Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing India announces its first ever Hackathon

Bangalore 25 Nov, 2012: The largest conference for technical women in India, GRACE HOPPER CELEBRATION of WOMEN in COMPUTING INDIA is presenting its first ever Hackathon for Women in collaboration with ThoughtWorks Social Impact Program and Yahoo. The Hackathon will be held on December 12th, 2012, from 9.00 AM to 5.00 PM at the Lalit Ashok Hotel in Bangalore. It will provide women participants a platform to collaborate and to write code on Free and Open Source Software (FOSS), contributing to humanitarian projects. This Hackathon is free and open to the first 50 women developers who sign-up.

“The Anita Borg Institute is very excited to launch the Hackathon for Women as a part of this conference. We are happy to be working with our sponsors, ThoughtWorks and Yahoo, who are helping in shaping this event and make it a great success in India. Please join us and be a part of one of a kind event”, expressed Jagruti Bhikha, Director – Grace Hopper Celebration India. The four participating projects are OpenMRS, Camfed, RapidFTR and Random Hacks of Kindness (RHOK). All these projects are Open Sourced and provide options to participants, willing to contribute based on their technology preference.
Tina Vinod - Operations Lead of the ThoughtWorks Social Impact Program, said “It’s wonderful for GHCI to be hosting its first ever 'all women' Hackathon here in Bangalore, and providing a platform for the community to come together to code for a cause. We look forward to a day of connecting, contributing and learning." Further to this, she added that Hackathon attendees, with the guidance of experienced mentors and facilitators, will collaborate to write code with their peers for free on four open source projects, which will provide participants an option to contribute based on their technology preference. Networking over code is a great chance to take part in hands-on development with women from other organizations and different experience levels. All of the humanitarian projects participating in the Hackathon have a need for contribution from developers and experiences from all levels are welcome.

About Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing: The ‘Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing India’ is a program of the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology and co-sponsored by ACM India to increase the recruitment, retention, and advancement of Indian technical women. Modeled after the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing held in the US and tailored by Indian technical women for the Indian technology culture, the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women and Computing, India brings the research and career interests of women in computing in India to the forefront. This is the 3rd annual edition of the GHC India Conference.