[Python-africa] DjangoGirls Lagos and PyNigeria + African Python Events

Tue Mar 1 00:51:51 EST 2016

Congratulations to Django Girls Lagos, We feel the awesomeness reading that
report :)

I think it contains some very valuable informations for any one wishing to
organize a python event in Africa. As it was also the case with Django
Girls Windhoek, there are 2 major issues one has to deal with when
organizing such event: energy and internet connection.

Maybe it's a good time to discuss about a project to solve these issues and
to encourage people to organize python meet-up and workshops locally if
there isn't any.
For the internet problem, we were discussing about a physical device setup
on the workshop's local network that would contains everything needed, from
the tutorial to the packages dependencies. Even IDEs. I don't have any
clear idea for the energy problem but all suggestions are welcome.
Let me know what you think, maybe later we can take it on GitHub.
Cheers,
-Ibrahim

Le sam. 27 févr. 2016 à 03:30, Aisha Bello <aishabello2050 at gmail.com> a
écrit :

> Dear Pythonistas,
>
> Yaaay so DjangoGirls Lagos happened last weekend and it was awesome, when
> all the pictures are ready alongside our short video clip, I'll be sure to
> post the links here. Also some of our attendees are looking to organize a
> DjangoGirls in another city in Nigeria #DjangoGirlsOgbomosho in May and
> another DjangoGirlsOAU is happening in April. Basically we would have 3
> DjangoGirls events happening in different states in Nigeria within the
> space of 4 months.
>
> So I was going to do a blog post about the workshop in form of a report
> and share it on later but Iwan and Ibrahim encouraged me to do a brief
> report here pending when I get done with the article.
>
> In total we had 38 attendees and 13 coaches. Special thanks and shout out
> to all our Mentors <http://djangogirls.org/lagos/#coaches> who came from
> far and near to coach some of the attendees.
> How we did for diversity?
>  Age- We had women from age 13- 58 participate in the workshop
> Location- We had about 40 percent of attendees from Lagos and the
> remaining 60% from other Nigerian states including Osun, Oyo, Rivers,
> Taraba, Ondo, et.al.
>
>
> Challenges: So Haven helped co-organized DjangoGirls at PyCon Namibia
> <http://blog.djangogirls.org/post/139654610313/django-girls-workshop-in-windhoek-namibia> I
> learnt a lot and thought I was really prepared for our workshop. For power
> Luckily I had the utmost support from the venue (CC Hub) who made sure
> their back up generator was up and running when power failed, I also got
> lots of power extension boxes in addition to the ones provided by our venue
> and that came in quite useful as even though there was enough ports for
> people to plug their laptops I found out that people wanted to be able to
> charge their other devices like phones or tabs.
> On Internet: I realized this was very crucial and has a way of putting
> everything to a halt when people can't push to Github or deploy to Python
> Anywhere; so even though the venue promised us internet I got a back up
> with data capacity of 30gb. This turned out really useful as the internet
> of the venue only had a few user names and passwords opened to multiple
> users so quite a number of people had to use the backup internet I got. And
> here I was thinking that 30gb was more than enough for just 2 days
> especially as I had python, git, sublime text, Atom all pre downloaded and
> copied to pen drives and the only thing needed to be downloaded was the
> Django framework which wasn't heavy at all, but Alas I was faced with the
> fact that at about 30 minutes to the end of the workshop the backup
> internet data finished. I should have gotten more data.
> Operating System: As was a similar case in Namibia most of our attendees
> used Windows (say about 95%) and only about 2 or 3 people brought Mac, and
> there was no one with Linux.
>
> A brief Story similar to what happened to Namibia: So about just 1 week
> before the workshop I had attendees email me that they didn't have laptops
> but they were going to borrow to participate in the workshop, and one in
> particular who said she was robbed in the past month and lost all her
> valuables including her laptop but was going to borrow either way. So I
> thought to myself if there was something I could do as it would be sad to
> come to the workshop, learn all these amazing stuff and have to return the
> laptop with no easy means for continuity.
> I reached out to the Python community in Nigeria explaining my dilemma and
> even started a twitter campaign soliciting for old/ refurbished laptops
> even though it was late in the day with the theme *Help a woman continue in
> her coding journey* and also late to even think about getting Raspberry
> pi's. Imagine the delight and happiness we felt when a pythonista who wants
> to remain anonymous came to the Python Nigeria meetup and donated 2 laptops
> to our attendees. It meant that these women could go back home and even
> after returning the borrowed laptops had their own laptops to continue in
> their coding journey #Beautiful.
>
> Also special gratitude to our sponsors and everyone who made the workshop
> possible and also made it possible for us to give financial aid to
> attendees travelling from other parts of Nigeria. (The Python Software
> Foundation, Django Software Foundation, GitHub,, Co-Creation Hub, Godwin
> Effiong, Thelma West, The Lagos Python Meetup ), Naomi Ceder(Our awesome
> Cake and Cupcakes sponsor), The Python Nigeria community, Chukwudi
> Nwachukwu (for our customized DjangoGirls pens) and a host of many others
> who supported us......We can't Thank you enough.
> On Twitter if you wanna see some pictures see @DjangoGirlsLAG
>
> Curious about how our fist Python Users Group Nigeria meetup went do see
> this awesome blogpost by a member of our community Tosin <
> http://takwas.github.io/article/python-nigeria-first-meetup.html> and the
> open source project we all agreed to work on. In all it was really awesome
> to see more pythonistas in Nigeria under the same roof communicating about
> how to move the community forward among other things.
>
> So there we go a brief report about DjangoGirls Lagos and PyNigeria, and I
> look forward to more PyCons in Africa or an Africa PyCon. PyCon Namibia in
> my opinion was the best PyCon I ever attended........*talk about the
> African way ;) * I also look forward to PyCon ZA
>
> A warm welcome to everyone who have just joined the mailing, I hope this
> serves as a platform where we  can collaborate more together......*because
> we are stronger together*
>
> Wishing everyone a Pythonic weekend :D
>
> Aisha Bello
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