WiCHacks is an all-female hackathon from February 25-26, 2017. After talking with the lead coordinator, it would be possible for Fedora to organize an "open source" sponsorship at no cost to us (and we would provide people / content).
A Fedora presence at an event like WiCHacks is a good way for us to not only engage with a university audience with students and faculty, but it is also a great way for us to engage with one of the historically underrepresented groups in computing and open source, women.
Since a financial sponsorship will not be required, I think this is a great event for us to sponsor and have a presence at.
The only costs that could be considered for this event would be travel and lodging. I know @cprofitt is a local, and if he is available and free that weekend, I think he would be a good candidate to attend. I will not be in the US at this time, otherwise I would also attend.
Additionally, I want to reach out to a few women contributors in the Fedora community to see if they would be interested in speaking or attending this event. Since this is the end of the FY17 fiscal year, I understand we will be reaching the edge of our budget. If it's possible for us to offer travel costs to these speakers, I think it would be helpful to do so, in order to help promote a female presence in Fedora at the event. I think at least one woman would be helpful for an event like this.
If the budget will not allow this, instead I would like to propose a local Rochestarian attend the event and invite some of the female contributors to participate remotely in the form of live Q&As / video calls / online discussion. This way, we could preserve budget but still have a strong representation at WiCHacks.
This event is a ways away, but I would like to have an idea of how much we would be able to allocate to an event like this. If we decide to sponsor the travel of one Ambassador, I anticipate costs being under $500.
I am interested in helping to support this effort. Having attended this and HackMIT I feel they both provide an opportunity to promote the Four Foundations.
Sponsorship guide provided by the WiCHacks organizers WiCHacks17_SponsorshipInformation.pdf
Discussed in [https://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/fedora-meeting/2016-10-14/famna.2016-10-14-01.00.html 2016-10-13 meeting].
I shared the event proposal with the region. We discussed the event and the possibilities of how we could fund it externally or participate with using as little budget as possible. We have some local leads we can use for WiCHacks. Additionally, this event also has a potential for "virtual" guest speakers, so I can reach out to Fedora women in the community to see if they are interested in giving a talk remotely.
My action items are to create a wiki page and begin reaching out to other groups to help support the event (including but not exclusively limited to Red Hat). I hope to have more information to share on this as soon as possible.
= [https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/RIT_WiCHacks/2017 wiki page created] =
You can now find the [https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/RIT_WiCHacks/2017 wiki page] for this event.
Added to proposed budget for events in Q4
This event has been suspended due to budget constraints, until further notice do not commit any fund allocation.
Given the close proximity to BrickHack and the fact that I won't be physically at this event, I'm running into hurdles to try to finalize this one. This may be an event we have to cut for this FY. We can discuss further at tomorrow night's meeting.
Due to a few hurdles with planning the event, we're going to have to give up WiCHacks this year. We can reconsider it next year (it will help when I'm there in person to help coordinate a little better), but for now, we're going to skip over this one and just focus on BrickHack ( #157 ).
@jflory7 changed the status to Closed
Closed
Login to comment on this ticket.