International Movement Building and Technology in the 21st Century

3 Ways You Can Help Right Now:

1. Share your street harassment story through iHollaBack.
2. Participate in TakeBackTheTech, anywhere in the world, November 25 – December 10.
3. Get an internship through the Humanitarian FOSS project.
4. Web programming and app development. Contact Jill Dimond (jill [dot] dimond [at] gatech [dot] edu )
5. Care about technology and public policy? Think about Google’s Policy Fellowship or Summer of Code.

This is the page contains the bios of the panelists for the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing panel, “Shifting Impossible: Technology and Movement Building in the 21st Century.” Starting now, I will take questions through the comments section here, on twitter (I’m @JessiDG), and in meat-space.

Panelist Bios

Emily May is an international leader in the anti-street-harassment movement. In 2005, at the age of 24, she co-founded Hollaback!, a movement to end street harassment, in New York City. The movement has since spread across the world, from Columbia, Missouri to Mumbai. As an expert on street harassment, Ms. May has been featured on ABC, MSNBC, NBC, NPR, and CNN and was recently selected as one of thirty “Women Making History” by the Women’s Media Center, along with Rachel Maddow and Nancy Pelosi, as a “ChangemakHER” by the Ashoka Foundation, along with Melinda Gates.

Joe LeBlanc is an activist with HollaBackPDX, a graduate from the Out in Front Seattle LGBTQI leadership program, and one of the founders of and the Administrator for QPatrol PDX, Portland’s first ever LGBTQI community foot patrol. Joe is a Cajun Gender queer Butch who is a believer in personal story-telling as a significant method for people to share experiences and solidify a better understanding about LGBTIQ identities, issues, and concerns. Joe is an advocate for building Queer community wherever possible, both in person and in on-line forums devoted to Queer issues.

Jill Dimond is a PhD student at Georgia Tech and is advised by Dr. Amy Bruckman. Her research focuses on digital activism and developing technology to organize internationally, and specifically doing action research with Hollaback!. She is a NSF Graduate Fellow, an Anita Borg Google scholar, and has interned for the App Inventor project at Google.

Jessica Dickinson Goodman (Moderator) is a Carnegie Mellon University student and says her ethnicity is “geek.” She studied karate for 16 years in dojo (Karate studio) where “you kick like a girl” is a compliment. In 2006 her essay, “High School Politics”, was published in _She’s Such a Geek: Women Write About Science, Technology, and Other Nerdy Stuff_ by Annalee Newitz and Charlie Anders. She has served as the web content manager for the World Organization for Human Rights USA, the New Media Fellow for the Polaris Project, and a technical intern for Survivors Connect. She also volunteers for HollaBack.