The Use of HFOSS Projects in the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing Open Source Day

The Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing is the world’s largest meeting for women in technology. The Open Source Day, a hackathon using humanitarian free and open source software (HFOSS) projects, has been held in conjunction with the conference for the past seven years. Open Source Day provides an unusal opportunity to survey a large number of women as they contribute to HFOSS projects. More typically, the small number of women computing students makes it difficult to measure the impact of HFOSS participation on women’s attitude toward computing. Although geared toward students, the Open Source Day attracts women of all skill levels and backgrounds. This paper reports on a pre/post survey designed to understand women’s opinions of HFOSS participation and how those opinions may change when working on a humanitarian project. The results demonstrate HFOSS has wide-spread appeal among women and that women have interest in humanitarian applications of computing. Our survey participants represented 28 different countries, across age groups, work experience and programming background.