The Ada Initiative has a vision: a world in which women are equal and welcome participants in open source software, open data, and open culture. They want women writing free software, women editing Wikipedia, women creating the Internet and women shaping the future of global society. They need your help.
At
their donation site, you can become a sustaining sponsor, for $16/month or $32/month. I participated as one of
100 seed funders a while back.
It's really clear, if you walk around any software conference or a ham
radio conference
, that there just aren't very many women there. I don't
consider a one-gender environment to be a socially healthy one.
Some of it is just what people like to do. But there is a pretty good case that there are social pressures against women's participation in the technologies, ranging from below-consciousness subtle to egregiously offensive. That's what the Ada Initiative works upon.
What I like about the Ada Initiative is that they have worked real positive change,
they're not anti-male,
they don't shoot themselves in the foot and they
stay on message. Thus, I appreciate their leadership.
The most visible change they've wrought is that they have convinced many technical conferences to enact anti-harassment policies. And the policies they promote are fair, where earlier proposals were so obviously wrong.
It's inexpensive and just takes a minute to get going.
Go over there and give them a hand.
