As you probably know, Ada Lovelace Day is Friday, October 7. Thousands of people will be blogging about inspirational women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, and naturally we hope that many supporters of The Ada Initiative will be among them.
At the same time, we know that many of you are busy and that, even though you want to participate, you may not have the time or the leisure to decide on a subject.
To help make your participation easier, Ada Initiative readers have helped put together a list of prominent women in open technology and culture:
- Laura Thomson, Mozilla developer, see Laura’s home page
- Dorcas Muthoni, founder of OPENWORLD LTD, an East African open source consultancy. See Dorcas’s Anita Borg Change Agent profile.
- Hanna Wallach, computer scientist and key contributer to Debian Women, GNOME Women’s Outreach Program and FLOSSPOLS. See Hanna’s academic home page.
- Jennifer Pahlka, founder of Code for America. See Code for America: Who We Are.
- Lorna Jane Mitchell of PHPWomen and Joind.in. See Lorna Jane’s home page.
- Laura James, founder of Cambridge Makespace. See Laura’s home page.
- Sarah Kenderdine, museum curator and virtual designer. See her City University of Hong Kong profile.
- Renata Avila of Creative Commons Guatemala and the Technology for Transparency Initiative. See Renata’s Open World Forum speaker profile.
- Solana Larsen, the managing editor of Global Voices Online, see her Global Voices profile, her homepage, a video interview, another video interview and a IPI World Congress 2011 Q&A.
- Hong Phuc Dang, organiser of FOSSASIA. See Hong Phuc Dang’s LinkedIn profile and a talk she gave on women in the Vietnamese FOSS community.
- Donna Benjamin, Australian community leader and co-organiser of linux.conf.au 2008, Software Freedom Day Melbourne and Drupal Downunder. See Donna’s consulting company and Donna’s home page.
- Karen Sandler, director of the GNOME Foundation and former counsel to the Software Freedom Law Center, see Wikipedia.
- Stephanie Troeth, user experience expert, of W3C, Web Standards Project, UX Montreal, and countless others. See Stephanie’s home page.
- Heather Ford of Creative Commons South Africa, Ushahidi and several other projects. See Wikipedia, Memeburn Q&A, Heather’s blog and a profile in IT News Africa.
- Christine Peterson, lecturer and coiner of the term “open source”, see the Foresight Institute’s biography page.
Thanks to all our readers for their suggestions!
Mary’s post on the Geek Feminism blog also lists several other entries in the wiki that include lists of women in different fields.
Other places where you can search for inspiration include the Look for a Heroine database on the main Ada Lovelace Day site, and lists of women speakers for conferences, such as those at:
- Lift11: (a list of community recommendations from 2010)
- The Speaker Wiki
- LinuxChix
And don’t forget, of course, the women on our own board of directors and board of advisors.
These resources overlap, and some are more current than others, but, between them, your problem may not be finding a subject so much as narrowing your choice to just one.
And if these lists fail to inspire you? Look at the women in your own life who have befriended, inspired, and mentored you, or worked beside you.
Once you start looking, there’s no shortage of subjects, so Happy Blogging — and Happy Ada Lovelace Day, too!