EECS alum marries two passions together in the Berkeley Parents Network
by Rachel Jackson
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GREAT IDEA: Ginger Ogle founded the Berkeley Parents Network, a virtual forum for sharing advice and resources.
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In 1993, Ginger Ogle (M.S.'95 EECS) was a CS graduate student working in database development. Whenever she had to teach a course section, she brought materials, lecture notes, and her two children to the College. When she had to use a computer, she trucked her children to the lab. "I had to. I didn't have childcare. Couldn't afford childcare," she says. "It was brutal." Though her husband at the time cared for their kids when he could, Ogle's last straw was when she found out about a fellow parent, an undergraduate EECS student, who was a single mom. "She would bring her children and spread a pallet on the floor and they would fall asleep right there in lab while she pulled an all-night computer session."
Soon after that, Ogle used her programming skills to create an informal email list of other parents in the EECS department, including both students and faculty. It was a way to organize and advocate for parent-friendly changes. At first, there were 14 people sharing information. Then it grew to 20. Parents began asking for more than just a parents' office in Soda Hall (which was granted and eventually stocked with children's books and videos). They asked about good pediatricians, neighborhoods, and how to introduce older siblings to a newborn. In 1995, Ogle's virtual community grew to include parents on campus. By 1998, it opened to parents in Berkeley and counted 1,000 members.
Today, it is known far and wide as the Berkeley Parents Network (BPN), whose free electronic newsletters are available to any parent within commuting distance of Berkeley. Its website of archived information is accessible worldwide. The site receives 40,000 visits a day, has 13,000 members, and includes 3,000 web pages. The irresistible draw is the real advice, real recommendations, and real stories from parents.
"It's a powerful tool," Ogle says. "Local schools list BPN on their websites as an important resource for their parents, and school counselors refer parents to BPN when they need a tutor or advice. We're considered a central resource for faculty recruitment on campus. New faculty are often referred to us in getting settled here. And we serve as graduate student support, too."
BPN is organized, maintained, and moderated by Ogle and 10 other volunteers. Though it supports the warm, fuzzy sharing of advice, BPN is a technical animal. "I'm a mom, and I'm a programmer," Ogle says. "I like writing code." Along with a toddler's night terrors and family-friendly restaurants, Ogle is conversant in UNIX, Perl scripts, and web servers. She started small with BPN and built out. When BPN hit 5,000 subscribers, she wrote code to create web forms so sending messages to the community could be streamlined.
And she has all manner of EECS connections. It was there she met her current husband, Wayne Christopher (Ph.D.'93 EECS). For years, she worked in the EECS department as technical lead for the National Science Foundation-funded Digital Library Initiative research project. And the EECS environment encouraged her to develop software for fun; she used the freedom to work on BPN, which is still hosted on campus computers. "I don't think BPN would have ever happened if I hadn't been at the CS department," she says.
Today, she's a short walk from Soda Hall, in the Valley Life Sciences Building , where she's developing database software for the natural history museum and biodiversity sciences. "BPN's free sharing of information is in the spirit of Berkeley 's CS department which has a long tradition of open source development," she says. "It's like sharing code for free. I hope BPN will always stay the way it is."
Berkeley Parents Network
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