Hacknight #138

Women and Color

with Mohammed Asaduallah and Sharon Kennedy

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Women and Color is a community of talented women and people of colour who are available for speaking opportunities at tech-related events. The goal of the organization is to foster more and better representation of diverse voices in the tech industry. The website started out as a Toronto-specific Wordpress site, and through the help of the Civic Tech community has been redeveloped as a custom web app that’s ready to scale to cities across North America. Last week, Women and Color had its soft launch. Today, we’ll talk about some of the challenges we faced (and are still facing) and lessons we learned from the past year of volunteer-driven product development at Civic Tech. https://beta.womenandcolor.com Special shoutout to our contributors: Erin, Mark, Matt, Rose, Sarah, Eric, Maju, and everyone else who has supported us!

Speakers

Mohammed Asaduallah

Mohammed Asaduallah is the Founder and Executive Director of Women and Color—an impact-driven organization that creates opportunities to advance and amplify subject matter experts from underrepresented groups in tech. Mohammed is also the Co-founder and CEO of Benji—an online service that finds tax write-offs for Canadian freelancers.

Sharon Kennedy

Sharon is a full-stack developer and co-founder of Nomadic Labs. She has been one of the lead developers on the Women and Color project. Sharon Kennedy is a multi-disciplinary software developer with experience in full-stack web development, web design, graphic design, online communications, and project management. She is passionate about achieving meaningful impact with technology, which has taken her career on interesting turns from a UN agency in Dakar to a tech startup in Barcelona to a health tech company in Toronto.

Presenter: Mohammed Asaduallah & Sharon Kennedy of Women and Color

Women and Color is a community of talented women and people of colour who are available for speaking opportunities at tech-related events. The goal of the organization is to foster more and better representation of diverse voices in the tech industry. The website started out as a Toronto-specific Wordpress site, and through the help of the Civic Tech community has been redeveloped as a custom web app that’s ready to scale to cities across North America.

Last week, Women and Color had its soft launch. Today, we’ll talk about some of the challenges we faced (and are still facing) and lessons we learned from the past year of volunteer-driven product development at Civic Tech.

https://beta.womenandcolor.com

Special shoutout to our contributors: Erin, Mark, Matt, Rose, Sarah, Eric, Maju, and everyone else who has supported us!

*** SOCIAL MEDIA CHEAT CODES:

@WomenAndColor @codeandcanoes @heymosef

*** BIOGRAPHIES:

Sharon is a full-stack developer and co-founder of Nomadic Labs. She has been one of the lead developers on the Women and Color project.

Mohammed is a designer at Tulip and the founder of Women and Color.

*** THIS MONTH’S VENUE SPONSOR:

Secret Location

The Emmy award-winning Secret Location combines cutting-edge technology with traditional storytelling to create powerful experiences for the web, mobile, tablet, and new platforms like Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR).

https://secretlocation.com

Mentioned In

Projects