The Ada Initiative is a non-profit organization supporting women in open technology and culture. We educate people of all genders on how to support women in open tech/culture through teaching workshops, writing policies, guides, and editorials, and speaking.

Our current top projects are AdaCamp San Francisco, a conference for women in open technology and culture (accepting corporate sponsors now), and our workshop and training program.

To increase our impact, the Ada Initiative pays several employees and contractors. Our ground-breaking work is only possible with the generous support of individual and corporate donations. In line with the principles of open tech/culture, most of what we create is freely available, reusable, and modifiable under Creative Commons licenses like CC-BY-SA and CC Zero.

What we’ve accomplished

• Created AdaCamp conference: Held two AdaCamps, a wildly popular unconference for women and advocates of women in open tech/culture.
• Made conferences safer for women: Wrote and encouraged adoption of policies preventing harassment of women, now in use by hundreds of conferences and organizations in open tech/culture as well as science fiction conventions, fan conventions, computer game conferences, and skeptic/atheist conferences.
• Reached hundreds of thousands of people through editorials, policies, and speaking: Wrote editorials read by hundreds of thousands of people, created policies that helped tens of thousands, and spoke about increasing diversity and welcoming women at several conferences, including co-founder Mary Gardiner’s keynote at Wikimania 2012. Our advisors also give keynote speeches on diversity, including Sumana Harihareswara’s OSBridge 2012 keynote, Sarah Stierch’s Wikimedia Academy 2012 keynote, and Alex “Skud” Bayley’s GUADEC 2012 keynote.
• Advised organizations on supporting women: Provided free consulting to several organizations on high-profile incidents of sexism, improving recruitment and retention of women in open tech/culture jobs, and creating a friendlier environment for women.
• Taught hands-on workshops: Wrote and taught four free workshops teaching practical skills to men wanting to help women and trans people in open/tech culture.
• Conducted surveys and research: We ran several surveys, including a survey of over 2800 people about attitudes towards women in open tech/culture.

Future programs

With the support of donors like you, the Ada Initiative can take on more ambitious, higher impact programs. To find out how you can help, see our support page. Programs we would like take on include:

• Impostor Syndrome training: Create an Impostor Syndrome training program for women and teach it to others. Impostor Syndrome is an epidemic in women in open technology and culture, and a major factor in women leaving the field.
• Resources for event organizers: Help organizers reach out to female speakers, attract more women to your event, and broaden your audience in general.
• Research: Quantify trends in women’s participation in open technology and understand the underlying causes.
• Gender diversity program design: Share best practices and avoid common pitfalls for gender diversity programs and initiatives.

If your organization is particularly interested in one of these programs and would like to discuss sponsoring or partnering with the Ada Initiative to raise its priority, please contact us at donors@adainitiative.org.