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NASA Hackathon Expected to Draw Over 15,000 Coders (fastcompany.com)
Saturday NASA began live-streaming footage of their "Space Apps Challenge" hackathon, which they're describing as one of the largest hackathons on earth. "Together, citizens like you have developed thousands of open-source solutions," says the event's site, while Fast Company reports that last year 14,264 people gathered in 133 locations to create apps using NASA's trove of open data. Last year's largest local app hackathon was started by two women in Cairo, drawing 700 participants, and this year NASA is trying to increase participation by female coders. NASA's open innovation project manager tells FastCompany that women "are looking for signals that they will be in a safe space where they feel like they belong," noting that 80% of last year's participants were men.
All this talk of "safe spaces" for women....
Late last year I spent a month on an exchange program with a university engineering department in Hanoi. I never saw any indications that the women there (who were also more numerous than I encountered in US/Japanese engineering departments) were begging for "safe spaces". In general the women I met were the most well-adjusted, entrepreneurial, and self-sufficient I've ever met.
Strange that this "Communist" country, and one with very traditional, masculine men at that, seems to not suffer from the same societal poisons in STEM as the West.
It's not so much the "safe space" that makes me roll my eyes here, but the "where they feel they belong".
It's hacking, not a social club. Hackers don't go to feel they belong. They go to find a challenge in an otherwise challenge free world.
Showing off a great hack buys you my respect, but doesn't make you my pal. No matter where your dangly bits may be attached.
> And while nobody should have to deal with overtly sexist atmosphere, simply having a majority of men == sexism!
Nobody said it was sexism. They just want to have more women participants, full stop. It's numnuts like you who turn everything into some OMG MERITOCRACY IS CRUMBLING AROUND US into places that make people feel it's just not worth dealing with non-well adjusted people.
"Old man yells at systemd"