When a person is in sudden danger, people close to him can find out his whereabouts; rescuing women from various forms of harassment; students, job seekers and teachers together create information platforms equipped with information, notes or materials. The three concepts mentioned above are the concepts of the final winners. From 35 teams to 10, then 3 from those 10 teams were declared the final winners.
The winners were announced on May 3 (Monday) at 4 pm through an online webinar titled ‘Bridging Industry-Academia to Increase Participation of Women in ICT Sector: Challenges and Scope’ organized by Bangladesh Open Source Network -BDOSN. The winners were announced by Muhammad Zafar Iqbal, Professor, Shahjalar University of Science and Technology and President of BDOSN.
BDOSN General Secretary Munir Hasan, Biz-Engagement Lead BDApps Md. Altamish Nabil, members of the jury and the winning team were also present at that time in the webinar.
‘Watcher 24-7’ was declared as the Champion, whereas ‘Querty’ and ‘Null-pointer Exceptions’ were declared as the First Runner-up and Second Runner-up respectively. They are the students of Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology, International Islamic University Chittagong and Islamic University of Technology sequentially.
The main organizer of the mobile app competition for girls is a joint venture of BDOSN’s ESDG Project and National App Store of Bangladesh BDApps. In this competition, learned Judges were Faisal Ahmed Head of Innovation and Branded Digital Services Robi, Md. Iftekhar Alam Ishaq Deputy CTO SSL Wireless, Kazi Hasan Robin Joint General Secretary BDOSN.
On the occasion, Prof. Zafar Iqbal said, if we want to take the country forward, we have to bring a change in mentality. Boys, as well as girls, need to be given opportunities to move forward. If we cannot do that, then the country, the society, the state will fall behind. It is possible to inspire girls with hard work by saying “you can”. If given a little chance, they can give much more to the country.
Noting that the participation of girls in the IT sector is very little, Munir Hasan said that their share in the IT sector is less than 13 percent and IT entrepreneurs are less than 1 percent. Now it is slowly changing. I think the number will increase even if the news of the girls’ involvement with academia and the various events reaches them.
Analyzing the variety of questions they have in the workshops for girls, Altamish Nabil mentioned that the interest of women in this sector is increasing.
The program was conducted by Kazi Hasan Robin, Joint General Secretary of BDOSN.
