Ada Initiative

The Ada Initiative's logo

The Ada Initiative was a non-profit promoting women in open technology and culture between 2011 and 2015.

The Ada Initiative was founded by Valerie Aurora and Mary Gardiner, and named for Ada Lovelace, the "world's first computer programmer."

History

Ada Lovelace, a woodcut graphic by Colin Adams based on the original watercolor by Alfred Edward Chalon. Created for the Ada Initiative.

In 2010, after the sexual assault of Noirin Shirley at ApacheCon 2010, Valerie Aurora, already an activist for women in open source, joined Mary Gardiner and members of Geek Feminism to develop anti-harassment policies for conferences. Aurora would go on to quit her job as a Linux kernel developer at Red Hat and with Gardiner, the founder of AussieChix, the largest open source organization for women in Australia, would found the Ada Initiative. The organization was named after Ada Lovelace, who worked with Charles Babbage and is considered the world's first computer programmer.

After a failed search for a new Executive Director in early 2015 the board decided to shutdown the organization effective mid-October 2015.

Mission

The Ada Initiative is a non-profit organization dedicated to increasing participation of women in open technology and culture, which includes open source software, Wikipedia and other open data, and open social media.

Initiatives

The major projects of the Ada Initiative were

• Authoring and advocating for adoption of the Conference anti-harassment policy and other anti-harassment work
• AdaCamp
• The Ally Skills workshop
• Impostor Syndrome training
• Feminist writing

External links

• The Ada Initiative home page