Main goals
The main goal of the event was to initiate more women to the software Sage to reduce the gender gap in mathematics software development. Each participant had to propose a mathematic development project to be carried out during the week.
OpenDreamKit implication
The event was initiated by Viviane Pons from OpenDreamKit and co-organized with Eleni Tzanaki (University of Crete). It was funded solely by OpenDreamKit which covered: lodging for the participants (rented houses), food, and transportation for many of the participants.
Event summary
The event was organized as a workshop where every participant could work on their own project to develop their coding skills. We started the week with an introduction to Sage and some tutorials. Then each participant gave a 5 minute talk about their own research. After that, we worked on different projects, organizing status reports every day. In particular, we ran a group specifically to produce new contributions to Sage.
Demographics
All participants were women coming from 8 different countries (France, Belgium, Germany, Greece, UK, US, Romania and Peru), as per institutions, and more if we count nationalities (Australia, Lebanon, Spain). About half of them could be considered Sage beginners. We had 1 master student, 14 PhD students, 2 postdocs, and 5 Maîtresses de conférences or assistant professor or lecturer.
We were supposed to also welcome 3 women from Nigeria but they were sadly not able to obtain their visas on time.
Results and impact
A full report on the impact of this workshop can be read on our website: https://opendreamkit.org/2019/06/28/WomenInSage/ The main goal was to make the participants more confident into their programming skills and more prone to become Sage contributors and attend classical Sage Days. It was a big success in that regard. Indeed, before the conference, only 17
Women in Sage, Archanes, Crete