Hacking On Crisis Data: Our Open Source Day Experience At GHC 2014

“The Mecca for Women in Tech” – That’s what Linda terms the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing to be. It probably is :). Linda, Chris, Brian and I had the honor of being able to attend this year’s celebration in Phoenix, Arizona.

For the first time this year, Open Source Day decided to host a session committed to helping women grow their skills and interest in using open source technologies at GHC, and we’re glad that Ushahidi was one of the organisations chosen to participate. It provided a unique opportunity for us to not only share the impactful work we do with Ushahidi software, but also helped to strengthen the work Linda and I do to encourage women to take up careers in technology.

The code-a-thon was focused mainly on CrisisNET, our global firehose for crisis data. We got the students to understand what opportunities the CrisisNET API presents for them to access data on any global issue/crisis, and helped them think through the kind of data they want to visualize. Some of the major themes 5 groups decided to work on included...