The Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing will be held September 30 - October 3 in Tucson, Arizona. The GHC 2009 theme is “Creating Technology for Social Good”.  I have just submitted a proposal for the conference and will wait till mid-May to know if it gets selected.

This conference includes a large number of university students, university faculty and professionals from the computer industry.  About half of Hopper attendees are university students.

Last year, I moderated a panel discussion on “Women in the Brave New World of Free and Open Source”. It was fun to research and set up the panel. It was the first time I was moderating a panel discussion and I was excited about it. I met the panelists for the first time the morning before the discussion. The panelists were Stormy Peters (GNOME Foundation), Zoe Slattery (IBM), Kristen Accardi (Intel), Valerie Fenwick (Sun) and Kathryn Vandiver (NetApp).

"Women in Open Source" panelists: Kristen Accardi, Meenakshi Kaul-Basu, Stormy Peters, Valerie Fenwick, Zoe Slattery and Kathryn Vandiver

It was a packed room with standing room only. There was good audience participation and we had fun. Stormy and Valerie also wrote about it. More pictures from GHC 2008 are also available on Katy’s blog.