A hackathon this past Wednesday in Bangalore brought together 100 women in the technology sector to work on humanitarian open-source projects in the fields of finance, geo-location, and health. The hackathon was organized by the Anita Borg Institute and the Association for Computing Machinery-India.

With an increasing amount of opportunities for those with Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) experience, the goal of the hackathon was to give an opportunity for programmers of all levels to learn how to contribute to a FOSS project. Participants also had the chance to network with other members in the humanitarian open source software industry.

Programmers had the choice to develop software on top of three frameworks – MifosX, The Bachchao Project, and Clinical Reminders. MifosX is a cloud-based platform that helps distribute financial services to the poor. The Bachchao Project develops open-source safety tools and asked programmers to develop a crowdsourced mapping system that would allow users to identify safe and unsafe areas, as well as other key locations such as police stations. Clinical Reminders asked participants to develop a clinical reminder system for patients.

For more information about the hackathon, visit their website here.