Dear users of Numpy and Scipy, here is an informal report on the last event of the Python African Tour, which took place in Dakar (Senegal) on July 6-10th. It might interest only a fraction of the lists, so I apologize for the spamming. What is the Python African Tour? ---------------------------------- It is a recent initiative to promote the use of Python in African countries, that we owe to Kamon Ayeva (http://kayeva.wordpress.com/). Born a Togolese, Kamon now lives in Paris (France) where he works as a web developer and a trainer in web technologies. It occurred to him that but a few African developers (Hi, Stefan! :D) participate in Python-related development or conferences. IT-related technologies and web development can contribute to economic growth in developing countries, and, because of the clarity and flexibility of the language, Python-trained developers may have a competitive advantage to develop successful businesses. The Python African Tour sends a few volunteers to places in Africa where a small core of Python users or developers already exists. These deliver a training over a few days, about Python and some of its applications. The goal is to create a small but dynamical community of users that will keep on growing after the volunteers have left. A first event was held in Morocco last December. Whereas the emphasis had been put on an introduction to the Python language and to the Django web framework, I proposed to give this time an additional course about the use of Python in scientific computing, which was nicknamed "Scientific Python". Numpy/Scipy is an opportunity to present the language as attractive for not only geeks, but also academic staff -- the people who may precisely teach the language in the universities and engineering departments. Organization of the Dakar event ---------------------------------- This year, three European trainers flew to Dakar for the event: Kamon Ayeva, Daniel Nouri and myself. For all courses we worked in pairs with three local organizers and Python experts: Thomas Noël, Ousmane Wilane and Sergiu Mihai. The course was organized as follows: * 1.5 day for a general introduction to Python * 1 day of specialization, either on the Django web framework (Kamon and Daniel) or on Python for scientific computing (Emmanuelle) * 1 day of barcamp, or informal talks showing how we would use Python in our daily work. * 1.5 day of "sprint", I should rather say practical work. The hosting organizations were the AUF (Agence universitaire de la Francophonie), the Dakar Linux User Group (DakarLUG) and the ESP (Ecole Supérieure Polytechnique, a master-level engineer school). The local team did a great job on announcing the event, rounding up potential attendees (and sponsors!), and selecting people. The course was free of charge, but there were only a limited number of positions. Finally, about 50 people showed up at the course (20 having chosen the Scientific Python course). Facilities at AUF were excellent: three rooms with a total of 70 PCs running the latest Ubuntu. The course on "Scientific Python" ---------------------------------- Course material ............... Whereas we reused the slides of the Moroccan event on the introduction to Python, I wrote the slides for the 3-4 hour course about Scientific Python. The slides were written in French, English being an issue for a part of the students. They can be found on http://www.dakarlug.org/pat/scientifique/html/ for French-reading people (my apologies to the others! I'm considering translating the slides to English but I will do it more rapidly if I'm given the incentive to do so, so tell me if you may be interested by an English version!). Given the duration of the course and the fact that the trainees had already been introduced to Python, I chose to concentrate mostly on Numpy, and on Scipy to a lesser extent. However, I tried to explain as soon as possible how to use numpy and scipy in a "real life" scientific workflow: plotting data with matplotlib or mayavi, opening data files, finding documentation, etc. How it went ............ Together with Thomas Noël, we followed the same group of 20 people during the training week. The group was composed of both students (master and PhD), and a few senior academic staff, professors and researchers. I'm glad to say that the course was a real success, insofar as everybody was convinced he or she could use Python with some benefit for his or her research. Most people were already using either Matlab (with some license issues...), R or Java for scientific computing. They were attracted by the following features of Python: * Python is a free software, so there are no license problems * with its wide range of scientific modules, almost *everything* can be done with Python Also, people were encouraged when they saw at the end of the week that they could work on their own data using their usual algorithms in Python, without too many difficulties. Speaking about difficulties, one may say that there was some disparity in the level of experience inside the group, some being very well at ease with array programming while others were obviously discovering programming. It was therefore difficult to meet everybody's needs, but well, I hope everybody learned something! Some pictures of the event are on http://dakarlug.org/pat/galerie/. What's next: outlook on the PAT -------------------------------- The Dakar event was a very encouraging one, and some other countries (Togo or Zambia) are already considered for the next stop of the PAT. Of course, before keeping moving towards the next event, we first would like to see what happens in Dakar after the PAT has left. Some pedagogical staff decided there would be a course on Python next academic year, and this is a very positive decision: the one-week course was definitely too short for the students. Now the big question is who is going to teach the course, as all professors were beginners in Python. A new mailing-list has also been created to gather the trainees together after the event. If you are interested by the PAT and you want to know more about past and future events, you may write to the dedicated mailing-list python-african-tour-discussion@lists.openplans.org, or take a look at the website http://www.coactivate.org/projects/python-african-tour. Thanks a lot for your patience if you have read so far! Cheers, Emmanuelle