Please vote for these #WomenInTech

I'm very excited to announce that not just one but TWO of my friends that are #womenintech have had their initiatives nominated for very prestigious awards from the United Nations.

The World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) Prizes for 2019 are now being voted on.

Courtney Ehrlichman and the rest of the founding team of RoadBotics are nominated in Catagory 5. Their tech will help transform the way that we manage our roads and road repair. The benefits will be tremendous domestically, but I think they can be truly transforming in developing countries. Go to their site and learn more about their tech and please consider voting for them in Cat 5.

Melissa Sassi has had her non-profit MentorNations nominated in Catagory 4. I'm particularly excited to encourage you to learn more about this project, and in Melissa's own words, here is how she describes the program that she started and funds out of her IBM salary:

"We believe digital literacy is a human right. We are a youth-led organization that teaches digital skills, coding, robotics, and IoT in the developing world (mainly Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Tunisia). We also fund young people to start their own tech companies and incubate them to become even more successful than they could become on their own."

Even if you don't vote for these two amazing projects (and why wouldn't you? ;-), I still encourage you to go to the UN Site and vote for and learn about many of the exicting projects out there around the globe. Here are the voting instructions:

How to vote?

1.    Go to the following link: https://www.itu.int/net4/wsis/stocktaking/Prizes/2019/Vote

2.    Register as a new user

3.    Validate your email address

4.    Log in to your account

5.    Go to the “Voting Form”

6.    Vote in each of 18 categories (only then is your vote valid!)

#6 is critical. And I won't lie, this does take a little while to get through all of the Catagories. But I think about all the work and all the time that all of these people put into these initiatives, and I realize what a small drop of effort it really is to take the time out to vote here. And here's the good news, the site saves your earlier votes, so even if you need to shut down your computer or go off to other things, you don't have to start the voting process all over again.

I sure hope you'll consider this!