Category Archives: Allies workshop

Allies workshop at Everyone Hacks in San Francisco Jan. 19

The Ada Initiative will be teaching the Allies Workshop this Saturday, January 19, 2013, at the Everyone Hacks event in San Francisco, California.

The Ada Initiative Allies Workshop is for people who may or may not be women in open technology and culture, focusing on practical, everyday ways they can support women in their community. After a short introduction on the basic concepts, we role-play or watch other people role-play through common scenarios, and discuss why some things work and others don’t.

Everyone Hacks is a two-day event focused on teaching women how to form teams quickly and build software that works in a short time – the skills often used at hackathons, startups, or fun projects. People of any gender are welcome. Child care is available both Saturday and Sunday for an extra fee.

We teach the Allies Workshop several times a year. Would you like to host an Allies Workshop in Australia or New Zealand? Because we’d like to teach one. The conditions are:

  • Dependent on staff availability
  • Travel and accommodation paid if outside Sydney
  • At least half of the workshop spaces must be open to non-profit employees and open tech/culture volunteers

See our Workshops and training page for more information.

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Ada Initiative offers free consulting on women in open tech/culture

Help Point sign on train station platform

by Thomas Nugent, CC BY-SA

With the upswing in attention to sexism in tech, don’t forget that the Ada Initiative offers free consulting advice to organizations on how to be more welcoming to women in open technology and culture. Feel free to recommend that companies talk to us to learn more.

Besides advice, we also run free workshops teaching people how to be allies of women in open technology and culture, and help write policies for companies, events, and communities. Working with organizations directly to help change their culture is key to achieving our goal of making open technology and culture a fun and rewarding place for women.

You do not have to be an Ada Initiative sponsor to work with us, although sponsors get priority if we can’t handle all our clients at once. If you know a company that might like to become an Ada Initiative sponsor, please contact them and give them our email: sponsors@adainitiative.org.

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Ada Initiative news, February 2012

Thank-you gifts all shipped

Ada Initiative scarf in actionThe last of our thank-you gifts for the last donation drive have shipped, including the “Ada’s Ally” scarves. If you haven’t received your gift (taking into account international shipping time if applicable), email us at contact@adainitiative.org. Thank you for your donations!

AdaCamp DC planning

Capitol Building in Washington, D.C. by Bernt Rostad, CC-Attribution

(c) Bernt Rostad, CC-Attribution

We have started planning for AdaCamp DC, co-located with Wikimania 2012 in Washington, D.C., on July 10 – 11, 2012. We’re planning for 150 – 200 attendees and hoping many people will attend both AdaCamp and Wikimania. We will post more information and start lining up sponsors during March. Well-known advocates for women in Wikipedia Sue Gardner, Joseph Reagle, and Sarah Stierch plan to attend, as will both Mary and Valerie.

We are looking into arranging free childcare for a limited number of children for this event. Please email us at contact@adainitiative.org if this will make a difference in your ability to attend. We are also working to make the conference easy to attend for people with disabilities and food restrictions.

We will announce when applications open, but start thinking of people to recommend and session ideas now!

Allies workshop

We taught an allies workshop at Linaro Connect and updated the (CC-licensed, online) curriculum for it. We are interested in teaching other people how to give the workshop and are happy to share our latest slides. Let us know if you are interested!

We are happy to teach the (free) allies workshop in the San Francisco Bay area. Contact us at contact@adainitiative.org to arrange a workshop.

Job tweets

We inaugurated a new program for retweeting job openings of interest to people in open technology and culture, with an emphasis on women-friendly environments. See our announcement blog post for details on who is qualified and how to send them in.

Ada Initiative advisors in the news

Sarah Stierch

Sarah Stierch

Leigh Honeywell

Leigh Honeywell

Sarah Stierch and Leigh Honeywell were part of a popular panel, “Some of all Human Knowledge: Gender and Participation in Peer Production” at the ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work.

Donna Benjamin

Donna Benjamin

Donna Benjamin was elected to the board of directors of the Drupal Association. Congratulations, Donna!

Administrative assistant and event organizer

We’re excited (for real, not just press-release speak) to announce that the Ada Initiative has hired an administrative assistant to help us with the copious amount of paperwork involved in running a non-profit. We also hired an event organizer to handle logistics for the next AdaCamp. This will allow Mary and Valerie to spend more time on program work. Thanks for your help filling these positions!

Board meeting

Our board of directors, which is presently meeting about every second month, held a meeting in mid-February. Our major items of discussion were: reviewing the success of AdaCamp Melbourne; early planning for an AdaCamp in 2012, discussing Mary Gardiner’s leave of absence; discussing our fundraising outcomes and future direction; and reviewing our financial situation and budgeting for upcoming months.

Thank you as always to Denise, Matt, Rachel and Sue for their help running the Ada Initiative.

Mary on leave

Mary GardinerMary Gardiner is taking two months of study leave from the Ada Initiative, excepting a few hours per week for administrative tasks, and will return in May.

Upcoming appearances

In addition to AdaCamp DC, Mary and Valerie will be attending Wikimania 2012 in July.

Upcoming events for women in open technology and culture

See our calendar for a full listing, and submit any additional events to share@adainitiative.org.

Sponsorship opportunities

The Ada Initiative’s Venture Philanthropist sponsorship program allows organisations to sponsor the Ada Initiative for sponsorship amounts between $2000 and $9999 (USD) with a minimum of hassle. Contact donors@adainitiative.org for larger sponsorship packages.

Ada Initiative news, January 2012

Fundraising

Thank you to everyone who donated to our fund-raising drive ending January 31, 2012. Over December and January, we raised $30,463 in individual donations from over 250 donors, and about $15,000 in corporate donations, for a total of 4-5 months of operating expenses. Your donations make projects like AdaCamp, allies workshops, and Adas Advice possible – in fact, we continued work on all three of these projects while we were fundraising.

If you want to donate and missed the deadline, dont worry – you can still donate at our year-round donation page. We are also seeking corporate donations.We especially thank our corporate sponsors who donated and/or provided matching funds:

  • Ceph: Open source distributed file system
  • Dreamwidth: Full-featured blog hosting on open source platform
  • Puppet Labs: Open source systems management software
  • Singly: Open source platform for accessing social network data
  • Creative Contingencies: Open source solutions and event organization

Thank you to everyone who donated, spread the word, or helped! We appreciate it!

AdaCamp Melbourne

We were thrilled with the success of our first AdaCamp in Melbourne on January 14.

AdaCamp stood out for me from other conferences because everyone participated and seemed to really want to go beyond the conference and drive things out in the real world. (Cobi Smith.)

Several sessions produced new or improved documentation, often hosted on the Geek Feminism wiki: fighting Impostor Syndrome, valuing diverse skills and women-oriented hiring, and preventing volunteer burnout. We also learned more about each others communities, including success stories like the majority female development community behind open source software project Dreamwidth and challenges facing librarians fighting for open access to knowledge.

For a full report on AdaCamp Melbourne please see AdaCamp Melbourne 2012 full report.

Based on the success of AdaCamp Melbourne other AdaCamps are in planning. Please follow our blog or join our announcement list for information on future AdaCamps.

linux.conf.au and Haecksen miniconf

Valerie and Mary spent a week in January in Ballarat, Australia for linux.conf.au. At linux.conf.au they delivered three sessions:

She’s Geeky

Valerie Aurora attended She’s Geeky Bay Area in late January.

Awards

At linux.conf.au, Ada Initiative co-founder Mary Gardiner was awarded the Rusty Wrench award for services to the Australian Free Software community.

Anti-harassment

In July, Tim O’Reilly pledged to adopt a code of conduct for O’Reilly events. O’Reilly has now released their code of conduct, joining other adopters of similar policies. Thank you O’Reilly!

Other organisations wishing to consider a anti-harassment policy can find policy resources on the Geek Feminism wiki.

Upcoming events for women in open technology and culture

See our calendar for a full listing, and submit any additional events to share@adainitiative.org.

New sponsors

Ceph

This month Ceph joined us as our first major Ada Initiative sponsor. Ceph is a distributed open source file system whose development was primarily funded by DreamHost, the successful Los Angeles based web-hosting company. The Ceph project is becoming part of a newly created and growing soon to be named” business entity that will provide ongoing resources and support services to those adopting Ceph.

Learn more about Ceph in Valerie Aurora’s interview with Sage Weil and Bryan Bogensberger.

Thank you again to Ceph for their support of the Ada Initiative.

Sponsorship opportunities

The Ada Initiative’s Venture Philanthropist sponsorship program allows organisations to sponsor the Ada Initiative for sponsorship amounts between $2000 and $9999 (USD) with a minimum of hassle. Contact donors@adainitiative.org for larger sponsorship packages.

Allies workshop – snappy comebacks for men who want to stop sexism

Allies: People who support members of a disadvantaged group, but aren’t a member of that group themselves.

Are you a male ally of women in open technology and culture? Would you like to be better at responding to sexist incidents right when they happen, instead of thinking up a great comeback while trying to go to sleep? The Ada Initiative has a program tailor-made for you: the Allies workshop. This is a free workshop taught by Mary Gardiner or Valerie Aurora in which we practice responding to sexism from the perspective of a male ally.

Valerie Aurora

Allies workshop teacher Valerie Aurora

We just expanded and improved the Allies workshop with feedback from teaching the class several times over the last year. The entire Allies workshop curriculum is licensed CC-BY-SA and is available on the Geek Feminism wiki, and we encourage other people to teach it as well.

If you’d like us to teach the workshop in your area, please contact info@adainitiative.org. The workshop itself is free, but we do not cover travel expenses outside of Sydney or the San Francisco Bay area.

Thank you for being an ally!

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Ada Initiative news, December 2011

Fundraising

You’ve probably noticed that in December and January the Ada Initiative is running a major fundraising drive. We hope to fund several months of activity in 2012 through this drive. We deeply appreciate your support so far. Help us reach our goal in January 2012!

Donate now!

Supporting the fundraising drive has taken a lot of behind the scenes work, particularly configuring and customising CiviCRM, our donation management software, and associated donation workflows. CiviCRM is an open source project recommended to us by EFF staff as substantially outperforming proprietary software in the same space.

While this fundraising drive has again consumed a lot of staff time behind the scenes, unlike the rather one-off work we did on our Seed 100 drive, where we manually raised invoices, reconciled payments and assembled the mailouts, our work setting up this fundraising drive is extremely reusable. We’re thankful to be running a successful and this time repeatable fundraising campaign!

AdaCamp Melbourne

In addition to fundraising work, we’ve spent the last month completing the organisation of AdaCamp Melbourne. We expect more than 35 participants to join us at the CERES Environment Park for our first ever AdaCamp. Participants are joining us both from Melbourne communities, and from all over Australia, including several participants from Western Australia. We’re also thrilled to have two women from New Zealand and one from the Philippines flying in to join us for the event.

While some of the work of AdaCamp will need to be redone for future events—for example, venue research and hire, and recruiting and selecting AdaCampers themselves—we’ve learned a lot from this first event that we’re looking forward to use in hosting future AdaCamps.

Application for tax exempt status

We were advised in mid-December that our application for tax exemption in the United States awaits a fuller review in 2012. We are conferring with our legal and tax advisors on the likely review date and related matters, but are unlikely to have further news to report for some months.

Existing donors filing US taxes should seek advice from their tax professional regarding showing their donation to the Ada Initiative on their tax filings.

Upcoming appearances

Valerie and Mary are both attending the Ada Initiative’s own AdaCamp Melbourne on January 14. We’re looking forward to working with the Australian community on women’s open technology and culture participation.

We will also be at the Girl Geek Dinner that evening, open to all geek women and their guests.

Valerie and Mary will both be attending LCA 2012 in Ballarat, Australia from January 16 – 20, where we will give several talks:

  1. a main conference talk on Women in open technology and culture worldwide“
  2. The Ada Initiative: achievements and plans” at the the Haecksen miniconference
  3. for the second year running, an allies workshop at the Haecksen miniconf, please register for the allies workshop if you are interested

Upcoming events for women in open technology and culture

See our calendar for a full listing, and submit any additional events to share@adainitiative.org.

New sponsor

In December, Dreamwidth Studios pledged 10% of their gross December revenues to the Ada Initiative. Their final donation amount means that they become the Ada Initiative’s third Venture Philanthropist sponsor!

Thank you once more to Denise Paolucci and Mark Smith, co-owners of Dreamwidth, for your generous support of the Ada Initiative.

Sponsorship opportunities

The Ada Initiative’s Venture Philanthropist sponsorship program allows organisations to sponsor the Ada Initiative for sponsorship amounts between $2000 and $9999 (USD) with a minimum of hassle. Contact donors@adainitiative.org for larger sponsorship packages.

Register your interest in the allies training workshop @ linux.conf.au in Ballarat!

From 2:20pm at the Haecksen miniconf at linux.conf.au on Monday January 16, the Ada Initiative’s Valerie Aurora will be running a workshop especially for our male allies. Please personally invite the men you know to come along and have some fun with us. They will find out why we want and need allies, and what to do when they find themselves in an awkward situation. Valerie will run through some specific scenarios that we’ve all seen, and how they can play out differently when there is an ally involved.

Register your interest in attending the allies workshop at the Haecksen website.