Ada Initiative - Progress in 2013

2012 was a tipping point for women in open technology and culture. In 2013 the Ada Initiative has
worked hard to build on that momentum, through the AdaCamp conference, Impostor Syndrome training,
workshops, speeches, interviews in the mainstream media, and more. With your help, we're continuing
to make a difference for women in open technology and culture. Thank you so much for your support
of our work!

Keep reading for a full report on our progress in 2013 so far, including:

AdaCamp and other Ada Initiative events
Impostor Syndrome Training (new)
Workshops and community-building for allies
Supporting women open source developers (new)
Community campaigns (new)
Press appearances and speaking engagements
New Ada Initiative supporters

AdaCamp and other Ada Initiative events
=======================================

In June, the Ada Initiative ran AdaCamp San Francisco, the third AdaCamp bringing women and their
allies in open technology and culture together to talk about issues and problems women face and
about how to solve them. AdaCamp continues to be our most popular and effective program for
recruiting and retaining women in open tech/culture, which is why we invest about 3 months of staff
time on each AdaCamp. For example, 85% of attendees surveyed said that AdaCamp San Francisco
increased their commitment to open tech/culture!

AdaCamp San Francisco was our largest AdaCamp to date, double the size of AdaCamp DC in July 2012,
with about 200 attendees. It was the first AdaCamp to feature a dedicated one-day allies track for
people of any gender. To increase the diversity of the event we offered travel scholarships to
attendees from countries including the United States, Canada, Mexico, India and Cambodia. AdaCamp
is an unconference, and attendee-led sessions included: a Likeability Paradox discussion; diversity
beyond gender, depression in activists, womyn of color, job seeking and career advice, and
expressing femininity in technical spaces. We also incorporated Impostor Syndrome training and a
make-a-thon and hackfest for the first time. Find out more about AdaCamp in our AdaCamp SF final
report!

Netha Hussain explains the long-term impact of AdaCamp on attendees, 8 months after AdaCamp DC:

"While traveling back to India, I was deeply satisfied. I had too many projects in mind, and the
potential to work towards accomplishing them - Ada Camp put me in touch with the right people and
right resources to get me started. Listening to the success stories of other participants helped me
overcome my initial inertia, and stimulated me to work hard towards increasing the participation of
women in Wikimedia projects."

In March we ran a smaller event, the first Ada Initiative feminist hacker lounge, at PyCon US in
Santa Clara. The feminist lounge was a casual space in the exhibition hall, sharing a beanbag
hangout space with PyLadies, and hosting sessions including Impostor Syndrome Check-in and
"Hackerspaces: What's Working, What's Not?" We enjoyed hosting this home base for women at the
conference and have suggestions for how you can do it too!

What's next? AdaCamp brings together so many women interested in working in and changing the open
tech and culture space. AdaCamp is going to remain a core part of the Ada Initiative's work. We are
hoping to work with dedicated event staff on future AdaCamps and are considering host cities for
AdaCamps in 2014 and 2015. We will also publish a collection of event advice, for running events
that are open, accessible and welcoming to women in open tech and culture.


Impostor Syndrome Training
==========================

Ada Initiative staff and volunteers have also launched Impostor Syndrome training, presenting on
techniques that allow women and others to feel appropriately confident in their work in the face of
the often publicly critical culture in open technology and culture. Denise Paolucci took lessons
from AdaCamp DC's several Impostor Syndrome sessions and presented them at linux.conf.au, Open
Source Bridge, and OSCON, with the Ada Initiative providing a captioned and transcribed version of
the linux.conf.au talk. Leigh Honeywell additionally created a values exercise to combat stereotype
threat and Impostor Syndrome, which we used at AdaCamp San Francisco.

What's next? We will continue to teach about and hold sessions on Impostor Syndrome at AdaCamps and
add to our resources as we go.


Workshops and community-building for allies
===========================================

In 2013, we expanded our work educating and supporting allies - people who support women in open
tech/culture but aren't women themselves. The Ada Initiative Allies Workshop focuses on what
individual people can do to make their workplace or community a better, more positive place for
women. We started the Allies Workshop program in 2011 and have continued to improve and grow it
every year. The Allies Workshop has been run three times in 2013 so far: at Everyone Hacks San
Francisco, the Wikimedia Foundation, and the Allies Track of AdaCamp San Francisco. We recently
posted a professionally recorded and captioned video of the Allies Workshop.

This year we ran the first Allies Track, a one-day meeting for allies of women in open tech/culture
to get to know each other, share best practices, and make plans for the future, held in conjunction
with AdaCamp San Francisco. About 20 allies of all genders attended, along with several dozen
visitors from the AdaCamp main track. Attendee Jeff Pollet wrote, "It was [...] nice to be
surrounded by a bunch of smart men advocating for feminism in tech."

What's next? The Ada Initiative is growing the Allies Workshops into a core program and expanding
the number of workshops we teach. To find out more about holding the allies workshop for your
project or organization, see our Allies workshop page. We are also in the early stages of
developing a training program for workshop facilitators, to train others to deliver the workshop.
We also plan to expand the Allies Track at the next AdaCamp.


Supporting women open source developers
=======================================

In April 2013, the Ada Initiative in partnership with GitHub offered private repositories to women
learning open source software, giving people from underrepresented groups a chance to practice and
grow their programming skills in private before participating in the mainstream open source
community, where women often face higher levels of harassment than men both online and in person.
This program has been enormously popular, with over 500 women requesting a free repository, showing
the effectiveness of outreach programs targeted specifically at women.

What's next? We are open to partnerships with organizations who want to support women by donating
resources, but don't have the expertise or infrastructure to run them on their own. Email
contact@adainitiative.org to learn more.


Community campaigns
===================

The Ada Initiative has written multiple online campaigns and editorials this year, encouraging
communities to support women in open technology and culture by carefully considering the role that
sexual topics have at technical events and advertising any such material thoughtfully and
respectfully to those who don't wish to encounter it; and encouraging event organizers to have
photography policies at conferences that restrict non-consensual photography.

The Ada Initiative also participated in the #banboothbabes campaign, arguing that using sexualized
booth staff at trade shows sends the message that women aren't the intended customers of technical
businesses; and encouraged panelists at conferences to pledge not to appear on panels without women
on them.

What's next? We will continue to keep an eye out for emerging issues and help boost campaigns led
by others, as well as start our own campaigns. Your support through speaking up in your community
is crucial to the kind of culture change we're working for.


Press appearances and speaking engagements
==========================================

In 2013, the Ada Initiative became a go-to resource for journalists wanting to know more about the
problems facing women in open technology and culture, both in the tech press and the mainstream
media. In March, Valerie Aurora discussed the firing of Adria Richards in Slate, writing that: "one
thing we can agree on is that the massive onslaught of rape and death threats [directed at
Richards]... was wrong... It's up to us to change the culture of consequence-free online
harassment."

In June, we reached one million readers of the U.S. print edition of Marie Claire in "When Geeks
Attack" by veteran feminist journalist Alissa Quart, writing: "... Thanks to the anonymity of the
Internet, fueled by a dogmatic belief that all speech is free speech, [Internet attackers] have
made the very act of being a woman in the industry something of an occupational hazard."

Valerie was interviewed on Minnesota Public Radio in July about the problem of harassment of women
in technology and what to do about.

Valerie also spoke at several events in 2013. She appeared as an invited speaker at Fórum
Internacional Software Livre in Brazil, moderated the good news on diversity in open source panel
at Open Source Bridge, appeared as a panelist in the Gender & Technology open forum in San
Francisco. She was also invited to be the keynote speaker at the first Ada Lovelace conference in
October 2013.


New Ada Initiative supporters
=============================

The majority of the Ada Initiative's funding continues to come from people like you, individual
donors giving yearly or monthly to support programs you care about. We love being accountable to
you!

In 2013 we've been pleased to welcome major new supporters JSConf US 2013, with 85% of their
attendees donating to the Ada Initiative at registration. Based on this donation, JSConf US sponsor
Bloomberg donated an additional $5000. We also welcomed back Dreamwidth Studios as sponsors. In
addition, AdaCamp San Francisco was supported by thirteen sponsoring organizations, including gold
sponsors Mozilla, Automattic and Google Site Reliability Engineering.

We can't do it without you!
===========================

2013 has been a good year for women in open tech/culture so far, thanks to people like you! Without
our hundreds of generous donors and the many community members who stood up for their beliefs, 2013
would have been a bleak year for women in open tech/culture. You are a critical part of a massive,
world-wide movement to give women an equal voice and role in online culture. Thank you!

http://adainitiative.org

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