Hi HN! I recently opened registrations for the Women Make 30-Day Challenge. I'm inviting members of the HN community who'd like to ship a project. Everybody is welcome, and there is no competition. This is an opportunity to motivate yourself, work among others, and achieve to build & launch something in a month.
Hello HN, I’m the person behind Women Make, a community for women founders and makers. In October I organized an online hackathon. Participants had 30 days to build and ship something. 160+ people registered and it resulted in dozens of projects launched at the end of the month!
Hi HN! 8 months ago I posted on Show HN about a project of mine, a space I built for women entrepreneurs and makers, and received a lot of great feedback [1]. At the time, it helped me to get new members. The community is still growing and we are almost 900 today! Next month, I’m organizing a hackathon called Just F*ing Ship It [2]. The concept: 30 days to build and launch something. Can be anything as long as you finish before October 31st. It’s the perfect opportunity to get things done! Who’s in?
I started with a Telegram group so I was relying on an existing infrastructure at first. Then when the community got bigger, I thought we needed a website, as an extension of our private group. I don't think it would have make a lot of sense to create a new group on another platform like Facebook or Reddit (since we were already using one).
Thank you, I'm using webshot-node (which relies on PhantomJS) but I might actually change. It doesn't always work well. There are different options (like waiting for the website to respond, or waiting for a specific amount of time), but even by tweaking those parameters it's not always reliable. I might give a try to capture-website soon.
"What would that be?", what do you mean by that? What I'm trying to say is that obviously I identify myself better with other women. And I want to be able to find other women entrepreneurs specifically because we face certain common issues. I think this comment sums up pretty well what it's like: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22129625.
Actually yes. More people and more activity means more moderation. And I think it's the time you realize if your foundations are strong enough. Moderation really is everything, and it's a lot of work to make people understand what are the values of the community, what is tolerated or not, etc. while making it welcoming. If you made that clear since the beginning, it's easier to handle later. And members might actually help you too, they become messengers, they also represent the community.
Not only Women Make is open to all women, but it's open to everyone. So trans women are more than welcome. Since you're asking this question, maybe I should make it more clear.
I think we are working on different ideas. Women Make is more focused on entrepreneurs and makers, whereas they are more into tech career advice (maybe like a LinkedIn for women). Also, Women Make is an indie project.
I'm not sure it's really specific to the sex or gender. My personal opinion is that society and education have a huge effect on how we behave and are perceived, depending on your sex. So yes, in a way it makes you closer to people from the same sex because you have something in common, but it's more than just your sex, and there are so many different criteria.
Basically, the idea is that you often identify better to someone who has common points with you, including sex.
Just the fact that StackOverflow have been accused of not being inclusive at all is enough to create something else. They also have moderation issues. I’m trying to keep a high quality standard on Women Make, just like dang and sctb here with the moderation.
Also, like I said in another comment, women tend to promote themselves/put themselves in front of others much less. The idea of Women Make is really to show them they can and they should. So basically it’s giving women confidence, and the specific support they don’t necessarily get from other places.
Thank you. And you're right. I implemented this popup and wanted to change the timing because I also think it's too fast to appear. I just didn't take care of it yet.
Like I said the first reason why I created Women Make is because I couldn’t find fellow women makers. There are several reasons for this: women are less visible in general, and also tend to less promote themselves. Gathering us is an opportunity to find allies, but also models, people from who you can inspire from and find the strength to do what you want to do. That being said, it doesn’t have to be exclusive. I am myself part of several communities, and most of them are not emphasizing on women. But I’m glad I have a place like Women Make for certain topics and to know I’m not alone in this.