Virtual Development Center

UC Berkeley's Virtual Development Center

The Berkeley VDC Team at the VDC Conference in Palo Alto, April 2002

UC Berkeley, under the aegis of the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS) and in cooperation with the Berkeley Institute for Design (BID - a new interdisciplinary research and teaching center spanning engineering, anthropology, architecture, business, and art practice) and the EECS Department, will initiate a Virtual Development Center site for undergraduate and graduate students.

What is the VDC? -- Created in September 1999, the Institute for Women and Technology's (IWT) Virtual Development Center (VDC) is an industry supported partnership of universities and communities aimed at bringing women's genius to the technology of the future.

The VDC creates a framework in which non-technical women from many communities join with female university students and faculty and female computer scientists and engineers in industry in the design and creation of useful new technologies. We hope to transform engineering education so that more women from broad populations pursue technical careers. In doing so, we want to train future computer scientists and engineers to routinely bring broad human perspectives and involvement to their projects. Finally, we want to generate projects that build technology that is inspired by and wanted by women.

Development Centers
The VDC is comprised of geographically distributed development centers situated in colleges and universities across the United States. Each development center creates an integrated and highly collaborative environment in which diverse women, non-technical and technical, are inspired to voice needs and ideas and to demand useful technology. It is through student projects at local development centers that these ideas are brought to concrete reality.