India's 'Hackathon for Women' Focuses on Projects to Help Humanity

What's This?

Pankaj Maru for Tech in Asia 2013-11-15 09:45:47 -0500

Most hackathons bring together software coders, techies or geeks to develop applications for specific tech platforms, software languages or business areas. However, this Hackathon for Women, organized by Grace Hopper India, has its own set of goals.

The hackathon, for female developers and students, focused on free and open-source software-based humanitarian projects. This year’s event saw the assembled hackers and coders building on top of three major project frameworks: MifosX, Bachchao and Clinical Reminders.

Wednesday's Bangalore-based event — now in its fourth year — brought together more than 100 women in the technology field to work and contribute toward humanitarian open-source projects in areas of financial inclusion, locations and maps, safe areas, and health and medicine.

MifosX is a free and open source financial-service system. Some of the hackathon participants worked with the MifosX framework to build a platform that enables financial-service providers to serve an estimated 2.5 billion poor and unbanked people globally. It takes the form of a management information system for microfinance institutions to manage and track funds, loans, installments, savings, deposits and related reports for accounting and analysis.

The Bachchao Project was the basis for other interesting ideas, with some women coders building Safemap, which is a custom, crowdsourced map that highlights information such as local police stations, hotels, accommodation and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). This particular project would come in handy for travelers — particularly female travelers worried about their safety. The project was started during the Grace Hopper India 2012 event.

Meanwhile, the Clinical Reminders system brought the female techies together to build and work on a Web service that gives reminders and alerts on medication, tests, immunizations or medical examinations.

The coding meetup was part of the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing in India Conference 2013 hosted by the Anita Borg Institute and the Association of Computing Machinery India.

Geetha Kannan, representative of Anita Borg Institute’s India arm, praised the high-spirited women for their work on such projects.

"The days of male-only coding platforms are gone and will hopefully never come back," she said.

Have something to add to this story? Share it in the comments.

Image: Desarrollando América Latina