GHC News: Grace Hopper Open Source Day Organization Spotlights: The Wikimedia Foundation and The Women’s Peer-to-Peer Network
This is the final post in a five-part series highlighting the social impact organizations participating in the second annual Grace Hopper Open Source Day.
Grace Hopper Open Source Day introduces conference attendees to the wonderful world of open source software and is an opportunity to collaborate with your fellow attendees to write software for one of ten open source software projects, all of which have a humanitarian or social good focus. Attendees of all skill and experience levels are welcome and encouraged to attend. In the previous issues, our readers have been introduced to the Baltimore Neighborhood Indicators Alliance, GNOME A11y, Google Crisis Response, GoodSpeaks, Kids on Computers, the Sahana Software Foundation, the Shared Learning Collaborative and Systers.
In this issue, we complete our series with introductions of the The Wikimedia Foundation and The Women’s Peer-to-Peer Network.
The Wikimedia Foundation
You might not have heard of Wikimedia, but you’ve used our projects! The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. is the nonprofit that operates some of the largest collaboratively edited reference projects in the world, including Wikipedia, the fifth most visited website in the world.
Participants in Open Source Day working with WMF can choose from a variety of projects for all skill levels, including learning how to edit Wikipedia for the first time, customizing your Wikipedia experience using JavaScript and CSS, and creating a first patch while learning how to use Git. One of WMF’s top strategic goals is to improve the gender balance of editors on Wikipedia and related projects; we invite you to chat with us and dive in. For more information and to sign up to work with the Wikimedia Foundation, visit the project page.
The Women’s Peer-to-Peer Network
Returning for their second year, The Women’s Peer-to-Peer Network is leading a global effort to connect the world’s women, including nearly 700 million women who are “off the communications grid,” for full inclusion in the global community. Currently, the same women who drive local economies, peace and development have the least access to communications technology. By integrating open-source applications with ubiquitous technology such as community radio, internet, mobile phones, and local women’s networks, we are creating a seamless network where all of the world’s women have access to each other irrespective of background, literacy, internet access, and other traditional obstacles. Inspired by women’s locally-driven movements around the world, the network is being designed and built by local women engineers in partnership with the local women who will most benefit, and with collaboration, support, and mentorship from the global community of technical women. The Women’s P2P Network’s first deployment is currently taking place in Haiti and we are also beginning projects Kenya, India, Liberia, and The Sudan. To learn more, view the Women’s P2P Network TED Talk.
Participants in Open Source Day working with The Women’s P2P Network will be collaborating with our team in Haiti via Skype (One member of the Haiti team, Grace Hopper Scholarship winner Vania Charles, will be working with us in person!) Participants can choose from a variety of projects, including working on an interactive voice response system, creating a map of connectivity and local usage data, and working on a community portal to connect the women participating in the project. For more information and to sign up to work with The Women’s Peer-to-Peer Network, visit the project page.
No Comments »
No comments yet.
RSS feed for comments on this post. | TrackBack URL