Category Archives: Support the Ada Initiative

Last day of fundraising: meet Caroline’s $1000 matching donation challenge!

Ada Initiative matching donor Caroline Simard

Ada Initiative board member and long-time women-in-tech activist and researcher Caroline Simard will match up to $1000 of your donations before midnight tonight US Pacific time (0700 UTC). Donate today and double your contribution with Caroline’s help!

Caroline says: “Open source is lagging behind nearly all other fields in their representation and inclusion of women. For a field at the cutting edge of innovation, this represents a huge loss of talent. The Ada Initiative provides concrete solutions to make open source better for all.”

On Monday, Sumana Harihareswara and Leonard Richardson offered to match up to $10,000 of your donations in the last three days of our fundraising drive. It took less than two days for our community to step up and donate $10,000. Combined with Sumana and Leonard’s contribution, this took us past our $80,000 goal for the campaign, one day early!

This is the last day of our fundraising drive. The more money we raise during this drive, the longer the Ada Initiative can work before having to raise money again. Thank you so much for your support!

With Caroline’s support and that of our nearly 250 donors to this drive, we’re ready to get started on our 2013 projects. Donate now and join us in helping women in open tech/culture!

About Caroline

Caroline Simard is passionate about building better workplaces for women and underrepresented minority talent in science and technology fields through evidence-based solutions. She is currently Associate Director of Diversity and Leadership at the Stanford School of Medicine and a STEM diversity consultant. Prior to joining Stanford, Caroline was Vice President of Research and Executive Programs at the Anita Borg Institute, where she led the creation and dissemination of solutions to further diversity in scientific and technical careers in industry and academia, working with executives and faculty of leading technology companies and academic institutions.

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$10,000 matching donation challenge from Sumana Harihareswara and Leonard Richardson

Sumana Harihareswara, Ada Initiative matching donor (Credit: Tobias Schumann CC BY-SA)

Ada Initiative advisor and all around superstar Sumana Harihareswara, together with her spouse Leonard Richardson, have pledged to match up to $10,000 of donations to the Ada Initiative, made before November 1. Our generous donors have already donated more than enough to fufill the Linux Foundation’s matching offer, but thanks to Sumana and Leonard, your donation to the Ada Initiative is still doubled.

Sumana says: “This is make-or-break time for the Ada Initiative. Leonard and I make our living through open source and we want to pay it forward.”

Leonard Richardson, Ada Initiative matching donor

With the support of generous donors like Sumana and Leonard, and every one of the over 150 individuals who have already donated, we’re looking forward to taking the next steps in supporting and advocating for women in open technology and culture. We’ve got $19,636 to go: with Sumana and Leonard’s matching pledge, we need less than $10,000 to meet our goal! Join Sumana and Leonard and support the Ada Initiative today!

Are you considering supporting us? Our goal is $80000 by October 31: if we don’t meet this goal, we may be forced to become a volunteer-based organization. This would be a great shame, given that we accomplished more in 2 years than the last 10 with the combination of full-time employees and grassroots community action. We have lots on our to-do list: more AdaCamp conferences, taking the fight against harassment to mailing lists and IRC channels, and writing simple guides on how to help women in open tech/culture.

About Sumana and Leonard

Sumana Harihareswara is the Engineering Community Manager at the Wikimedia Foundation. She has worked in open tech/culture for many years as manager, writer, and producer for groups like GNOME Foundation and Question Copyright. She co-edited the science fiction anthology Thoughtcrime Experiments.

Sumana’s spouse, Leonard Richardson, writes both open source software and books. He is the author of Ruby Cookbook, RESTful Web Services, and web parsing framework Beautiful Soup, as well as science fiction novel Constellation Games.

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Ada Lovelace fans: 5 more signed prints from Kate Beaton

The first computer programmer, Countess Ada Lovelace, was one of history’s more interesting mathematician-philosophers. She was unusual in not only being allowed but positively encouraged to study mathematics – in an era when many people believed that too much education damaged women’s uteruses (no really). What made Ada Lovelace’s education so wildly different?

Kate Beaton, the popular cartoonist, drew a hilarious comic called “Young Ada Lovelace” (below). The short version is that Ada’s father was Lord Byron, a famous poet who was also famously violent and dissolute. Ada’s mother, Anne Isabella Milbanke, worried that Ada would inherit her father’s personality and die young and miserable. She theorized that mathematics would counter poetry and unbridled emotions, and taught young Ada advanced mathematics to prevent her from following her father’s example.

You can get a print of this comic signed by Kate Beaton by donating to the Ada Initiative to support women in open source software, Wikipedia, and similar ares. The next 5 donors at the Ada’s Angel level before the close of our fundraising drive on October 31, 2012 will receive a print, in addition to an Ada Initiative t-shirt and/or Ada Lovelace pendant.

Whether or not Ada’s mathematics education prevented any poetical tendencies, it allowed her to write the world’s first computer program, over 100 years before any general purpose computer was actually built. Perhaps if all women had the opportunity and encouragement to study mathematics, the Computer Age would have started 100 years earlier.

Linux Foundation makes $500 matching donation challenge

The Linux Foundation will match up to $500 of donations to the Ada Initiative between now and November 1st. Double your donation and donate today! If your company is one of many that matches employee donations, you can triple your donation by donating now. Matching donations to non-profits is a perk of employment at Google, Red Hat, Microsoft, Apple, and many other companies – don’t miss out on it!

The Linux Foundation is the primary non-profit supporting the Linux community, including the Linux kernel, Linux conferences, and the Linux ecosystem overall. The Linux Foundation is a long-term supporter of the Ada Initiative’s work to make Linux more welcoming to women, most recently sponsoring AdaCamp, a conference for women in open tech/culture, and donating $2000 to our current fundraising drive.

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Microsoft and Red Hat gift-matching join our sponsors: add your employer today!

We’re thrilled to announce that with the help of Microsoft employees, the Microsoft Gift-Matching Program joins our Venture Philanthropist sponsors this month! Microsoft employees have donated over $3000 to the Ada Initiative in 2012, and Microsoft is matching their gifts dollar for dollar!

In addition, Red Hat employees have donated over $800. matched by Red Hat, making the Red Hat Gift-Matching Program a Contributing Sponsor for 2012. Microsoft and Red Hat join the Google Gift-Matching Program, Atlassian Gift-Matching Program and 1st Playable Productions Gift-Matching Program as sponsors, all based on their employees’ support of the Ada Initiative.

Googlers have submitted over $18000 of donations for matching in 2012. making their gift-matching program a Bronze sponsor of the Ada Initiative. Our challenge to Googlers is: can you go Silver? Another $7000 of Googler donations in the current drive, matched by Google’s employee program, would make the Google Gift-Matching program our very first Silver sponsor ever. (Our challenge to everyone else is: can you beat Google?!)

Does your company offer gift-matching? Check your personnel documentation or intranet for information on whether your employer matches gifts to 501(c)3 non-profits. If so, your donation to the Ada Initiative may be eligible for employer matching. Matching funds make up around 20% of the donations in our current fund-raising drive and form a crucial part of our funding to operate into 2013. Please file for matching if you’ve already donated and are eligible, or donate today and then double your support.

If you would like to make a direct corporate donation to the Ada Initiative and be credited as a sponsor, please contact sponsors@adainitiative.org.

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Now 2/3 of the way to our fundraising goal! 7 days left to be part of the success

Due to the incredibly generosity of the open tech/culture community, we’ve hit 2/3 of the Ada Initiative’s fundraising goal – that’s 2/3 of the funding we need to operate until March of next year!

With your help, we can reach our goal in the next 7 days before the end of the drive on October 31. Tell your friends why you donated to support women in open tech/culture: Because you want your daughters to have a chance to have an open tech/culture job? Because Wikipedia is the 5th most popular web site in the world but only 9% of editors are women? Because you are tired of sexism in your community? Send an email, write a tweet, post on Facebook – just let people know!

Women in open tech/culture

By working with the community instead of against it, the Ada Initiative is actually succeeding in changing the culture of open technology and culture. We can’t do it without you!

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Linux Foundation donates $2000 to support women in Linux

Today the Linux Foundation donated $2000 to the Ada Initiative to support women in Linux. Women make up only 2% of the open source community overall, and a similar percentage of the Linux community. The computing industry as a whole is around 20% women, which strongly suggests that genetic differences between men and women are not the cause of the gender gap in Linux.

Given the overall shortage of Linux talent, research showing that mixed gender teams create make better decisions than same gender teams, increasing the number of women involved in Linux is vital to the health of the Linux community overall. Any organization employing Linux experts and struggling to hire women benefits from the Ada Initiative’s work, and Linux Foundation’s leadership in supporting initiatives to improve the culture of Linux.

You can be part of the work to bring more women into Linux, by donating as an individual or as a company. Donate below, or contact us at sponsors@adainitiative.org for more information.

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Has open source given to you? Give back so women have the same chance you did

Like many of you, open source software gave me a good job as a software engineer – for over 10 years now for me. My job as a Linux kernel developer let me do something good for the world – and make a lot of money doing it. My open source career let me help my family, do fun things like see erupting volcanoes in Hawaii, and donate to causes I care about, like women’s rights and protection of free speech. Open source software gave me amazing opportunities and a great salary to go with it.

Valerie Aurora, lucky open source programmer

That’s why I donated so much of my time and money to help other women have the same chance at a career in open source software that I did. I first started donating my time in 2001 by volunteering for LinuxChix. Today, the Ada Initiative‘s work is so important to me that I donated $5,000 in cash and worked for free for 8 months to get it off the ground – more than $80,000 at senior open source software programmer rates.

Those of us who are in open source software today got lucky: We started programming at the right time, had access to computers, and got community support. But lots of other people – especially women – didn’t have these opportunities. That’s why women make up only 2% of the open source community (as opposed to 20% or more in computing overall). The open source community believes in fairness and social justice, and we should all be working to give women a fair chance at the same jobs we love.

By Lorena Ceron CC BY-SA-3.0

If open source software gave you a career, a house, or a college fund for your children, please consider giving back to help women have the same chance at a career like yours. Is it worth 1% of your annual salary to know that your daughters, nieces, and other young women will have the same chance at an open source career like yours?

A reminder about employer donation matching: Many employers will match employee donations to non-profits like the Ada Initiative, including Google, Microsoft, Red Hat, Apple, and many smaller companies as well. Check with your manager or search your internal company web site to find out if you can double your money.

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10 Ada Initiative scarves for next 10 Angel donors in next 24 hours!

Ada Initiative scarves were a big hit at our Ada Lovelace Day party! We are offering scarves to the next 10 Ada’s Angel level donors in the next 24 hours, from 21:00 UTC Oct 18 to 21:00 UTC Oct. 19.

Update: Extended for 2 hours due to mis-timed tweet!

These are “soccer supporter” style scarves, in acrylic with black fringes. If you have seen a scarf from the OSBridge conference, these are very similar.

Scarf artwork – scarf includes black fringes

Donate now:

Fundraising update: $41,000 down, can we get to $80,000 in 14 days?

$41,000, hurray!

A quick fundraising update: Supporters like you have donated about $41,000 to the Ada Initiative so far – great work, everyone! We’re looking forward to our next projects: increasing civility in open tech/culture communities online, not just at conferences, more AdaCamp conferences for women in open tech/culture, and online training to overcome Impostor Syndrome for women in open tech/culture. If we get enough sponsors for AdaCamp, we will be able to add a track open to the general public – “AdaCon.”

Our goal is $80,000 by the end of our fundraiser in 14 days – October 31, 2012. We’ve raised just over half of that money so far, which is on track for our goal based on other fundraising campaigns. If we don’t meet this goal, we will almost certainly have to become a volunteer-based organization. Given that the combination of full-time employees and grassroots community action accomplished more in less than 2 years than we did in the previous 10 years working as volunteers, we think that would be a shame.

You made the progress in attitudes towards sexism in open technology and culture over the last couple of years possible. Take a minute to be proud of yourself!

If you’ve already donated, but would like to help more, you can help by letting your friends know that you donated and why.

Donate now:

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