RHoK
A Call to Action for Women Programmers
In the two short years since its inception, Random Hacks of Kindness has grown into a diverse global community of experts and volunteer technologists putting their skills to work for the greater good. An important part of that diversity is the significant number of women programmers who have come out to RHoK events to hack for humanity. Women have traditionally been underrepresented in the global software development community. Here at RHoK, we are aiming to better the statistics.
A map showing RHOK #2 participation globally with circle size indicating total attendance and circle color indicating percentage of women attending.
Green: >=20%, Yellow: between 10 and 20%, Red: <=10%.
At last year’s Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, the Open Source for Good panel (including Avni Khatri and Alice Bonhomme-Biais from RHoK founding partners Yahoo! and Google) threw down a challenge: to ensure that women made up 20% of all participants at RHoK #2.
The challenge made an impact. RHoK locations in Chicago, New York, Boston and Seattle, and Lusaka, Zambia all had close to 30% female participation, with 17% of participants globally being women, and many women acting as lead organizers.
“We didn’t just hit 20% challenge of women participants, we leapt over it,” said Chicago attendee Natalia Vinnick, Yahoo!, on the YDN blog. “It was great to see so many women who participated and women who won!”
The winning team at the RHoK #2 Chicago Mainstage
“I found out about RHoK from a friend who participated in RHoK #1 and recommended it to me, since I am passionate about humanitarian causes,” said Eugenia Gabrilova, a member of the winning team in Chicago. “I hope more women learn that a career in tech isn’t about sitting in a corner coding—you can accomplish so much and interact with many cool people.”
Yahoo! took the 20% challenge one step further, funding a scholarship for a female student to travel to RHoK #2’s Chicago Mainstage event.
“I have always hoped that my education will help me in building tools that will have social outreach—tools that will benefit others across any boundaries,” wrote scholarship winner Malveeka Tewari, a graduate computer science student at UCSD in her winning essay about hacking for humanity.
Nairobi RHoK attendees included members of the AkiraChix team. The AkiraChix “are a group of intelligent and energetic ladies yearning to empower women through the use of technology in our day-to-day lives and change the cliché that IT is for men,” said Jamila Abass and Judith Owigar. Their team learned about RHoK through Nairobi’s innovation hub and RHoK’s Nairobi venue, the iHub.
AkiraChix member Linda Kamau at the iHub
“Currently there are few women in technology here in Kenya. Even fewer involved in software development. We as AkiraChix would like to change that,” said Jamila Abass and Judith Owigar. “We would like to see more women using technology to enrich their lives and creating relevant applications. Since these women are an untapped resource who knows what new applications they could create? The bottom line is by getting more women involved in technology we get a greater variety of ideas and applications, all of which are for the benefit of all people who will interact with these applications.”
With RHoK #3 fast approaching, RHoK is sending out a call to action to lady hackers around the globe: we invite you to take RHoK by storm! Register here to join us in hacking for humanity on June 4th and 5th.
RHoK #3 on June 4th and 5th
Hackers, mark your calendars. On June 4th and 5th, 2011 Random Hacks of Kindness is coming to a city near you. Taking place in 20 locations around the globe, RHoK #3 will be RHoK’s fourth hackathon, and the first with an expanded focus on both disaster risk and climate change. So we are issuing a call to action: Experts in disaster risk and climate change—send your challenges our way. And to the coders, designers, engineers, programmers and geeks of every variety—join us on June 4th and 5th to tackle some real-world problems and hack for humanity.
Click here to register
RHoK #3 will be taking place in:
Aarhus, Denmark
Bangalore, India
Basel, Switzerland
Berlin, Germany
Buenos Aires, Argentina
Hartford, Connecticut, U.S.A.
Jakarta, Indonesia
Lusaka, Zambia
Melbourne, Australia
Nairobi, Kenya
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.A.
Santiago, Chile
Sao Paulo, Brazil
Seattle, Washington, U.S.A.
Toronto, Canada
Trento, Italy
Stay tuned for the announcement of additional RHoK #3 locations and the opening of registration, and get ready for a weekend of intensive brainstorming, collaborating and problem solving.
With Our Eyes Turned to Sendai
As we watch with shock and profound sadness the tragedy unfolding in Japan and across the Pacific rim in the wake of the Sendai earthquake, our hearts and sympathies are with the families affected and their loved ones around the world. Both personally and professionally, we are deeply sensitive to the challenges now facing that region.
We know many of you in the Random Hacks of Kindness community feel an urgency to take action in some way, to express your solidarity with the people of Japan and to offer your time, skills and efforts in their support.
There are many incredible initiatives out there that are actively engaged in the response efforts, working with volunteer technologists and citizens alike to channel their concern into action. We know they would welcome your help. These are just a few that we are aware of:
The Crisis Commons Volunteer Community
Crisis Mappers Net: The International Network of Crisis Mappers
OpenStreetMap (OpenStreetMap Japan)
RHoK the Campus
Last week we all descended upon the Googleplex where we reviewed the past, dreamed about the future and began our concrete planning for RHoK 3. We’ve culled through the lessons learned and valuable advice that many of you passed along and it is clear that, although most everything we heard was overwhelmingly positive, there are many opportunities to make this next event even better than the last. The success of RHoK 2 was, of course, the result of a phenomenal global partnership between corporations, organizations, subject matter experts, designers, hackers, event planners and a small army of other volunteers.
In planning for the next RHoK event, which we have penciled in for sometime in the first half of June, we wanted to make a special call out to universities around the world to partner with us. So whether you are a student, a professor, represent a department or have ties to a university or college, send us a line so we can start the logistics machine as early as possible. Universities can provide space, internet, problem definition expertise in the areas of disaster risk management and climate change and have, to date, been phenomenal partners in all respects.
If you are tied to a university and have an interest in participating in the RHoK 3 hackathon, please let us know here by February 28th so that we can have logistics in place by the end of March.
