in this new post to his site, Bradley Holt - an organizer of the Northeast PHP Conference - looks at one of the difficult struggles for events right now...getting more women to submit to speak at conferences.

We opened up the call for papers for the Northeast PHP Conference about a week ago. Guessing by the names, it appears that we have a very low number of women who have submitted talks.

He includes some quotes from this post by Courtney Stanton about how she was able to get such a high female submission rate for her event. The basic idea was to offer "consulting" services on their ideas and drafts of presentations to help encourage and bolster their confidence in the event. Bradley is offering to do the same for this year's conference, for anyone - not just women.

The Northeast PHP Conference is being held in Cambridge, Massachusetts August 16th through 18th

As Lineke Kerckhoffs-Willems has posted to the PHP Women site today, the Ada Initiative, an organization that supports women in technology, is looking for donations to help improve the work they can do for women all around the world.

Over a year ago I first heard about the Ada Initiative, an organisation to support women in open technology and culture. This is exactly why PHPWomen was founded, only we narrow it down to women within the PHP community, because that is our level of expertise. However, we are an organisation based on volunteers and therefore, we often struggle with finding the time to do more. Luckily, The Ada Initiative isn't based on volunteers, but on people working full time to reach their goal, our goal. We share their vision: "a world in which women are equal and welcome participants in open source software, open data, and open culture" and therefore we support the organisation.

As they are a non-profit, they can use all of the financial support they get to help further their cause. There's one catch to donating - the campaign ends tomorrow, October 31st. If you want to contribute to the cause (they've already collected over $73,000) you can do it here.

We know you care about women in the PHP community, and technology as a whole, as much as we do. Donating to the Ada Initiative is an easy way to help and our community is based around helping others. Will you donate too?

The DevHell podcast has posted their latest episode - Episode #21, "The Grace Hopper Rape Whistle":

We recorded this episode just a few days after #20, because we were able to get Elizabeth Naramore as a super-special secret guest! She talks to us about Codeconnexx, an open source tech and life skills conference in Indianapolis Nov 8-9. We also talked a lot about getting women to submit talks to conferences, including the success that Jan Lenhardt has had in this area with JSConfEU. We then get into Chris's experiments with JS testing, and what we think of App.net from a developer perspective.

You can listen to this latest episode either via the in-page player, by downloading the mp3 or by subscribing to their feed.

In the newest post in their "Chicks that Rip" series of podcasts spotlighting women in technology, Elizabeth Naramore interviews Elizabeth Smith, a member of the PHP community about her involvement in a few different projects (and her work).

[In this episode] Elizabeth Naramore interviews Elizabeth Smith of mojoLive about working on PHP for Windows and starting phpmentoring.org

They talk about her move from dance to programming, the work she does on PHP and Windows, issues she sees in the PHP core code, the PHP Mentoring project and some of her own advice for working moms. She also mentions the CoApp, an open source package manager for Windows.

As a part of this year's Zend/PHP Conference and Expo (2008), the PHP Women group hosted an unconference session. They talk about the session in this new post to their site.

At ZendCon this year, Juliette Reinders-Folmer of phpwomen.org ran a session in the unconference entitled "Women in IT". In this session she invited the attendees (a fairly even mix of the genders) to discuss various aspects of women working in the male-dominated IT industry, and specifically in PHP. We were lucky enough (thanks Paul Reinheimer of php|architect!) to get the session recorded.

You can download the audio from the phpwomen.org website and check out the forum entry to continue the discussion. Their post also includes several talking points concerning women in the IT industry and how PHP Women can help.

On the PHPWomen site, there's an interview with two of the founding members of the group - Ligaya Turmelle and Elizabeth Naramore.

I'm pleased to present the first of many planned interviews for the phpWomen site. I am starting the series at the beginning. My two victims, er...guests, started the frenzy that has become phpWomen.org.

The questions vary from where they went to college out to what they expected from the PHP Women group and what they see of the future of PHP. Check out the full interview for the complete details.

It seems the "PHP Women" group is getting support from all over, including from this post on the PHPClasses.org site.

This post lets you know about a new initiative to bring together the women that work with PHP throughout the world.

It explains how spreading the word is vital for the success of communities of specific interests. The article also tells what you can do to help.

Manuel Lemos talks about the group, the formation of it, and who it tries to appeal to. He also gives a suggestion or two of how to help the group really get started (spread the word). There's also a link to the user group information on the PHPClasses.org site, as well as a link to the "Delegations" section of the official PHP Women site.

A new group is being proposed in this post from Ben Ramsey, this one from Ligaya Turmelle, and these comments from Elizabeth Naramore - a gathering of the female PHP programmers out there.

From Ligaya and Elizabeth:

We started talking about the number of women in PHP world. Elizabeth Naramore and I know we aren't the only ones (between the 2 of us we could count ~10 other women in the PHP world). There have got to be more then that. So if you are a woman and a PHP developer - stand up and be counted.

We think it would be a great idea to start a women's group for PHP programmers and we want to know who's with us. We've all noticed the lack of females at conferences, user groups, and in print - let's get together and change those numbers, shall we?

If you're interested in this kind of group, you can send off an email to Elizabeth at elizabeth _at_ naramore _dot_ net or just post a comment to this entry over on Ligaya's blog.

The Zend Developer Zone also has their perspective posted today, talking about how the idea was formed and the above discussions on the topic.

Elizabeth Smith has also shared a few thoughts with the community on the "women of PHP" idea.