womENcourage past chair – organizing the event online
This year we are going to have the 10th womENcourage celebration, which will be hosted in Trondheim, Norway! We are so excited to share the journey we had so far and looking forward to bigger, greater and more exciting celebrations to come. We are acknowledging this milestone of 10 years with a series of blogs from past chairs who organized this event successfully so far. This month we have Araz Yusubov, who was chair of womENcourage 2020.
1. Brief introduction about yourself: who are you, what do you currently do and how are you connected to the computing field.
For the last 8 years since 2015, I am Assistant Professor at the School of IT and Engineering, ADA University in Baku, Azerbaijan, while my university teaching experience started back in 1999.
Speaking of my connection to the computing, I believe what further ignited my interest, as a little boy, in the field was a colorful brochure my father’s friend brought from an exhibition “Informatics in the Life of USA”, which featured also an article by Isaac Asimov. This exhibition was organized in 9 cities of then Soviet Union by the US Information Agency throughout 1988-89.
What is more curious, as a Visiting Scholar of the Computer Science Department at the George Washington University last year (2022) I was part of a project led by Prof. Rachelle S. Heller, who is also Director of the Center for Women in Engineering. I was positively shocked to coincidentally discover that she was one of the 24 exhibition guides who visited the Soviet Union back then. To my excited “you are one of the reasons why I am in computer science”, she calmly responded “you are welcome”.
2. How did you hear about ACM-W Europe and then about womENcourage?
I had to double check it – in October 2013 we received an email, apparently sent to all chapters, about the first ever womENcourage in Manchester from Reyyan Ayfer. I replied that we promoted it locally through or Facebook page. Back in 2012, we started the Azerbaijan ACM Chapter as the first professional chapter in the Caucasus. But it was until the 2nd European chapter leaders’ workshop in Athens back in 2014, we felt the true energy of the ACM, we met colleagues from different countries. Reyyan Ayfer was a pure inspiration, and Virginia Grande continued supporting our local activities with guidance and help over the years.
It was our short dialog with Virginia “-How many participants from Azerbaijan at womENcourage 2015? -Zero -How many applications from Azerbaijan? -Zero” that sparked the idea of having a local celebration that would promote womENcourage. We started these events, named Ada’s Legacy as homage to Ada Lovelace, in 2016 at ADA University, ahead of womENcourage to encourage Azerbaijani students/professionals to participate. We felt a strong support from ACM-W Europe ever since Reyyan flew to Baku to give opening remarks.
Ada’s Legacy started in 2016 as a 3-hour event with a coffee break. In 2019, it was a 2-day event with coffee breaks, lunches and dinner for hackathon participants. As a result, around five students would win travel scholarships to attend womENcourage every year in different European cities. In 2018, finally we had three research posters from Azerbaijan also accepted to the womENcourage conference program. ACM official instagram even shared a photo of our student next to her team’s research poster.
This culminated in our successful bid for and hosting of the 7th ACM Celebration of Women in Computing in 2020. Once again, another ACM-W Europe colleague, Adriana Wilde, encouraged us to submit our bid.
3. How were the preparations for the event?
ADA University regularly hosts international events. Just a year before, in 2019, we were coordinating efforts for hosting the 31st International Olympiad in Informatics in Azerbaijan. Nevertheless, womENcourage has its specific traditions and guidelines and the site visit from the colleagues, Ruth Lennon, Adriana Wilde, Dorota Filipczuk, Beverly Bachmayer and Rukiye Altin in February 2020 helped with ironing out the program details. However, global pandemic pushed us to an uncharted territory of hosting a totally online event. Once the decision was made in May, we had to identify and test an engaging online event platform, prepare the video content and rethink the event, which was stretched out into a 4-day program. All local teams felt a strong guidance and support from the ACM-W Europe colleagues during the preparations and on the event days.
4. How were the days of the event?
Although it was disappointing not to be able to host colleagues from all over the Europe on our campus, our online event attracted 200+ registered participants from about 40 countries and 5 continents. The first two conference days of keynotes and poster presentations, as well as the third day of the career fair, workshops and tutorials went very well. We even managed to run a cultural evening program with a virtual video tour of Baku and some feature films and documentaries.
But the spell of challenges continued on the fourth hackathon day, having an unfortunate military aggression in the country. Many of our local Hackathon participants had connection problems and it was not immediately clear if it is a result of a simultaneous cyber-attack or of centralized measures for preventing the spread of misinformation. Luckily, we had a stable Internet connection on the campus and were able to conclude the event successfully with the announcement of Prague as the 2021 host.
5. What was your takeaway from the entire process and from the event itself?
Eventually, the 2020 event was the first online womENcourage, the only one so far that lasted 4 days and had a male chair. While answering these questions I had to check some of the correspondence and documents from a decade ago. Once again, the energy, inspiration and commitment of ACM-W Europe colleagues, some mentioned above, which made womENcourage possible, cannot be overstated.
6. What would be your advice to other people that wish to organize either womENcourage in the future or any other celebration of women in computing?
Just do it – womENcourage is a great platform with a positive, inclusive, inspirational traditions. You may want to consider starting with local celebrations, as we did some years ago. This can be a great occasion for starting a local ACM chapter or strengthening and existing one.