman

Systers is the world’s largest email community of technical women in computing. The Systers project supports the community through the enhancement and maintenance of a customized version of GNU Mailman. Bug fixes and new feature work is available for all skill levels including those new to open source.

Wikimedia Foundation

The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. is a nonprofit charitable organization dedicated to encouraging the growth, development and distribution of free, multilingual content, and to providing the full content of these wiki-based projects to the public free of charge. The Wikimedia Foundation operates some of the largest collaboratively edited reference projects in the world, including Wikipedia, the fifth most visited website in the world.

The Women’s Peer-to-Peer Network

The Women’s Peer-to-Peer Network is connecting women by integrating mobile and open-source applications with ubiquitous technology such as community radio and local women’s networks. Our project is a collaboration with Haitian women ICT students who are participating via Skype. Participants will have the opportunity to collaborate on several apps, including developing a FrontlineSMS voice plug-in, creating a project wiki, and customizing the OpenStreetMap platform.

Local Baltimore Projects

Baltimore has a great tradition of community developed software created for civic good. Work with one of the projects below to learn how you can create technical solutions for local community civic needs.

GoodSpeaks

Our vision at GoodSpeaks is to connect news stories about diseases, disasters, and crises directly to actionable and relevant Nonprofit/NGO videos that show organizations on the ground, working to improve the situation. We have seen both the supply and popularity of videos created by nonprofit organizations explode over the last two years, as well as the demand for quality content related to what someone is doing or watching online, thanks to SocialTV and Second Screen applications. We plan to meet this demand by aggregating NGO/nonprofit video, curating it by applying semantics, and distributing these videos to select publishers.

Baltimore Neighborhood Indicators Alliance

For over 10 years, the Baltimore Neighborhood Indicators Alliance-Jacob France Institute at the University of Baltimore (known as BNIA-JFI) has been committed to promoting, supporting, and helping communities make better decisions using accurate, reliable, and accessible data and indicators to improve the quality of life in Baltimore City neighborhoods. BNIA-JFI supports and strengthen the principle and practice of well informed decision making for change toward strong neighborhoods, improved quality of life, and a thriving city. Participants would be able to work on designing and enhancing the system in order to easily access analytics data by users.

Additional Resources

FOSS Booth

Stop by the FOSS booth in to network with fellow contributors and find out more information about open source day projects and how you can participate.

Open Source Related Sessions at GHC:

If you are interested in learning more about Open Source and how you can contribute, please consider attending the following sessions:

Oct 4th, Thursday from 11:30 AM – 12:30 PM	Diversity in Practice: How the Boston Python user group grew from 0 to 15% women and over 1800 members
Oct 4th, Thursday from 5:15 PM – 6:15 PM	10 women in 10 mins – A lightning talk combined with an edit-a-thon activity.
Oct 4th, Thursday from 5:15 PM – 6:15 PM	Finding your Community and Changing the World
Oct 5th, Friday from 3:45 PM – 4:45 PM	First Experiences in Open Source Software: How to get involved ?