And not just how much they’re paying—although that matters, too—but who’s paying. Who are you inviting to your hackathon? Who’s getting access to your mailing list? Remember:

You are selling me. I am your product.

As the overwrought adage goes, “If you’re not paying, you are the product.” As a hacker, I am the product, and you’re selling me, as a potential hire, to the sponsors. It’s your job, then, to make sure that I’m glad I’m the product.

Are you selling me to the companies that I want to be sold to? Am I going to get an awesome internship out of this, or just a bunch of spam from a crappy company that I don’t care about? Think hard about this before accepting a sponsor “just because they pay.”

While we’re at it: Are you selling me well? Do I get an opportunity to show off to recruiters and dev evangelists? Or will I get cut from the final demos? Will I have to battle 600 other hackers in order for my hack to be seen by anyone?

If I’m not happy about being the product, I’m not going to be happy about being at your hackathon.

Your sponsors (usually) determine your mentors.

There are exceptions—hackNY, for instance, doesn’t link its sponsorship to its mentors—but for the most part, sponsors are the only companies who get to send mentors (engineers or dev evangelists) to the hackathon.

Who will your sponsors send in? Who will be helping hackers at 3 AM? (Will anyone be helping hackers at 3 AM?) Will they give entertaining API demos and helpful tech talks? Or will we all be clawing our eyes out after yet another PowerPoint presentation?

Mentors often set the tone of the hackathon. Sponsors choose the mentors.

So what makes a good sponsor? 

In addition to strong mentors, you should be looking for a few things in a sponsor:

• Interesting APIs. Will hackers want to use their APIs? Or are we going to sit through an API demo that no one’s going to care about? Is the API open, so that we can keep using it after the hackathon? And will it be affordable for a side project? (Example: Twilio’s phone APIs are versatile and applicable to a wide variety of hacks; sometimes they give away free credit for hackers.)
• Internship opportunities. Is this company hiring? Do they have internship opportunities? Do they have an internship program? (Example: Microsoft has a terrific internship program, but people rarely want to use their APIs at a hackathon.)
• Good swag. This is, I think, the least important consideration–but nice swag (soft tee shirts, clever stickers, attractive mugs) can be icing on top of a great hackathon. (Example: Github has some of the best swag ever, but they generally don’t take interns and I’ve never seen them send mentors to a hackathon.)

Here’s the bottom line: You choose the sponsors. If you cast your net wide enough, you don’t have to accept every company that wants to sponsor—so you can choose good sponsors, get good mentors, and have happy hackers.

I’m Tess Rinearson, hackathon addict and occasional computer science student. I’ve worked at Microsoft, Valve and a couple of other startups, and in a week I’ll be an engineering intern at Medium. If you liked this post, you might want to follow me on Twitter or post it to Hacker News.

People often say that success happens when preparation meets luck. It’s trite, but in my case it was true.

In spring 2011–well after most college students have settled their summer internships–my high school computer science teacher quietly pulled me aside and asked if I was interested in an internship doing web development at Valve. I said yes, though I wasn’t a gamer and didn’t know anything about Valve, and she passed my resume along to the company. A few weeks later, they interviewed me. A few days later, they gave me an offer.

I thought about it, briefly…

…and then I said yes.

I’m not entirely sure what happened on Valve’s end, but it was a big summer for them (with a particularly ambitious summer sale and a new website for Team Fortress 2, among other things). So one of their engineers decided that he could use some more fingers on front-end web development, and he decided to hire the cheapest talent he could find.

Which, ultimately, was me. Lucky me!

I was lucky in a bunch of ways:

My high school CS teacher was looped in to the tech scene and was thoughtful enough to loop me in, too.

And, in the first place, I had a CS teacher in high school.

And I was graduating in 2011, which happened to be the same summer that one of Valve’s engineers decided he wanted a high school intern.(I later got lucky again, because he ended up being a great mentor.)

But I had also seized the opportunities that my luck provided: So I was also prepared in a bunch of ways.

I had taken all of the web development work I could find, ranging from interning at a Seattle startup (which was another stroke of luck, in it’s own way) to working on websites for my teachers.

I had tackled a number of side projects, including one that had landed me and some buddies on Time’s tech blog.

And I had done two semesters of independent study in JavaScript, and had taken a class with a heavy web development emphasis. I was prepared—especially compared to most of my CS classmates.

Most of them had shied away from the front end, I think because it was too “soft.” (Someone once referred to it as “girl work.”) Subsequently, for every project I did in high school, I wrote the CSS, HTML and JavaScript—at least.

But that relatively deep knowledge (which, by the way, wasn’t even that deep!) distinguished me from my peers.

And that was how my “girl work” got me a job at a video game company.

My time at Valve

…was fantastic.

I was doing front end development, which was clearly grunt work for the people I was working with. But it was the right work for me—I learned a lot about all kinds of things. I learned how to take a designer’s meticulous Photoshop file and make it real, down to the pixel. I learned how to use jQuery. I branched out, and learned a little bit of database design.

I enjoyed my coworkers immensely. I looked up to all of them, a lot. I gained an appreciation for the gaming industry. I gained a couple of pounds, from all the free food.

I screwed up occasionally.

When Team Fortress 2 went Free-to-Play, a site that I had worked on was unveiled. But I’d forgotten to put one of the big images up on the CDN (a faster way to distribute lots of static data to lots of people). In the Free-to-Play frenzy, tons of people hit the site, and with the image in the wrong place, the page basically didn’t load.

My mentor helped me fix it. Everyone forgave me.

I learned a lot.

How you can get an internship at Valve

I get email about this. I generally like getting email, but I get a lot of email about this.

It’s always nice email: “Hello,” it says. “I am an immensely promising-sounding high school student, and I’m just dying to intern at Valve this summer. Can you tell me how to get an internship at Valve, or pass on my resume?” The resume is always great.

And while it’s always nice to get email, I hate replying to this email, because the honest answer is that you probably can’t.

At least, not with Valve. Valve just isn’t hiring interns right now—but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t other terrific companies out there who are looking for interns.

There are. There are plenty of them, ranging from little startups to huge corporations. A lot of them are more than happy to hire high school students.

Go get ‘em. Reach out. Figure out what distinguishes you.

And keep trying.

This post was also posted on Medium. If you have anything to say, please feel free to reach out to me via Twitter or email (<myname>@gmail.com).

Unfortunately, many students (largely freshmen!) who will be well-qualified for an internship in May are intimidated by the process and decide that they’re not ready. This, of course, contributes to the original supply-and-demand issue!

Here are some thoughts on how the recruiting process could be more freshman-friendly.

1. Keep your applications open at least through winter break. A lot of freshmen begin their internship search over winter break, especially since they may not have the data structures/algorithms skills to pass a technical interview until they complete their first semester. Winter break also allows people some breathing room to figure out what they want to do.

Many programs like hackNY and KPCB Fellows could be great programs for freshmen, but they close their applications before many freshmen begin looking for internships! I understand that programs would like to start getting their intern classes together in the fall, so perhaps organizers could instead say something like, “We’ll give some preference to applications submitted before December 15, but we will be accepting applications through January 15.”

2. Let students use other students as references. If you’ve never had a tech internship before, you don’t have any prior managers or mentors for references. If you attend a large research university, you probably don’t know your professors very well. For many freshmen, it’s a real challenge to find good references!

One solution is to let students use other students as references. Obviously there are a lot of potential pitfalls here, but students can sometimes assess each other better than anyone else, especially when they have to do team projects or go to hackathons. I’d like to think that I could give a strong and honest assessment of anyone I’ve gone to a hackathon with!

3. Consider using coding challenges instead of technical interviews. The first time you do a technical interview, it is a totally bizarre and foreign experience. Technical interviews bear little resemblance to anything that happens in a computer science course, and they don’t really represent what happens in an internship, either.

Fortunately, most tech internships don’t go quite this far.

Coding challenges can be a better alternative. They’re more similar to programming homework, so you can avoid “false negatives” (i.e. people who get tripped up by the format of a technical interview, rather than the content).

Any other ideas? Let me know in the comments.

P.S. If you are a freshman looking to get started on an internship search, I strongly recommend Alexey Komissarouk’s Brief Guide to Tech Internships, which, incidentally, is my source for the delightful comic up there.

I’m Tess Rinearson, a sophomore at Carnegie Mellon’s School of Computer Science. I’ve interned at Microsoft, Valve, and a couple of startups. Come summer 2013, I’ll be at Obvious Corporation. If you liked this post, you might want to follow me on Twitter.

Now, I am by no means an expert on computer science education. But I, along with several of my friends, started programming in middle school. I’m grateful for that. I truly think that that was the right time to be introduced.

Unfortunately, not many schools teach computer science as part of their formal curriculum. I couldn’t find statistics on middle school CS, but, at the high school level, only 27% of American high schools teach rigorous computer science courses. I’m sure the number for middle schools is stunningly small.

But you don’t need a “formal” introduction to CS. Really, a homegrown introduction to computer science is just as good (if not better). I want to share some ideas on introducing your daughter/son/sister/brother/niece/nephew/cousin/friend to computer science. (These were all suggestions that I made via email to a family friend who wanted ideas on how to get his 12 year old son involved with computer science.)

Ideas for Homegrown Computer Science

Lego robots. Many of my friends who are now studying computer science in college started out with Lego Mindstorm robots. The physical aspect is really satisfying for a lot of kids, though I always preferred programming to building. There are a variety of ways that these robots can be programmed–I first programmed them using a friendly, point-and-click graphical language, but many kids will quickly get frustrated with that and will want to move on to something like NQC (“not quite C”), a straight-forward imperative language.

Programming languages for kids. There are graphical programming languages out there, like Scratch or Alice, which are designed to help kids learn how to program in an unintimidating way. Google’s App Inventor, which is now maintained by MIT, is another good graphical option–it lets anyone with a basic understanding of programming concepts (like loops) build an Android app. App Inventor might lend itself to more tangible projects than Scratch or Alice.

Building websites. Building websites with HTML and CSS (and eventually JavaScript) is a great option for middle school students. I think its especially great because you don’t need to download any SDK’s or compilers or VM’s or anything. Literally, all you need to get started is a browser and a text editor (Notepad, anyone?). The barrier to entry is so low, and the possibilities for projects or goals are endless. I got started with HTML and CSS when I was 12, because I wanted to make a presidential campaign site for “Tofu for President, 2008.” (I was an avid vegetarian at the time.)

Online courses. Some of the more mature or ambitious kids might be interested in taking an online course, such as MIT’s Introduction to Computer Science and Programming, or Coursera’s Learn to Program: The Fundamentals. I offer this suggestion with some hesitation; I’ve never taken an online course successfully. But I know some people love them, and I imagine that a precocious middle school student could get a lot out of an online course.

Codecademy, Khan Academy or other interactive online programs. In the past year or two, websites like Codecademy and Khan Academy have sprung up. These sites mix interactive lessons and in-browser programming, which means that the barrier to entry is very low! I’ve never used either of these sites, but I imagine that this is a great, low-key option, and I’m jealous that it wasn’t around when I was learning to program.

Screen cap from Khan Academy

Of course, there are many other possibilities. I hope you’ll share some in the comments! These are just a few ideas, mostly inspired by my own experience. I hope you find them helpful.

So why does this matter?

Why Middle School Students Should Be Introduced to Computer Science

The world needs more computer scientists. 1.4 million computing related jobs will be added to the U.S. economy by 2018, many more than the number of computer scientists graduating before then. And not only do computer scientists play an important role in innovation, but they’re also compensated to match. As any current CS student can tell you, the market is already fierce–demand for programmers far outstrips supply.

An education in CS opens doors in a wide variety of other disciplines. The world is becoming increasingly computational. In fields ranging from biology to linguistics to political science, people are finding that computational skills give them an edge. A few years ago, a CS professor at a well-known public research university explained gleefully that all the biology researchers were coming to his department for help. Simple computer science skills will soon be critical in many fields.

Computer science education should start in middle school, because that is when kids start to get hooked. Middle school is when schools start offering electives to students. This is when schools begin separating students into gifted math programs. Many students will wonder, “Should I take orchestra or Spanish?” Students need to know that computer science is an option, too.

Students who start studying CS early are less intimidated when they get to college. I’ve addressed the concept of “technical entitlement” before, but it’s a sad truth that college CS courses often have a certain macho, know-it-all culture associated with them. To a newcomer, this can be quite intimidating. Students who come into college with a bit of CS knowledge will be more likely to hold their own, recognize the know-it-alls and the phonies for who they are, and will be more likely to continue studying CS in the future.

I speak from my own experience, as well. Many of my friends who now study CS in college started out playing with lego robots, or coding MySpace themes, when they were in middle school. My own positive experiences with simple web development, which started when I was in middle school, led me to become a CS major.

I’m grateful that I was introduced to computer science when I was still in middle school. I still think that it was the perfect time. I love CS, and I want to see more students study it. I hope you’ll find my suggestions useful!

I’m Tess Rinearson, a sophomore at Carnegie Mellon’s School of Computer Science. I’ve interned at Microsoft, Valve Software, and CloudMine.me. Come May 2013, I’ll be interning at The Obvious Corporation. If you liked this post, you may want to follow me on Twitter or post this to Hacker News.

One such hunch is the idea that productivity begets productivity. That is, you’re more productive when you feel productive, when you’re confident in your productivity. And when you don’t feel productive, it’s hard to get yourself out of that rut.

That seemed like a reasonable supposition to me, so I decided to apply it to my own life. I started using Github to manage the coursework for one of my classes.

Now, I probably should have been using git anyways, but I decided to put everything up on a (private!) repository for one main reason–Github graphs. I wanted to see a visualization of just how much work I’d done.

It became incredibly satisfying to see changes to these graphs, no matter how small they were, as I progressed through projects for this course. Sometimes I’d catch myself spending a couple extra minutes here or there admiring the graphs–and while it could be argued that I was wasting my time on this, I realized that my assignments for the course were being turned in earlier and more completely. Seeing the graphs on Github made me more confident in my productivity, and so I found that I was being more productive–at least in that course.

So as far as I’m concerned, Eliot is right: Productivity begets productivity.

There is a downside to this, of course: My productivity in another course, which I can’t sync with Github, plummeted.

This has raised some more questions: How will I measure my productivity in non-programming courses? How will I measure my productivity in frustrating theory courses where I might spend more time just ruminating than anything else?

If you have any suggestions, let me know in the comments, or over Twitter. Now, back to work.

Those were some of the headlines after the failure of an “experiment” in the Marines to introduce women into their infantry officer course. For the first time, the Marines admitted women–just two of them–to its grueling Infantry Officer Training Program. They both failed, one of them on the very first day, and the media was all over it. But what none of these headlines mention is that 26 of the 107 of men also flunked out–on the first day alone. That’s to say nothing of the others who end up dropping out as the grueling course continues.

In other words, any two men could have very easily failed as well. But instead, it’s easy to walk away with the impression that women can’t cut it as Infantry Officers in the Marines.

This is the problem with underrepresentation: Anyone in a minority suddenly becomes representative of that whole minority.

This is bad for many reasons. For one thing, this is how stereotypes start.

Underrepresentation also means that a lot of people are misrepresented. To use a personal example, I know there are many women in computer science who would hate to be represented by me. I have particular views on things, and many women in CS agree with them, but plenty don’t.

Additionally, underrepresentation puts immense pressure on people in minority groups. One of my friends told me that she struggled a bit when she started taking computer science classes, and felt so ashamed that she thought about switching majors: “I thought, ‘I am letting down women in computer science.’”

Can you even imagine a man thinking that? “I did poorly on that last test, so I am letting down men in computer science.”

But, of course, this isn’t limited to women. A male, African American friend told me that he drove himself crazy trying to be a strong representative in computer science before he realized he just had to do the best he could.

And that’s all you can do–try your best, and hope that you are recognized as an individual rather than an unsuspecting representative. And, conversely, recognize that you can’t draw reasonable conclusions about a whole group from just a few people.

To use a favorite refrain of science students: Sample size matters. A woman may have flunked out on the first day of Infantry Officer Training, but so did 26 men.

I’m Tess Rinearson, a sophomore at Carnegie Mellon‘s School of Computer Science. I like to write about a lot of things, but I especially like writing about tech and feminism. Even better if I can do both at the same time.

If you liked this post, you might want to follow me on Twitter (@temiri) or post this to Hacker News. 

Links on the Marines:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2012/10/16/163009028/second-female-marine-fails-grueling-infantry-officer-course

http://www.forbes.com/sites/katiedrummond/2012/10/16/marine-corps-women/

http://www.stripes.com/news/marine-corps/first-women-drop-out-of-marine-officer-infantry-training-1.193228

http://www.businessinsider.com/biggest-challengesd-facing-women-in-the-marine-infantry-officer-course-2012-10?op=1

http://www.kpbs.org/news/2012/oct/04/first-female-marines-take-combat-leadership-test/

Why?

Firstly, there are financial benefits. The award itself includes modest prize money as well as a brand new laptop. But more significantly, many schools offer merit scholarships explicitly for winners of the Aspirations Award. One girl explained that her school doubled her scholarship money when she told them she was an Aspirations Award winner. (The NCWIT website has a full list of schools that give automatic scholarships to award winners.)

Here’s a totally posed picture of me meeting Peter Lee, Corporate Vice President of Microsoft Research, at an NCWIT event. (Thanks @ruthef for the photo!)

Then there are professional benefits. Several award winners have cited the Aspirations Award as a key part of landing interviews and jobs. Some actually connected to employers through NCWIT’s broad professional network, but others have simply benefitted from the boost to their resumes. One girl who interned at a prestigious company her sophomore year explained:

“Differentiation is huge… When you’re interviewing after just a year of college, very few people have done anything worth mentioning. Having a recognizable award on your resume is pretty alluring to companies. It proves that some other large body sees you as a worthwhile investment.”

But I think that the most important benefit is community-based. NCWIT has done a tremendous job of growing a real community out of the award-winners. There aren’t that many young women in tech–this feels especially true in high school–but having a supportive peer group is critical. The NCWIT community serves as a safe space for young women to ask for advice on everything from impatient interviewers to sexist classmates.

Lastly, I want to stress that there is no real reason to not apply. The award is selective but winning is very possible–there’s both a National Award as well as a myriad of regional “affiliate” awards. When I applied just two years ago, there wasn’t an affiliate award for my hometown. But now there’s one in every single state, as well as Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands.

Additionally, the Aspirations Award selects for interests as well as achievement. Some of the winners I’ve met were doing groundbreaking research in high school but others had mostly expressed interest in computing through attending camps or leading clubs.

Applications for the 2012 Aspirations Award close in less than two weeks–October 31–but that’s still plenty of time to fill out the application and spread the word. It is incredibly worthwhile to apply. The benefits are both diverse and significant. Don’t let something like a lack of experience hold you back.

I’m Tess Rinearson, a sophomore at Carnegie Mellon University. I was a National Aspirations Award winner in 2011. If you apply for this award, please let me know! If you think the Aspirations Award is important, please spread the word and post to Hacker News and/or Reddit. And if you liked this post, you might want to follow me on Twitter.

Now, I’ve taken my fair share of shit from people. I’ve had people call me a bitch. I’ve had people call me whiny and ignorant. A stranger once aggressively diagnosed me with a mental condition. One of my peers used to keep a blog about how much she hated me.

But this? This really stung. P. was a good friend of mine, and I really trusted him. I tried to laugh it off.

“Good one,” I said. After all, we were talking about my Microsoft internship. Microsoft has a program for women and underrepresented minorities, but I wasn’t in it. I was a regular old SDE intern.

But P. wasn’t joking. “I know it sounds bad,” he said. And then he went on to explain exactly how I would not have gotten that same offer had I been a man.

I chewed on it for a while. In a logical place in my head, I knew he was probably only saying it because he, too, had applied for that same position–before being rejected. But in my heart I worried that he was right.

I often feel like a fluke. In fact, I was worried that, with this particular internship offer, I was a really big fluke. When I walked into my interview in Redmond, my interviewer looked slightly askance at me and explained that, for that position, he hadn’t interviewed anyone so young before. (I was a freshman.) I struggled a bit in the interview, but I pulled through in the end.

Maybe.

I had my doubts: What the hell was I doing as an SDE? It seemed like all of the other SDE interns were going to be vastly more qualified than I. Maybe I was a mistake. Maybe P. was right.

But I also knew that these feelings weren’t uncommon: Plenty of people deal with “impostor syndrome.”

Impostor syndrome is the feeling that everyone else is more qualified than you are. It’s the feeling that you’re a phony, a fake, and at any moment you’re going to be exposed. But somehow, amazingly, you keep fooling everyone.

Of course, it’s not really that amazing. You’re not a phony, and you’re not fooling anyone because you’re not faking anything. You’re totally qualified to have that job, or that position in that prestigious school, or to have won that award.

But impostor syndrome takes those accomplishments and replaces them with a sense of doubt. Impostor syndrome often leads to people applying for fewer scholarships and internships and reaching for fewer promotions. If you don’t deserve what you already have, how could you possibly ask for more?

Imposter syndrome flourishes on its own. But, sadly, I see people reinforcing it in one another.

Impostor syndrome is reinforced whenever someone suggests that someone else’s achievements are a not a result of their ability, but instead have happened thanks to other, unrelated qualities.

Let me put that in simpler terms: You can reinforce imposter syndrome by suggesting that someone doesn’t deserve their accomplishments.

To cite an example, from, of all places, The Onion*: “You’re only giving this speech because you’re Latino.” Or, a more personal one, ”You only got into this school because you’re a girl.” Or, like P. said: “You only got that internship because you’re a woman.”

So, instead, how do you fight impostor syndrome?

Tell other people about it. Praise your friends for their successes. Say, “You so deserve that promotion/scholarship/interview offer.” (Someone said this to me recently, and it was one of the most gratifying things I had heard all year.) Gently correct your friends if they underrepresent themselves. Offer to help read resumes and make sure people are self-promoting. If you’re interviewing, don’t ask questions which make people “rate” their skills.**

Be aware.

I’m Tess Rinearson, a sophomore at Carnegie Mellon University. I’ve interned at Microsoft, CloudMine and Valve Software, and I feel like a fluke a lot of the time. If you liked this post, or maybe even if you didn’t, you should follow me on Twitter or post it to Hacker News.

*I know people are going to give me shit for using the Onion as an example here. “Don’t you recognize satire!” they’ll say. I do recognize satire. I also recognize that the Onion shows that this is a common perception in our society.

**Thanks to the Geek Feminism Wiki for many of these excellent suggestions.

Too often, marketers and product designers think that they can slap some pink on a product and women will flock to it. Remember Dell’s “Della” line for women? Or Bic for Her, the totally unnecessary ”pen for women” (and its ensuing Amazon reviews)?

But let’s be honest: It’s not really a problem that the iPhone 5 doesn’t come in pink. It is a problem that it probably won’t fit nicely into any of my pockets. (Fashion these days seems to dictate that women’s pants pockets are impossibly tiny. My iPhone 4 is bad enough already. Lengthening it just a little bit makes a difference.)

These are some of my roomiest pant-pockets.

It also sucks that all of the flagship quality phones are getting larger and larger. (“It’s one of those ‘mine is bigger than yours’ things,” said one of my (male) friends.) If I want a smaller phone, I’m going to have to settle for a less powerful processor and a less capable camera. This isn’t because manufacturers can’t fit those tools into a smaller phone; in the case of the iPhone 5, they have heavily emphasized the fact that it has less volume than the iPhone 4. But instead of making a more compact phone, they make an effectively bigger one.

Product people, I know you want women to buy your stuff. After all, they are becoming the most important demographic in tech. So stop trying to pander to women by making everything pink and feminine.

Instead, win women over by making flagship-quality products that fits into our hands and our pockets and our lives.

Or, more generally: Solve real problems.

I’m Tess Rinearson, a sophomore at Carnegie Mellon’s School of Computer Science. I like hackathons, feminists and coffee. 

If you liked this post, you should follow me on Twitter or post it to Hacker News.

Circle of Six is an app designed to let women reach out to their trusted friends (their “circle of six”) with only a couple of taps. It’s a great idea, at least on the surface. But I was bothered by a single line running along the bottom of every page on their site:

“Take the Facebook pledge: ‘I won’t let violence happen in my circle.’”

That sentence gave me the shivers. It’s one step back from victim-blaming. It feels like victim’s-friend-blaming.

It puts the onus on women to prevent rape.

Now, victim-blaming is a tricky thing. On the one hand, there’s this idea that rapists should be the ones responsible (well, duh!). But on the other, there’s a practical concern: Can a more consistent connection to your circle prevent rape? Maybe. I don’t know. (Though I’ll admit that, as a college student, it’s hard to imagine any of my friends using this app.)

I might be more open to the ideas behind Circle of Six if there weren’t better alternatives. But there are “hacks” which put the burden on the perpetrators instead. One of my favorites is the “Red/Yellow Card Project,” which encourages women (and men!) to give red and yellow cards to men (and women!) who behave inappropriately. Wonderfully, there’s also a green card to give people props for good behavior. It’s completely analog right now, but I can also imagine ways in which it could be digitized.

The great thing about the Red/Yellow Card Project is that it holds people responsible for their actions. The only people held accountable by Circle of Six are… friends. This is not how it should be.

The team behind Circle of Six is obviously thoughtful and accomplished. In fact, one of the developers wrote that, “The most important thing for us was to provide a useful tool that doesn’t victim blame.” And they may be taking a more pragmatic approach than the Red/Yellow Card Project. But Circle of Six’s pledge still makes me feel icky inside.

Still, that might just be me. Circle of Six has received a fair amount of positive attention. So tell me, in the comments or on Twitter: How do you feel about Circle of Six? Is it victim blaming, or is it a smart preventative measure?

[Note: Earlier I said that this app was released "recently;" it was actually released early this year. This is not news.]

I’m Tess Rinearson, a sophomore computer science student at Carnegie Mellon University. I’m a full-time feminist and a part-time idealist. I blog about tech and women, sometimes at the same time. If you liked this post, or maybe even if you didn’t, you may want to follow me on Twitter.