Sunday, September 26, 2010

Grace Hopper 2010 - The Celebration Begins!

Less than 2 days till the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing starts in Atlanta!

I learnt about the conference last year (was too late to register) and ever since then I've been waiting for GHC 2010. Since this will be my first time at the conference, I've been reading blogs from veterans of the conference (check out the GHC blog feed) and following #ghc10 and @ghc on Twitter to get pointers on how to prepare for the week.

And prepare you must! The sheer volume of planned activities is mindboggling, leave alone those impromptu meetings and outings that are bound to happen. I've taken some time to look through the abstracts of the various seminars and mark those that are most interesting to me.

I'm especially excited about the track on Open Source as I am taking a course on Open Source Business as part of my Masters. I hope to share what I learn with my classmates. There will also be a chance to participate in open source development via the Codeathon for Humanity for the Sahana-Eden project. As a facilitator for this event, I'm looking forward to learning more about their disaster management software platform and how I can use my coding skills for social good.

The codeathon is a brilliant example of the conference theme of "Collaborating Across Boundaries" and my aim will be to look at the talks I attend in this broader context.

I'm also eager to meet many of the accomplished women participating this year, especially those interested in mobile platforms and wireless applications and those who (like me) have taken or are interested in a business career path after a technical degree.

The rest I'm leaving to serendipity :)

0 comments: