Hanna Wallach has been, and remains, an inspiration to OpenHatch. On Ada Lovelace Day, we pay tribute to the women scientists and engineers who made us who we are.

Hanna is a star computational linguist, currently an assistant professor at UMass Amherst. She has been inspiring people to join free software projects for years. Her outreach work from 2004 to 2007 created institutions that have brought scores of new contributors into free software communities: in that time, she co-founded Debian Women and the GNOME Women’s Summer Outreach Project.

Over the years, Hanna became a celebrity to me.

She was applying computational linguistics just as I was learning it. In 2002, while I was in my first year of studying cognitive science at university, she was porting Dasher to handheld Linux devices.

She was improving Debian just as I considered contributing. In 2004, while I wondered what my first package should be, she had identified cultural problems in Debian that required the creation of Debian Women. Her effort was an immediate success, as you can read in a blog post written by then-teenage Christine Spang:

Two days ago, I was browsing Debian Planet in my RSS aggregator, and stumbled across this entry in Hanna Wallach’s blog. Curiousity piqued, I ventured over to the Debian Women site and browsed around a bit. Not too much later, I checked out #debian-women channel on freenode. A day after that, I am a complete convert (not to mention IRC lurker).

I first had the opportunity to meet Hanna in 2007 when I visited Boston for the GNOME Summit. She and Chris Ball were at a bar named Grendel’s, drinking and chatting. I had just graduated from university studying under Jason Eisner, so I thought I would break the ice by mentioning my advisor. Hanna exploded with energy and told me stories of Jason, in character, asking annoying questions at a linguistics conference. (-:

Hanna has impressed me with her audacity: rather than accept bad culture in open communities like GNOME and Debian, she set out to fix them. She continues to think about gender issues in computer science. Her efforts’ success has meant that now, five years later, Debian Women and GNOME Women’s Outreach continue.

In March 2010, at the Women’s Caucus during the FSF’s LibrePlanet conference, I was lucky enough to catch up with her and explain the OpenHatch project. Today, on behalf of OpenHatch, this post pays tribute to her for her outreach efforts. On a personal level, she is doubly impressive: beyond her outreach efforts in free software, her ongoing academic work in statistical machine learning is a dream I once had (and sometimes still have) for myself.

Image credit: cool sunglasses by-sa Mika.