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rpleven edited this page Jan 29, 2018 · 8 revisions

Our Mission

Women's P2P Network is a growing, global community of girl-geeks, grassroots women, and organizations, developing tools that better connect women within and across borders. Our focus is strengthening global women’s communities around key issues, such as ending violence, electing women to political office, and supporting micro-entrepreneurs. Our priority is to create platforms with “onramps” to connect and include the 700 million women normally left behind, due to barriers such as literacy, computer access, and privacy concerns, by incorporating such “old school” technologies such as voice applications, sms, and community radio, still the world’s most-used media platform.

The long-term vision is to create a network that enables every woman on earth to connect, organize, and collaborate, - both locally and across borders - irrespective of computer access, language differences, and other traditional barriers. Each woman a seat at the table with an equal voice. Through local and global women's virtual “meetups” women will be able to offer support and assistance with collective goals.

Our History

The Women’s P2P Network was founded by Rachel Leventhal, a documentary journalist, whose 20 years of empowering women and girls to tell their stories was crystallized in a single moment: “I was in Monrovia in 2005 covering the Liberian election. I witnessed women – some were professionals, some were activists, may others were illiterate and poor – perform a historic feat: In a grassroots effort, they mobilized using basic, local technology such as radio and the human networks they had formed in refugee camps during the war and working in the markets, to elect Ellen Johnson Sirleaf as Africa’s first woman president. They accomplished this, what years of outside peacekeepers and NGOs could not, by building on the simple tools they already use, and connecting to each other.” Rachel envisioned building a network that could similarly connect similarly diverse women on a global scale

Our Activities

Our first projects took place in Haiti, where we collaborated with local women technologists to support Haitian microentrepreneurs by building basic cell phone and SMS. We have also hosted several cross-border “hackathons,” delivered a TED Talk, organized a Python training via Skype for Haitian women university students, and have participated for several years in the Grace Hopper Conference Open Source Day Codeathon for Humanity. We are currently focusing on building an Electing Women Toolkit and platform that will bring much-needed support to global women candidates and support a growing global movement to elect a greater number of women to political office.

Our Values and Vision

  • The Women's P2P Network is founded on the value of equal partnership between women of all diverse backgrounds as the source of our strength.
  • We believe that each of us is powerful and necessary, and brings valuable resources to the table.
  • We take to heart the adage of “we are all in this together,” and challenge the conventional paradigm that it is acceptable to leave some people behind for progress’ sake.
  • We envision a world where women are able to collaborate and organize freely, unencumbered by the barriers of language, literacy, geography, and access.
  • Women’s P2P Network is working towards a technology-neutral space where all voices are heard and can be included.

We are committed to:

  • Creating a safe space (online and communities) for local and global collaboration, and to technology for good
  • Every woman is represented and counted
  • Being a healing force for good in the communities we work in
  • Removing the barriers that prevent women from connecting with each other
  • We are each equal and powerful, with important resources to contribute
  • We are stronger when we come together, support one another, and grow together

Contributors guide

Our goal is to collaborate with contributors who are excited to join the mission and achieve it the open source way! Together we will build some impactful tools, learn and improve skills.

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