by, for, and about women in science, technology, engineering, & math

The punchline: new to free and open source software development? Want help getting started? Come to the OpenHatch open house tonight, Sunday October 10th, at 8:30pm Pacific: https://openhatch.org/blog/2010/learn-more-sunday-monday-office-hours/

In full:

Free and open source software (FOSS) projects need all kinds of help — everything from coding and documentation to artwork and translation to helping users, encouraging new volunteers, and getting funding.

Contributing to FOSS projects is awesome for many reasons. It’s a great way to develop your software engineering skills and proficiency in a programming language. It’s a great way to gain experience with real-world development environments (revision control systems, patches, test frameworks, automated testing and build farms, communication media like IRC, release cycles, writing and maintaining documentation…the list goes on and on). It’s also a great way to meet new, smart, interesting people.

For many people, the biggest hurdles are 1) finding a first project to work with, and 2) getting comfortable enough within a project community to make the leap to speak up for the first time (be it submitting a bug report or patch, helping someone, or asking for help). If this resonates with you, have a look at OpenHatch: https://openhatch.org/

OpenHatch helps you find projects, bugs, and people in the open-source community. Browse projects matching your criteria. Tell projects you want to help and have them work out assignments that make sense for your skill set. Browse bite-sized bugs to get your feet wet, and search for bugs by type or programming language. Find people near you who are also contributing. Become a mentor or mentee.

If you want to learn more about OpenHatch, come to their virtual open house, tonight, Sunday October 10th, at 8:30pm Pacific: https://openhatch.org/blog/2010/learn-more-sunday-monday-office-hours/

The open house is on IRC. If you want help getting started with IRC, or want to practice chatting using IRC before the open house, send me a stemming.org private message and I’d be happy to help.

• Stubbornella writes about discrimination and affirmative action based on gender in the world of computing. Money quote: in response to an affirmative action critic’s comment, “as long as there are no barriers for [women], and I can’t think of one, I don’t see a problem”, she says: “Um, dude, if your site was loading in 18 seconds but you couldn’t think of any reason for it, would you decide you didn’t have a performance problem?”
• Restructure! at Geek Feminism starts a controversial discussion by asserting that if you were hacking by age 8, you were privileged (touching on some of the same issues I raise in my post about when students should start learning computer science). Of course, as always happens when someone suggests that computing may not be a 100% perfect meritocracy with success based on innate ability, people (mostly men) come out of the woodwork in the comments to complain about how they couldn’t possibly be privileged and of course their success is 100% a function of their ability and not any other circumstances.
• The Free Software Foundation’s Women’s Caucus has put together a list of mentoring/menteeing resources.

• If I were to link you to all the awesome Ada Lovelace Day posts that came out this week, we’d be here all day. Fortunately there’s already a list for your browsing pleasure! Obviously more than enough to read, but hopefully you’ll find something about a technical woman you didn’t know about or whose contributions were/are bigger than you realized.

• Geek Feminism posts about how NOT to observe Ada Lovelace Day; the purpose of the day is to increase the visibility of women in science and technology, and they call out some posts that don’t help with this goal

• 18-year-old Erika DeBenedictis just won the Intel Science Talent Search top prize for her work on a software program to direct interplanetary travel. Congratulations, Erika!

• AAUW has released a report, Why So Few, that studies the factors keeping women out of STEM fields — some of the report’s findings, including evidence that women will respond to stereotype threat and score worse on exams if told that women tend to score worse on those exams, are summarized in the San Francisco Chronicle.

• Psychology Today posts on an experiment where children weren’t taught math until sixth grade — these children were able to catch up quickly to their peers in mathematical ability, while remaining way ahead of other children on other measures. The article’s author argues that it could be beneficial to adopt this approach to elementary education across the board. What do you think?

• Kathy Kleiman is raising money to produce a documentary on the six women who programmed the original ENIAC computer! These women have received little credit for their work developing a lot of the ideas we use in programming today.

• Geek Feminism has a thread seeking advice from commenters on how to mentor a geeky teen.

What awesome links have you dug up this week? Do you have a favorite Ada Lovelace Day post this year (or did you write a post)? Post them in the comments, or in your own post!