wConnect: Cultivating a Landscape of Online Places for a Developmental Learning Community

We describe our work on seeding and building a developmental learning community for recruiting and retaining women in educational programs and careers related to computing and information science (CIS). Our approach is explicitly participatory: we work with young women to better understand how they view and approach CIS and to build activities that may attract women who would otherwise be disinclined toward computing. In this paper we focus primarily on what we have learned through focus groups with women at different developmental levels with respect to CIS, and the tools we have been building to engage them in community-building activities.