ICTD - Having Global Impact as a Technical Woman

So, our panel at GHC is called "Having Global Impact as a Technical Woman: Information Technology Applied to the Developing World" --
Three women will present first hand accounts of how they are building and deploying technologies ranging from mobile devices to sensor networks to address issues in disaster mitigation, healthcare, and improving the status of women in developing countries. All four speakers will provide advice and give examples of ways attendees can get involved in the area of Information and Communication Technologies for Development (ICTD), through curriculum examples and projects.

Realistically, we'll have about 15 minutes a piece to talk about what each of us could easily spend several hours discussing, so we'd like to offer a little background.

Melissa is first because she set up this site, and also manages http://ictdchick.com/ -- Melissa comes from a Computer Science/Networking background (Cornell, University College London), has put in her time at startups, and has worked on ICTD research all over the world - India, Mexico, Ghana, DRC, Uganda...She's part of the esteemed TIER group at US Berkeley (http://tier.cs.berkeley.edu/wiki/Home). Melissa is mostly concerned with healthcare delivery and information systems. Check out her research page at http://ictdchick.com/web/research/digitaldivide.php to get a sense of the issues that ICTD tries to address and some of the groups working in this space. Melissa is a researcher, a practioner, and a scholar who also cares deeply about ICTD pedagogy and theory. Very cool indeed.

Elizabeth is in Honduras as I type, working on a sensor network that provides early detection of flood conditions in agricultural areas. Detecting floods or any other random environmental disaster is computationally complex; communicating such data in a form that is timely and accessible for people to act on, especially in areas of limited connectivity and infrastructure is even more difficult, so Elizabeth's work is in high demand and visibility. Coming from an engineering background, she is part of MIT's Distributed Robotic Lab (http://groups.csail.mit.edu/drl/wiki/index.php/Main_Page), and her work specifically is at http://groups.csail.mit.edu/drl/wiki/index.php/floodews. As with other ICTD folks, I only ever see Elizabeth at ICTD events - Chile, Bangalore - although she assures me she does have a US address.

Revi (me) comes to ICTD research after working on Gender and IT issues at Microsoft for a decade. I am concerned with the gendered aspects of the digital divide - how can we make sure ICTD projects benefit women, who make up the majority of the world's workforce, and the majority of the illiterate and disenfranchised as well? I'm the least of the technical panellists, having come from a humanities and gender background, but recognize that technology is one of the most promising methods for achieving gender equity worldwide. I am now at the ATLAS Institute (http://www.colorado.edu/atlas/), an interdisciplinary center at the University of Colorado, where I am working on a communications system for women to use in conjunction with community radio stations (https://webfiles.colorado.edu/sterlins/www/), and where I teach an ICTD seminar (http://drachma.colorado.edu/atlas-seminar-wiki/index.php/Main_Page - a course page with links to other ICTD resources).

Ruth is our fearless panel organizer and moderator. She is renowned researcher in technical education and education technology, as you'll see from her publications and work at http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/rea/. One of the projects Ruth was instrumental in, Classroom Presenter, has served as the basis for several successful ICTD education pilots, and Ruth is increasingly focusing on Ed Tech as it pertains to infrastructure-poor education institutions. Ruth has her Ph.D. in Computer Science, and has been on the faculty at both University of Virginia and now University of Washington. I first met Ruth on a bus headed to the Vancouver Grace Hopper's conference in 2002 - 5 Hopper's later and I'm excited we get to participate together (this panel was her idea, folks.)