 Live from Houston, Texas. It's theCUBE, covering Grace Hopper's celebration of women in computing. Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of the Grace Hopper Conference here in Houston, Texas. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. Today we have joining us Anitu Jane, a product manager at IBM, and Daniela Dorniano, a software developer and trainer at Appway. Thank you so much for joining me. Thank you for joining us. Thank you so much Rebecca for inviting us. And both of you have stepped away from a hackathon that is taking place here at the Grace Hopper. What's happening? What's going on? What are you hacking? It's a lot of energy up there. You should come see it. A bunch of 300 people are upstairs. They are coding live right now. They're actually now getting to the the wrap up of their projects. They've been doing that all morning. They started very early at eight. They are all coding for open source for humanitarian purpose. Okay, so a bunch of humanitarian problems. Anitu, set the stage for us. What are the problems we're trying to solve? Sure, so we basically called all organizations we know who are passionate about open source, using open source project for humanitarian causes. Like we have Cloudera participating with us. They are working on a project called THORN, which tries to identify traffic victims, human trafficked victims, using data science on chat bots. They try to analyze the chatting data on the dark web and, you know, match some patterns and try to identify there are pictures posted and there is communication posted, transfer of them posted. So they're trying to identify, you know, there could be human trafficking taking place and, you know, interject and give that data to the relevant people. Then there is another project with Microsoft, which is Microsoft Disaster Response, where they are creating open source tool to be able to use in disaster recovery situations to locate people, to help them to rehabilitation, et cetera. Then we have another project with Women P2P, where they are trying to solve the problem of empowering women. And many of them are illiterate women to give them a voice. For example, give them a voting software. Through mobiles, or give them a communication medium without using the radio, because in South Africa and Kenya, radio centers are controlled by men, which sort of controls the voices of women. They cannot say something which they do not like. So they are trying to come up with an ingenious way of using repeaters to provide them a shadow network to communicate to each other. These are some of the examples of the projects and we have more, I can go on. So this is using open source to save the world to solve some of the world's most pressing problems. Obviously, we want these things to be successful. The goal is to solve these problems. It's unlikely to happen in three hours. So these projects, they are not finishing here. These are open source projects. Everything people are going to code today is going to be up online for future people. For future people. Contributors. And these projects are actually going from a hackathon and they are gathering a community through this one of these hackathons. And then they are building up and people are finding out about the projects and they contribute more and more. And then this is how you save the world. Yeah, think of it like the entry to the door. We want to introduce these projects to other people who don't know about it. We want to encourage the first newcomers to open source. And we want to basically dazzle them with the power of open source. What real life changes you can make, right? And then it's not like in today you're going to solve this problem. It's not a hackathon. It's like, how do you get to go about it? How are we tackling it? Make you feel safe and welcome. Many of the codeathons, they don't feel welcome. Well, that's what I wanted to ask you about in the sense of, here we are at Grace Hopper, a celebration of women in computing. Most of the hackers up there are women. How is that different from other hackathons? Well, for some of these people today, this is going to be a life-changing event. They are coming and coding for the first time in a hackathon. Nitu, you are telling me that... Yeah, a girl walked me up and said, thanks a lot for organizing this. She actually works at Microsoft and she's a master's in computer science. But what she said was, I've never felt comfortable going to the hackathons because I've always felt shy and imposter syndrome that I'm not good enough. And I felt comfortable here and I'm learning so much that I'll have the confidence next time to walk in into another hackathon where there are all kinds of people, not only women, but it's a good first start for her. And she feels safe and welcomed and she knows this community, so she feels more comfortable here. And I want to ask about the energy and the vibe of the room too, because research shows that things like collaboration, communication, those tend to be skills that women cultivate, perhaps maybe better than men do. So talk about what it's like because we know that coding is actually a very social activity. What's it like up there? Yes, so hackathons usually involve a lot of collaboration. You can't achieve much in a few hours unless you talk about it when you have a problem, you cannot allow yourself three hours to solve it yourself. So collaboration, it's a very important key factor in the hackathon. So you walk up in the room and you see everyone is moving, they are going if you have a problem, they are moving sticks around if they need a particular software. And they feel very comfortable doing that in this environment. So this is a great start for many women that maybe before they didn't have the courage to go and try that in a man environment, only man environment. Now they have their first experience, they will feel much more comfortable now going into all the other hackathons and feel the same energy, the same power and the same power to go and ask whenever they have an issue. I want to add to the energy. So I mentored, I was an open source day mentor last year and I saw this woman who's actually a professor, Michelle, and she was struggling with Git and I helped her with Git. And this year she came up to the open source hackathon and she thanked me for teaching her GIF and she's teaching Git now in her university and now she's teaching Git upstairs in the hackathon with confidence. So that is the willingness to help. I was going to ask that. I mean, for those of us who've never been to a hackathon, is it competitive or is it? It's not, that's why it's very collaborative I've been, it's the attitude is, I've been there. I know exactly what you're going through. What you're going through is basically just you need to do it once and you will never feel it again. And I'll help you get through that blocker. That is the vibe. Maybe the competition comes afterwards. What are you going to do with what you have acquired? With the Git knowledge that you have acquired, are you going to use it? And then next year you feel like you have a feeling of achievement. You come back, you can say, you can discuss and you give back what you've learned. And that's maybe a self-achievement competition with yourself, with sharing what you have learned. It's sort of what like GHC and ABI stand for. We're all here to basically pass it on. We have been students, we have interviewed, students have interviewed here. They've come back to interview on these books. And it's a metaphor for the hackathon which you're starting these projects and then launching them into the world. Exactly. Neetu, Daniella, thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you so much for the invitation. This is Rebecca Knight at the Grace Hopper Conference here in Houston, Texas, live with theCUBE. We'll be back after this.