The Ada Initiative supports women in open technology and culture through activities like producing codes of conduct and anti-harassment policies, advocating for gender diversity, teaching allies, and hosting conferences for women in open tech/culture. Most of what we create is freely available, reusable, and modifiable under Creative Commons licenses.

The Ada Initiative is a non-profit organization currently employing two staff and half a dozen contractors. Our ground-breaking work is only possible with the generous support of people like you.

What we've accomplished

Since our founding in early 2011, we've worked with the community on practical, high-impact programs that directly recruit and retain women in open tech/culture. Here's what we've accomplished so far:

• Created AdaCamp conference: AdaCamp is an unconference for women in open tech/culture and their allies that measurably increases women's commitment to open tech/culture. The first three were held in Melbourne, Australia, Washington DC, and San Francisco.
• Made conferences safer for women: Wrote and encouraged adoption of policies preventing harassment of women, now used by hundreds of conferences and organizations in open tech/culture as well as science fiction, fan, gaming, and skeptic/atheist conventions.
• Created the Allies Workshop training program: Wrote and taught the popular Allies Workshop, teaching men practical skills for helping women and trans people in open/tech culture.
• Designed Impostor Syndrome training: Created videos and online exercises to fight Impostor Syndrome, a significant factor holding back women in open tech/culture.
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  CC-BY-SA Alejandro Linares Garcia

  Spread our message through writing and speaking: Wrote editorials read by hundreds of thousands of people and spoke about increasing diversity and welcoming women, including keynote speeches at large conferences.
• Advised organizations on supporting women: Provided free consulting to several organizations on high-profile incidents of sexism, improving recruitment and retention of women in open tech/culture jobs, and creating a friendlier environment for women.
• Conducted surveys and research: We ran several surveys, including a survey of over 2800 people about attitudes towards women in open tech/culture.

Future programs

With your support, we can expand our programs to include:

• Resources for event organizers: Help organizers reach out to female speakers, attract more women to your event, and broaden your audience in general.
• Support community codes of conduct: Advise and assist open tech/culture community leaders on creating and adopting codes of conduct for their communities.
• Research: Quantify trends in women's participation in open technology and understand the underlying causes.
• Gender diversity program design: Share best practices and avoid common pitfalls for gender diversity programs and initiatives.

If your organization is particularly interested in one of these programs and would like to discuss sponsoring or partnering with the Ada Initiative to work on it, please contact us at donors@adainitiative.org.