With the expanding world of social media, there are more ways than ever for professionals to connect and converse with each other online. And that’s well and good, but some still desire to forge relationships with people in person. The Anita Borg Institute wants to help women in technology take it to the real world, get to know each other and form alliances that will pay off well into the future.

Jody Mahoney, VP of Business Development and Corporate Partnerships at the Anita Borg Institute (ABI), said she’s seen magic happen for members of the ABI community. She told Jeff Frick (@JeffFrick), cohost of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, “Someone will come in who’s an undergraduate or a master’s level student, and they’ll say, ‘Hmm, I don’t know.’ And I’ve seen people convince them to stay in, and they’ve gone on, and I’ll meet up with them in ABI partner companies.”

Community service

The showcase event for ABI is the annual Grace Hopper Conference. Mahoney said that because the conference receives so many brilliant submissions from women technologists every year that it is forced to turn away, ABI has decided to host mini copycat events in other locations.

Called GHC/1 conferences, “These are one or one-and-a-half-day events. So we’ve got them planned, and we’re doing one in Africa, we’re doing one in London in June,” she said. The events are modeled around the Grace Hopper conference, so, “There’s a call for participation, or a hackathon, or some technical event.”

Mahoney said the goal is to allow for networking, an exchange of content, and perhaps the forging of lifelong relationships.

Watch the full video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of the Anita Borg Institute’s Women of Vision Awards 2016.

Photo by SiliconANGLE