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Diff — Ada Lovelace Day

Comparing rev 2 → rev 3

	{{infobox
	\| title = Ada Lovelace Day
	\| image = ald-logo.png
	\| caption = The Ada Lovelace Day logo — Finding Ada (CC BY-SA 4.0)
	\| observed = The second Tuesday of October, annually worldwide
	\| founded = 2009 · United Kingdom
	\| founder = Suw Charman-Anderson
	\| named_for = [[Ada Lovelace]] (1815–1852), author of the first published algorithm intended for a machine
	\| purpose = To celebrate and raise the profile of women in science, technology, engineering and mathematics
	}}

-	Ada Lovelace Day is an annual international day of celebration held on the second Tuesday of October, honoring the achievements of women in science, technology, engineering and mathematics — and, in the founder's words, fighting not the absence of women in those fields but their invisibility.[[cite: Finding Ada, "Meet ALD's Founder" — "the issue wasn't a lack of women, but their invisibility"]] It is named for [[Ada Lovelace]], the nineteenth-century mathematician whose published notes on the [[Analytical Engine]] contain what is widely regarded as the first algorithm intended to be carried out by a machine.[[cite: Lovelace's translation of and notes on Menabrea's "Sketch of the Analytical Engine," Taylor's Scientific Memoirs (1843)]]
+	Ada Lovelace Day is an annual international day of celebration held on the second Tuesday of October, honoring the achievements of women in science, technology, engineering and mathematics — and, in the founder's words, fighting not the absence of women in those fields but their invisibility.[[cite: Finding Ada, ["Meet ALD's Founder"](https://findingada.com/about/) — "the issue wasn't a lack of women, but their invisibility"]] It is named for [[Ada Lovelace]], the nineteenth-century mathematician whose published notes on the [[Analytical Engine]] contain what is widely regarded as the first algorithm intended to be carried out by a machine.[[cite: Lovelace's [translation of and notes on Menabrea's "Sketch of the Analytical Engine"](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/57577), Taylor's Scientific Memoirs (1843)]]

-	What began as a single day of coordinated blogging in 2009 is now a global observance marked by Wikipedia edit-a-thons, school events, conference programming, and a flagship live science evening in London — all coordinated by the Finding Ada organization.[[cite: findingada.com — "History of Ada Lovelace Day"]]
+	What began as a single day of coordinated blogging in 2009 is now a global observance marked by Wikipedia edit-a-thons, school events, conference programming, and a flagship live science evening in London — all coordinated by the Finding Ada organization.[[cite: findingada.com — ["History of Ada Lovelace Day"](https://findingada.com/about/history-of-ada-lovelace-day/)]]

	# Origins: a pledge

-	Ada Lovelace Day was founded by British technologist and writer Suw Charman-Anderson in January 2009, in response to a running frustration of the era's tech conferences: stages full of men, and the recurring claim that no women could be found to speak. Charman-Anderson's counter-argument was that the problem was visibility, not existence — and she set out to prove it in public.[[cite: Finding Ada, "Meet ALD's Founder"; S. Charman-Anderson, "Join me on Ada Lovelace Day," January 6, 2009]]
+	Ada Lovelace Day was founded by British technologist and writer Suw Charman-Anderson in January 2009, in response to a running frustration of the era's tech conferences: stages full of men, and the recurring claim that no women could be found to speak. Charman-Anderson's counter-argument was that the problem was visibility, not existence — and she set out to prove it in public.[[cite: Finding Ada, ["Meet ALD's Founder"](https://findingada.com/about/); S. Charman-Anderson, ["Join me on Ada Lovelace Day"](https://findingada.com/blog/2009/01/06/join-me-on-ada-lovelace-day/), January 6, 2009]]

	The mechanism was a Pledgebank pledge — the British civic-action site where promises only activated if enough others signed on:

-	> "I will publish a blog post on Tuesday 24th March about a woman in technology whom I admire — but only if 1,000 other people will do the same."[[cite: Charman-Anderson, "Join me on Ada Lovelace Day," January 6, 2009 — the original pledge text]]
+	> "I will publish a blog post on Tuesday 24th March about a woman in technology whom I admire — but only if 1,000 other people will do the same."[[cite: Charman-Anderson, ["Join me on Ada Lovelace Day"](https://findingada.com/blog/2009/01/06/join-me-on-ada-lovelace-day/), January 6, 2009 — the original pledge text]]

-	Nearly two thousand people signed, and on March 24, 2009 the first Ada Lovelace Day filled blogs, newspaper columns and — memorably — the debut of Sydney Padua's webcomic The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage. The day drew coverage in The Guardian, The Telegraph, the BBC and the computing press.[[cite: findingada.com, "History of Ada Lovelace Day"]]
+	Nearly two thousand people signed, and on March 24, 2009 the first Ada Lovelace Day filled blogs, newspaper columns and — memorably — the debut of Sydney Padua's webcomic The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage. The day drew coverage in The Guardian, The Telegraph, the BBC and the computing press.[[cite: findingada.com, ["History of Ada Lovelace Day"](https://findingada.com/about/history-of-ada-lovelace-day/)]]

	[[File:ald-charman-anderson.jpg\|right\|300px\|Suw Charman-Anderson speaking at a Wikimedia UK Ada Lovelace Day event. Photo: Daria Cybulska (WMUK), CC BY-SA 3.0.]]

	# From a Tuesday in March to the second Tuesday of October

-	The following year the observance moved to October and settled into its permanent rule — the second Tuesday of October — which keeps it clear of most holidays and makes the date easy to compute: October 13 in 2026, for instance.[[cite: Ada Lovelace Day observance rule — second Tuesday of October, per Finding Ada and Wikipedia]]
+	The following year the observance moved to October and settled into its permanent rule — the second Tuesday of October — which keeps it clear of most holidays and makes the date easy to compute: October 13 in 2026, for instance.[[cite: Ada Lovelace Day observance rule — second Tuesday of October, per [Finding Ada](https://findingada.com/about/history-of-ada-lovelace-day/) and Wikipedia]]

-	What the day became is bigger than blogging. The Finding Ada network grew around it — an organization devoted to women's visibility in STEM — and the flagship event became Ada Lovelace Day Live!, an evening of science cabaret hosted in London, where women researchers take the stage to present their own work: part lecture series, part variety show, all of it a pointed answer to the conference line-up problem the day was founded to fix.[[cite: findingada.com — ALD Live! event listings]]
+	What the day became is bigger than blogging. The Finding Ada network grew around it — an organization devoted to women's visibility in STEM — and the flagship event became Ada Lovelace Day Live!, an evening of science cabaret hosted in London, where women researchers take the stage to present their own work: part lecture series, part variety show, all of it a pointed answer to the conference line-up problem the day was founded to fix.[[cite: [findingada.com](https://findingada.com) — ALD Live! event listings]]

	[[File:ald-timeline.svg\|center\|700px\|Ada Lovelace Day timeline — from Lovelace's 1843 Notes to the 2009 pledge and the worldwide observance it became.]]

	# How it is observed

	The day's signature activity remains what it was on the first one: telling the world about a woman in STEM whose work deserves to be known. Around that core, Ada Lovelace Day has accumulated rituals:

-	- Edit-a-thons — Wikipedia communities (notably the Women in Red project) run Ada Lovelace Day editing drives to write missing women scientists into the encyclopedia — a tradition with a sly edge, since Ada's own coverage long lagged her influence. Events have run from Wikimedia UK gatherings to edit-a-thons in Ghana, India and New Zealand.[[cite: Wikimedia Commons — Ada Lovelace Day edit-a-thon documentation; Women in Red project]]
+	- Edit-a-thons — Wikipedia communities (notably the Women in Red project) run Ada Lovelace Day editing drives to write missing women scientists into the encyclopedia — a tradition with a sly edge, since Ada's own coverage long lagged her influence. Events have run from Wikimedia UK gatherings to edit-a-thons in Ghana, India and New Zealand.[[cite: [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Ada_Lovelace_Day) — Ada Lovelace Day edit-a-thon documentation; Women in Red project]]
	- Schools and universities — talks, panels and classroom sessions built around women scientists' stories.
	- Workplaces and conferences — company events, lightning talks, and "name the woman whose work you admire" campaigns on social media.
	- ALD Live! — the London flagship, an evening of stage science held each October.

	[[File:ald-ghana-editathon.jpg\|right\|300px\|A Women in Red edit-a-thon held for Ada Lovelace Day in Ghana. Photo: Ruby D-Brown, CC BY-SA 4.0.]]

-	The day's deeper claim is structural: girls choosing subjects and women choosing careers need visible predecessors. A holiday built entirely out of naming is, in that sense, a machine for manufacturing role models — one Lovelace, the woman who saw that a calculating engine could work on more than numbers, would presumably have appreciated the meta-design.[[cite: Finding Ada, "About" — creating new role models to support girls' study choices and women's careers]]
+	The day's deeper claim is structural: girls choosing subjects and women choosing careers need visible predecessors. A holiday built entirely out of naming is, in that sense, a machine for manufacturing role models — one Lovelace, the woman who saw that a calculating engine could work on more than numbers, would presumably have appreciated the meta-design.[[cite: Finding Ada, ["About"](https://findingada.com/about/) — creating new role models to support girls' study choices and women's careers]]

	# Why Lovelace

	The namesake earns her place twice over. In 1843 [[Ada Lovelace]] published her notes on Luigi Menabrea's memoir of [[Charles Babbage]]'s Analytical Engine — notes triple the length of the original, containing the Bernoulli-numbers computation that makes her, by the usual accounting, the first person to publish a program. She also saw further than the machine's builder: where Babbage designed a calculator, Lovelace speculated about engines that could compose music and manipulate symbols.[[cite: Lovelace, Notes A–G on Menabrea's Sketch (1843); see [[Ada Lovelace]] and [[Bernoulli numbers]]]]

	And she is the day's own subject matter: a woman whose work was signed only with initials, under-credited for a century and a half, and rediscovered as the patron saint of everyone the line-up forgot.

	# See also

	- [[Ada Lovelace]] · [[Analytical Engine]] · [[Charles Babbage]] · [[Bernoulli numbers]]
	- [[Grace Hopper]] · [[The first programmers]] · [[Nina Leontyeva]] · [[JoAnn H. Morgan]] · [[Donna Strickland]]
	- [The ALB Honor Roll](/honors/) — the site's tributes to the giants, Lovelace's successors included

	[[Category:Holidays]]
	[[Category:Women in computing]]
	[[Category:Computing]]
	[[Category:People]]