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"Hackathon for Women" explores technology based solutions for humanitarian problems

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Harmeet
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BANGALORE, INDIA: Over 100 women developers and students got together at the Second Grace Hopper Hackathon at Lalit Ashok Hotel today to network, code, learn and contribute to humanitarian projects MifosX, Bachchao and Clinical Reminders.

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The aim of the event was to help women in technology get plugged into Humanitarian Open Source projects, get familiar with the various projects with help from volunteers who already have experience contributing to these projects.

This Hackathon for Women is part of the 4th Annual Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing India(GHCI) Conference 2013, presented by the Anita Borg Institute (ABI) in association with the Association of Computing Machinery India (ACM India).

Participants who had signed up for MifosX, a free and open-source Financial Service System, worked on to build a platform that enables financial service providers to more effectively and efficiently deliver responsible financial services to the world's 2.5 billion poor and unbanked. It is an MIS for Microfinance institutions (MFIs) to manage and track funds, loans, installments, savings, deposits and related reports for accounting and analysis.

In Bachchao Project, participants worked on to build Safemap, a custom crowd sourced map to showcase all the safe locations like a police station, 24 hours hotels, NGOs in any area. It also provides an interface to the user to add safe and unsafe areas. Going further this could help people(especially woman travellers) take safer routes for travel.

In Clinical Reminders project, participants worked on to build a clinical reminder system that allows people to receive reminders & alerts on medication, tests, immunizations or examinations.

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