Over 100 women developers and students got together at the Grace Hopper Hackathon at Lalit Ashok Hotel here in Bangalore on Wednesday to network, code, learn and contribute to humanitarian projects MifosX, Bachchao & Clinical Reminders. The aim of the event was to help women in technology get plugged into Humanitarian Open Source projects, get familiar with the various projects with help from volunteers who already have experience contributing to these projects.
This Hackathon for Women is part of the fourth Annual Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing India(GHCI) Conference 2013, presented by the Anita Borg Institute (ABI) in association with the Association of Computing Machinery India (ACM India).
Participants who had signed up for MifosX, a free and open-source Financial Service System, worked on to build a platform that enables financial service providers to more effectively and efficiently deliver responsible financial services to the world’s 2.5 billion poor and unbanked. It is an MIS for Microfinance institutions (MFIs) to manage and track funds, loans, installments, savings, deposits and related reports for accounting and analysis.
In Bachchao Project, participants worked on to build Safemap, a custom crowd sourced map to showcase all the safe locations like a police station, 24 hours hotels, NGOs in any area. Also provides an interface to the user to add safe and unsafe areas. Going further this could help people (especially women travelers) take safer routes for travel.
In Clinical Reminders project, participants worked on to build a clinical reminder system that allows people to receive reminders & alerts on medication, tests, immunizations or examinations.
“The Hackathon was undoubtedly a resounding success,” said Geetha Kannan, India Head of Anita Borg Institute. “Thanks to some of the high-spirited women in India and around the world, women in technology are no longer in the shadows. The days of male-only coding platforms are gone and will hopefully never come back.”
“The Hackathon was unique as it focused on programmers collaborating and writing code on free and open source software (FOSS), while contributing to humanitarian projects. This year’s Hackathon had three groups with different problem statements.”