To celebrate International Women’s Day (March 8th), at 1600 UTC, the Open Heroines network is hosting a virtual event: Open Heroines in Conversation: Balance for Better. We’ll host a panel with three of our network members to talk about the work we do to develop capacity, share skills, and train each other so we all thrive in the open web sector. With this event, Open Heroines joins the #BalanceforBetter campaign, organized by International Women’s Day.
Our panellists for this event include:
- Isik Mater, presenting NetBlocks, which operates in Turkey. Isik is a director of research at the NetBlocks internet observatory where she developed new technology to assess internet filtering and measure restrictions to open knowledge online in Turkey and around the world. Training institutions on how to use those tools and data sources is an important part of the work. She says: “Capacity building is essential to let people know what is out there, how they can use data-driven methods to improve access and how they can build policy for a more open internet, at a time when even basics like Wikipedia are restricted from the general public”.
- Sara Kimmich, presenting Online Brain Intensive, which operates in the United States and the United Kingdom. Online Brain Intensive teaches scientific reproducibility, biostatistics, cloud computing — and the spirit of collaborative engagement. This volunteer-driven platform provides free training to scientists and connects them to global teams to analyze open source brain data sets. Over 700 people from 42 different countries participated in the first year, and 5 teams were sponsored to a multi-day Brainhack event in Washington D.C. where instructors met in-person with participants to develop new scientific computing platforms.
- Katarina Kosmina, presenting R Ladies Belgrade, a project that operates in Serbia. The IT sector in Serbia is still predominantly male, with estimates of the number of women in this sector ranging between 9 to 15%. This also applies to the widely popular area of data science. Apart from being a tiny fraction of a dynamic sector, women in Serbia are also less likely to speak on panels, hold lectures or conference presentations in IT related. Katarina says: “I co-founded the local chapter of R-Ladies Belgrade with the idea of not only educating more women and enabling them to work in R, but also of providing a safe and motivational space for them to speak up, share projects and issues, improve presentation skills, build their network, and boost their confidence in their work”.
In this online event, we will dive into why training for women makesthe Open Web sector a more balanced and accessible space. After our panellists present their projects, we’ll have a strucred conversation with the audience. You will be able to ask questions via the Youtube app and on Twitter (using #openheroines and #BalanceForBetter).
Everyone is invited! We hope that you can join our first online event and engage in the conversation celebrating International Women’s Day, Open Heroines’ style.
