Overcommitment and Burnout

The Support Team would like to introduce the Support Team “Inactive Member” state, as Ania takes some time off from the Django Girls Support Team. This is not a goodbye for Ania, but a valuable experience for all of us. We’re all taking notes about burnout and overcommitment in an effort to help all of the Django Girls. Ania is a valuable member of the Support Team, and we support her taking some time off for some much-needed self-care. We hope this experience will also help us identify the overcommitment earlier in ourselves before it has damaging outcomes.

Photo by Kaboompics.com

Django Girls is all about inspiring women, giving them opportunities, and showing them that everything is possible. You already know that, right?

Usually we shout out: you can do it! You can be a programmer, you can create advanced things, and you can make your ideas come to life! And most of the time, we do!

But there are times we have to step back, examine our day to day lives and ask,  “Am I really okay with the amount of responsibilities I have right now?” We might ask a friend, “You seem exhausted, is everything okay?” We might encourage them to take a break, and not even dare open their inbox during the weekend! Everyone needs to take time for themselves.

During our recruitment process for the Awesomeness Ambassador, we looked at the work the interviewee was already involved in, and we asked them, “Will you be able to handle one more thing?” Because for us, overcommitment is a very serious problem, one that can lead to burnout and depression. Many of us tend to throw ourselves at interesting opportunities without taking a moment to think: how will I handle this?

We might think, “It doesn’t take that much time to prepare a workshop. It’s easy, right?” it might be easy, but if you are already handling two conferences, parenting three kids, doing yoga classes 5 times a week, hosting events for a local community of food bloggers and hitchhiking like crazy… it might be a bit too much.

There are a few things about overcommitment every one of our volunteers should know:

• The real amount of things you are able to fit in your schedule can’t be determined by how much other people can handle. It also can’t be calculated on the internet. You have to learn it yourself. Each and every one of us is different; that’s the beautiful thing about people. We each have different characteristics, and our capacity to handle things is different. You can be a morning person, and others can have their best hours when you are slowly falling asleep. We are unique and there is not one frame of measurement for our capabilities.
  
• You should always be sincere with yourself. If you are feeling tired and a free weekend doesn’t help, you might have to think over your responsibilities and activities.
• You shouldn’t feel irreplaceable. It might be a flattering feeling at times, but in the end it’s always better to exchange knowledge with someone else or write it down for the next person. Delegate responsibilities to someone and really enjoy a week-long vacation instead of constantly checking your e-mail. Vacation is for resting :) And it should be comforting to know that everyone is replaceable, because it means you really can take a break!
• Yes, you are working that hard! We tend to think: I am not really doing that much, person X is doing a lot more! Comparing yourself to others won’t help you do what’s right for you and is usually a bad thing to begin with. You should take into account things like: Am I constantly tired? Am I having problems with sleep? Have I been seeing my family and friends as frequently as I would like to? Have I had problems with handling usual day-to-day things like laundry, shopping, and taking the dog out? Do I have time for the other things I like to do?
  
  Answering such questions might help you notice if there is something you should change. Believe in that gut feeling. If you don’t feel ok with something deep inside, cut it off. If you feel something is for you even though most of the people would think otherwise - go for it!

Avoiding burnout, and dealing with it when it comes along, is an important topic in the programming community. Barbara Shaurette gave an amazing talk at DjangoCon US called Things That are Tired: Uggs, Segways and you! Coming Back from Burnout, where she talks about how to avoid burnout in the first place, but also how to responsibly step back from your commitments when you need to take a break. The text of her talk is on her blog. At the same conference, Russell Keith-Magee gave an incredibly personal and moving talk about his own struggles with depression. His talk, I am a doctor (content warning: depression, anxiety, miscarriage, suicide) includes valuable information about how to seek help if you need it, and how to provide help to a friend who is suffering. Jacob Kaplan-Moss’s was talking at OSFeels about the stages of burnout and his experiences.

As you can see, burnout is a very real problem, one that we know many Django Girls volunteers and contributors may experience over the course of their lives. It’s our mission to create a sustainable, supportive community where you feel safe communicating your needs, and stepping back when you need to. Rest assured that we will all welcome you back with open arms when you’re rested and ready.

Django Girls at PyCon UK (Coventry)

We started planning for the workshop back in June - we had all volunteered when we heard the conference organisers wanted to have a Django Girls at PyCon UK but were looking for somebody to run it. Eleni, Päivi and I (Helen) had never met before we began organising, none of us were local to Coventry and I was the only one of us who had been to PyCon UK before - so we had a few challenges!

Django Girls ran on the first day of the conference. PyCon UK very generously provided a room and free conference tickets (including meals) so attendees had the opportunity to go to talks, workshops and sprints throughout the weekend and meet others in the Python community. We were in the Simulation Centre building, where some other conference events were also happening that day - we were next door to Trans Code (a hack day for trans people and allies) and an education day, where teachers come together to network and talk about Python in education.

With the help of additional sponsorship from the Python Software Foundation, Django Software Foundation and GitHub as well as some funds left over from a previous workshop, we were able to provide financial aid, swag and decorations.

Applications

We had around 80 applications for 28 places - we really enjoyed reading the applications but scoring was incredibly difficult and we had a lot of really strong candidates - there are some core criteria which are useful when scoring Django Girls applications and we tried to focus on the value each person could get out of both the workshop and the conference as a whole, as well as ensuring we could provide the right financial aid for those who needed it. We ended up with a lot of really great people at the workshop, but sadly also had to say no to a whole lot more.

Coaches

Our biggest worry was probably finding coaches. I think we could have done more to raise awareness in the Python community about what we were doing and also to make it clearer that guys can be coaches too (we had a few questions about this). However, we ended up with ten coaches - which was just enough for the numbers we had, and they were all amazing! Usually there is a coaches’ dinner to thank people for giving up their day - there wasn’t really a good time where we could get everybody together for this, so we decided on gifts and got everybody a personalised mug instead

We’d hoped to have a couple of meta coaches too but it all turned out well as we had a constant stream of volunteers wandering through the room to see what was going on and offer help (some of this help was invaluable when we ran into some really obscure Windows problems)

Swag

We had a lot of fun with the swag - we made unique stickers by combining the Django Pony with the PyCon UK crown and liked the design so much that it ended up on the posters, coaches’ mugs, presentation slides… ponies everywhere!

We also made some “I code like a girl” badges - these were based on Kenneth Love’s T-shirt design for the Portland workshop and were quite popular. It was especially nice to see so many guys picking up and wearing these badges too.

Päivi printed out some temporary tattoos (including ponies) - we left them afterwards for the Kids’ session which was next day in the same space - 100 children came along to code with Raspberry pi, electronics, Minecraft and other fun things.

There were some challenges with none of us living near Coventry, especially when it came to ordering swag and decorations. We had some of it sent straight there, which meant seeing it for the first time when it was too late to fix anything that was wrong. (fortunately, it was all fine). I had some sent to my home, which meant struggling up to Coventry on the trains with a huge box of T-shirts and tote bags strapped to the back of my bike!

Competition

As well as financial sponsorship we had been offered a few product licences to use as prizes, and Eleni had a brilliant idea for a competition. We’d bought some cute animal stickers and asked each team to choose an animal to put on their name badge and place card. The competition was to close your eyes and try to draw your team animal. We gathered them all up at the end and recruited some Trans Code participants from next door to choose winners based on whatever criteria they wanted, be it skill or pure amusement factor. We had some quite funny entries and I think it provided some light relief in what was otherwise quite an intense and studious day!

Django Girls at a conference

A lot of work went into organising the workshop but it was very much worth it when people started arriving, settling down to work and beginning on their Django journeys!

Running as part of a conference is different in some ways, most of them good! It was really great that the attendees were around all weekend as the workshop day itself can be quite intense and as an organiser you spend all those weeks dealing with a list of names and you don’t always get the chance to meet the people properly - so it was nice to talk to some of the ladies throughout the weekend and find out more about their experiences at the workshop and their future plans.

It’s also great that people had the chance to experience the Python community, continue their learning and meet other developers. For some people it’s their first conference of any kind - even when you’ve been working as a developer for a while, conferences can seem intimidating or mysterious - so it was good to be able to give our attendees that experience.

Finances can be different at a conference workshop. We didn’t have to worry about venue hire, tables and chairs, meals, tea and coffee or anything infrastructure related - we are incredibly grateful to PyCon UK for providing us with the perfect space for the workshop! However, people were travelling from further afield and staying for the weekend so the financial aid requirements were greater.

More pictures!

We were also super lucky to have Ola Sendecka there for the day - she gave a wonderful lightning talk about how the internet works and took some lovely pictures of the workshop!

Nicholas, one of the conference organisers, also made some videos of the install party.

How could we do better?

We could do some things better in future:

• Start earlier! It can take a while to find sponsors and coaches.

• We’d also have liked to tell people earlier about whether they got in - by the time we did (1 month in advance) hotel prices were getting quite high.

• Find out more local places to advertise. By the time we’d figured this out, it was only a couple of weeks before applications closed - it can take some time for this information to filter through to to the relevant people!

• If the event is part of a conference, print extra swag! We ran out of stickers and badges very quickly as we had mainly printed everything for the workshop attendees and didn’t anticipate everyone else in the conference being so interested

• List events (talks, workshops etc) that are beginner friendly so that people can get the most out of the conference

Helen Sherwood-Taylor

@helenst

Your Django Story: Meet Jordan Decker

This is a post in our Your Django Story series where we highlight awesome ladies who work with Django. Read more about it here.

Jordan is a 25 year old KU grad, currently residing in Lawrence KS. Professionally, she specializes in optimizing social media strategies for local businesses to obtain whatever goals they may have. Her dream has always been to be a Disney Princess  - and that hasn’t changed. Jordan has just modified it to involve wearing a suit instead of a crown, as she hopes to work for the corporate side of Disney some day. Her favorite quote? “Those who don’t believe in Magic, will never find it.”

How did your story with code start?

That story has a rough beginning that involves a lot of copy and pasting from Google. There was a situation where I was asked to make changes to an email campaign.. and the only way to do that was to manipulate the HTML. So, I Googled what I needed to do and copied, pasted, and rearranged the code that I found. A little while later, I built a personal website through squarespace, but wanted to manipulate the template, so I again went to Google. Can you believe at that time I didn’t even think it was possible for me to create a website on my own? The story gets better though! Fast forward to a few weeks ago when I went to the Django Birthday Celebration. Suddenly coding became more than just these letters I changed to make a black box appear. The possibilities that code presents are endless and I am now very excited at what I will be able to do with it in the future.

What did you do before becoming a programmer?

I’m not really a programmer… yet! I’m a social media and digital marketing master. I’m very interested in coding and want to learn it for my personal growth (I already do everything else in the digital realm, why not add this?). The fact that learning this will have a professional impact is just a bonus for me.

What do you love the most about coding?

I know this has been said before, but it’s like magic! If i can think it, I can create it, and I find that incredibly fascinating.

Why Django?

Django has a personality. It’s welcoming, it’s helpful, it’s contagious. It’s the first part of this coding world that didn’t feel like numbers and letters and incomprehensible data on a screen to me. I’m incredibly thankful to Jeff for letting me into the conferences during the Django Birthday Party, because if I hadn’t done that, I may not have ever found the Django community. Plus, I live in Lawrence, KS and worked for The Lawrence Journal World for the last 3 years - I think it might be fate?  

What cool projects are you working on at the moment/planning on working on in the near future?

I’m a newbie, so I’m working my way through the Hello Web App book. I’ve made it through I think 4 pages so far. The book said before I proceeded I needed to have a basic knowledge of HTML and CSS. So, I have reserved several books from the library about HTML and CSS and plan to start that process this week! Once I get that down, I’ll return to the Hello Web App book and I think I’ll create something like a “Disney Character Search” as I teach myself Django.

What are you the most proud of?

My work ethic. I am constantly learning, practicing, and perfecting so that my clients receive the best products and services. I’ve created great professional relationships with clients because they trust me. And that’s all thanks to my work ethic.  

What are you curious about?

Coding! I tried to think of something else to say, but that’s what’s at the top of my list right now. It really bugs me that I can’t just sit down and do it! As I said before, I’m new to this world, and it fascinates me.

What do you like doing in your free time? What’s your hobby?

I travel, blog, play video games, read, think of costumes for conventions and Ren Fests, plan my future Disney trips, and now, learn Django.

Do you have any advice/tips for programming beginners?

Find the Django people who are available to help you through the beginning. (It won’t be hard to do, this community is amazing.) For me, it started with a conference. I was lucky enough to know someone who could point me in the right direction after that conference. Now I have books, online tutorials, and a phone number I can text if I get stuck along the way. Don’t be intimidated. You can do this!

Anna Ossowski

@OssAnna16

Django Girls ATL

This first appeared on Adrienne Lowe’s blog, Coding with Knives, and is reproduced here with permission.

Atlanta’s first Django Girls was Friday, September 25 & Saturday, September 26. It was a huge success!

While it’s still fresh in my mind, I wanted to take some time to write up how it went.

My hope is that if you’re planning a Django Girls workshop, you’ll find this encouraging, and maybe pick up a few good ideas. If you’re thinking about sponsoring, I want you to see how very worth it supporting the workshop will be. And if you’re considering coaching, volunteering, or attending as a student, you’ll see how much fun you’ll have!

Planning: from the beginning!

I learned about Django Girls from my friend Anna Ossowski, who gave an inspiring talk at PyTennessee this February. It was so inspiring, in fact, that I decided on the spot that I wanted Atlanta to have Django Girls. I returned home full of great ideas, new connections, and the drive to make the workshop a reality.

However, there wasn’t really a community for women doing Python in Atlanta. OurPyLadies meetup was dormant at the time. If this was going to happen, I’d need to lead the charge! Thankfully, we did have a very active PyATL Meetup that I’d been attending, where I made and expanded connections.

In the spring, I worked with PyATL organizer Doug Hellman and my PyLadies co-organizer Alianor to sketch a vision for PyLadies and get it up and running again. To grow momentum and interest in Python among women in Atlanta, I wanted to host Django Girls. Doug & Alianor were supportive, and I gave a talk at PyATL in May where I explained the Django Girls program and invited folks to join as volunteers and mentors.

There were few sign-ups at first, but there was enough to give me confidence to keep going. I figured that since the event wasn’t til the fall, there was still time. Indeed: after giving another PyLadies talk in August at PyATL, we had enough coaches to make the event possible!

I made the Twitter account on July 20 and the website went live about a month later, on August 13, after I’d secured our corporate sponsorships.

Sponsorships: 100% Funded by Tech Companies

Okay, now that you know the backstory, let’s talk about corporate sponsorships. If you know me outside of this post, you might already be aware of my background in professional fundraising. So let’s have a few words about how you might manage sponsorships, especially if it’s something you’ve never done before.

The most important aspect of fundraising is probably what you love the most about Django: the people. Effective fundraising is all about telling stories about your values and vision to someone you hope will share them. Whether you’re trying to raise $500 or $5000, you need to be able to do the same, basic things: reach out to your contacts, articulate your vision, ask for support, and thank them profusely when you get it.

Django Girls ATL was 100% funded by tech companies who care about diversity and creating opportunities for women. Two of our sponsors are based here in Atlanta:MailChimp and Kabbage, Inc. DreamHost is based in California, but they have employees here, awesome folks I met through PyATL. ThoughtWorks is based in Chicago, but they have a (totally gorgeous, amazing) office in Atlanta.

For each of these companies, I connected with someone who shared my vision and advocated internally for Django Girls. Thanks go to Ryan at DreamHost, Alianor at MailChimp, Chris at Kabbage, and finally, Rick of Atlanta’s Clojure meetup, who put me in touch with our event host Ryanne at ThoughtWorks. The help and internal influence of each of these folks was critical.

A new way of doing swag: partnering with Hello Web App!

From the Klean Kanteens at DjangoCon Europe to the belt buckle at DjangoCon US, Django conference organizers make an effort to offer thoughtful swag. I wanted to do the same for my first class of Django Girls by including something that would help attendees continue with their study after the workshop. What could be better than a copy of Tracy Osborn’s fantastic tutorial Hello Web App?

When I talked about it with Tracy at DjangoCon, she was thrilled! When she told me that she’d found a sponsor – thank you Opbeat! – to cover the cost of donating the books to my workshop, I was elated! It was a win-win.

Since Tracy and I share a love of selfies, I asked our students to take “Hello Web App selfies” and tag them with @limedaring, @opbeat, @hellowebapp and the hashtag#thankyouHWA.

Attendance: 100% Participation with NO no-shows

As anyone who has ever put on a free event might tell you, there are always going to be people who sign up but don’t show up.

Imagine my surprise when I handed out nametags on Friday evening and discovered that every single person who RSVPed was there: every coach, student, and volunteer! We had 100% participation with NO no-shows both days!

Fabulous Django Girls organizer Lacey asked me to share the communication plan that might have enabled this achievement. It probably helped that I communicated, very clearly, how important it was for people to confirm their attendance. This message, which went out two days before the event, really captures it:

We actually accepted attendees on two different occasions. At first, 20 people were accepted into the program. I had them confirm their attendance with one week of receiving acceptance. If you did not confirm, I gave you one more chance by sending a personal email. One person did not respond, was removed from the roster, and was notified.

Within a few weeks, people who had confirmed said they actually wouldn’t be able to make it. I also got a few more coaches. This combination meant I could accept more students, so after talking it over with Lacey, I decided to accept new applicants for “one day only!” a few days before the event. Seven new students were admitted to the program for a total of 24, and the waiting list grew by dozens.

In my communication, I emphasized the specialness of this opportunity and the length of the waiting list. Lots of Atlanta women would have loved to be in the first class of Django Girls, but because of space, we could only accept 24. Even though it was a free event, I wanted people to take it seriously. I’m so glad they did!

Thanking folks: it’s really, really, ridiculously important

Showing gratitude is an important step of fundraising that often doesn’t get the attention that it deserves. It’s not enough to make connections, make your case, and ask for money. You have to let folks know you appreciate it, and what a difference it made!

A spirit of sincere thankfulness permeated this workshop. I thanked the students, coaches, and volunteers for their hard work every time they arrived and at each break. I also had them extend their thanks to the folks who made this possible by doing the following:

• Regularly tweeting thanks to @KabbageInc, @MailChimp, @DreamHost,@thoughtworks, @hellowebapp / @limedaring, @opbeat, and @githubcommunity
• Signing a card for our guest speaker Friday night, Greg of GitHub
• Signing cards to each of our sponsors – these were mailed yesterday, 9/30
• Writing personal messages in thank you notes to their coaches
• Taking a group photo with hearts that had our sponsors names in the center

Provide quality food that everyone can eat

As someone with dietary restrictions, I know all too well the disappointment of attending a special event and being served iceberg lettuce while the folks around me enjoy creamy, decadent, thoughtfully-prepared delights. And as a former personal chef, I really care a whole lot about making food delicious. For this event, I was determined to provide food that everyone could eat and enjoy.

The thing is, the most accommodating cuisine you can serve is vegetarian/vegan, because everyone can eat it! (It’s also a feminist issue.) My students and coaches had a variety of dietary restrictions, from “no pork” and “dairy free” to vegetarian and even vegan. I decided to make the event fully vegetarian and mostly vegan to make everyone feel welcomed and cared for.

For Friday night, we had a vegetarian fajita bar with fajita veggies, seared orange tofu, two types of beans, and all of the fixins, from Willy’s Mexicana Grill. Saturday breakfast was giant fluffy cinnamon rolls, five types of scones, bagels, and gluten-free biscuits, all baked fresh that morning by local bakery Dulce Vegan. Gluten-free attendees also received fresh fruit and dairy-free yogurt.

For Saturday lunch, the students were treated to a full Italian feast: spaghetti with homemade marinara, gluten-free ziti marinara, veggie chicken francese (vegan chicken in vegan butter, white wine, and whole fresh lemon slices), vegan eggplant parmigiana, and veggie chicken marsala (vegan chicken in marsala wine with mushrooms). There were also tons of garlic rolls and two giant salads. This was provided by Vito’s Pizza and Ristorante in Alpharetta. The owner even delivered everything!

A breakfast of vegan cinnamon rolls by Dulce Vegan and a nice big fair-trade coffee to start the day. Why not?

Oh, and I baked cupcakes the morning of the workshop (yes… I know…) because it’s not a Django Girls event if you don’t have cupcakes!

I cannot tell you how many times people came up to thank me for providing quality food that they enjoyed and could eat. People were so, so, so happy. One attendee who was not vegetarian, but who has severe allergies to gluten and dairy, said that it was the most care she’d ever received at a special event.

For any organizers out there, here’s what it cost to serve 40 people the following meals:

• Dinner Friday night: $516.92
• Breakfast Saturday morning: $270.00
• Coffee service Saturday morning: $122.32
• Lunch Saturday: $545.39
• Coffee service Saturday afternoon: $122.32
• Snacks Saturday afternoon: about $50

As a thank you to the coaches, I budgeted funds to take them out to a nice dinner and drinks at Wrecking Bar Brewpub, an award-winning brewery and restaurant. They had a great time! When you’re saying thanks, don’t forget to find a meaningful way to acknowledge the sacrifice that your coaches and volunteers make to help out at your event.

Think quickly, be flexible, and remember: Have Fun!

People kept coming up to tell me how well-planned the event was, how seamless the transitions were, and how wonderfully structured it was. And surely, I gave some thought to how I wanted things to go in advance. But it’s important to be open to thinking quickly and flexibly, because there’s only so much you can plan in advance. Also, remember, you’re supposed to have some fun with it! When you’re relaxed and having a good time, you more easily think of solutions to issues as they come up.

For example, when my O’Reilly books didn’t arrive by the event to give away as prizes, I didn’t fret. We still did the raffle, but instead of giving folks their prizes that day, I invited all winners to pick up their prizes at the next PyLadiesATL Meetup on October 20. This way they get what they won, but also have an incentive to continue community involvement by checking out a meetup (possibly their first!).

Similarly, even after folks went back for seconds and thirds of lunch, we still had lots of leftovers because our caterer was so generous. I used to volunteer at a homeless shelter where they serve the residents a hot meal every night, either prepared in-house or donated. When I called to ask if we could send over our untouched pans of pasta, salad, and bread, they were thrilled! (Thanks to my sweetie Curtis for making that very special delivery.)

If I had been really stressed out, I probably wouldn’t have been thinking clearly, and definitely wouldn’t have had as much fun. So remember: whether you’re on your own as I was, or on a team, make sure you have a good time!

So serious during one of our raffles.

Our awesome raffle giveaways!

Coach Chris explains how it all fits together.

Stickers and tattoos!

Final notes:

These are just a few random thoughts that might help other organizers:

• Don’t forget to have first aid kits! Ours had ibuprofen, acetaminophen, Midol, migraine medicine, Tums, band-aids, Neosporin, alcohol wipes, cleansing cloths, tampons, and sanitary pads.
• Provide pens and paper for your students! They were in our swag bags.
• Have a raffle to reward attendees and break the monotony! We had two! You could enter to win an awesome O’Reilly book, or Two Scoops of Django, by answering one or both of the following questions:
  • Describe a specific action you plan to take, and when, to support a woman in your life who wants to learn how to code.
  • Ask your scary question – the one that you’re afraid to ask because you think it’s too basic, or sounds silly, or any other reason.
• Don’t forget to stop everybody for stretch and snack break. Folks will keep working like robots unless you remind them they’re human – say things like “Can you believe it’s been an hour and a half since your last break? You’ve been working so hard! Give yourself a pat on the back, take a stretch, and get some water!”
• Take a group shot! You want those memories.
• Encourage folks when they do cool things and be sure to tell everybody. Our coach Cameron set up a Slack channel!
• Get as many coaches as possible so that you can keep your student-teacher ratio low! This is all about learning, right, and most folks learn best when they get individual attention. Our student teacher ratio was two students per one teacher.
• Do you have any advanced applicants to your program who don’t feel comfortable coaching solo? Have them join your team as a coaches’ aide! They can provide additional support to a coach and learn at the same time.

It’s not all glory and glamour: sometimes you’ll find yourself picking up a coffee order in the rain on a few hours’ sleep. But don’t worry. It’s worth it.

And thanks:

• Anna for introducing me to Django Girls and encouraging me to make it happen
• All of the Django Girls core/support team for putting together great training materials (tutorial and coaching manual); Baptiste for setting up my email account and providing instructions on the website; Lacey for answering all of my weird questions (really, really fast!)
• Alianor for providing moral support and working with MailChimp to get funding
• Chris for advocating for funding from Kabbage
• Ryan for connecting me with DreamHost folks
• Tracy for sending her books and for working with Opbeat as a sponsor
• ALL of the amazing coaches! Alec, JR, Marvin, Maura, Ryan, David, Shawn, Chris, Wendy, Cameron, and Benjamin
• Our two fabulous Friday night support coaches: Colin and James – thank you!!
• Our two lovely coaches’ aides, Meenu and Britni
• Our hard-working volunteer Curtis, who picked up coffee orders, helped with catering, and was generally awesome
• Our Absolutely Amazing ThoughtWorks liaison Ryanne, who was the very picture of professionalism and thoughtful, hard-working hospitality
• Mark Lavin for the discount code to Lightweight Django, which made it possible for me to get a bunch of O’Reilly stuff at a really good price
• Audrey and Danny of Two Scoops Press for their really lovely inscription in “Two Scoops of Django”
• Everyone who tweeted at me in the days and weeks before the event – you know who you are!

And you, for reading this post and caring about Django Girls! Now, go forth and volunteer, teach, learn, and have a blast doing it!

Adrienne Lowe

@adriennefriend

Your Django Story: Meet Tapasweni Pathak

This is a post in our Your Django Story series where we highlight awesome ladies who work with Django. Read more about it here. 

Tapasweni Pathak is working as a Software Developer with SAP Labs. She is a GSOC mentor for Systers Org. She is in the organizing committee of GHC India for the Hackathon track. She is an OWASP Summer Code Sprint 2015 student. She contributes to the Linux Kernel and works on a lot of side projects. She is a FOSS enthusiast. She reads and writes on Quora. She loves C, Python, Operating Systems and Compilers. In past she has worked as an Outreachy Linux Kernel Intern, Engineering Intern at Qualcomm Inc, and Research Intern at I.I.T Delhi.

How did your story with code start?

I was 9 when I first used a computer. I completed a basic certification course then, the most interesting part of that was I created a webpage, which printed my name in shiny characters. :)

I used to try random things, whenever I used to get the access of a computer. After high school, I had a choice to opt for biology and computer science for senior school, and I opted for the latter one.

I wrote my first Hello World in 11th grade in Turbo C++ as a part of the school curriculum. My first laptop was a Dell Inspiron 1525. I did not have any internet at that time. In my school we used to get 4 hours a week with a computer, to finish the assignments and learn C++. Apart from that I used to practice small programs and programs which helped me learn the syntax of C++. At that time I did not know that internet can be useful.

But those two years made me curious about Operating Systems, I learnt some C++ and some simple logic building.

I decided to pursue a bachelors in CS. During my bachelors, I got internet access, as well as a computer, whenever I wanted to.

I got to know about so many interesting topics in CS. This was the time, when I was free to try and learn anything that I wanted to do and then I started coding.

What did you do before becoming a programmer?

I’m a CS lover from the very first day I first understood, what does it mean to be interested in something. So I’m a developer from the very beginning.

What do you love the most about coding?

With some lines of code, you can do so many amazing things, you can help so many people, you can touch so many lives. Isn’t that awesome?

Why Django?

I started with Python at the end of 2013. I participated in many MOOCs, I used to read tutorials, try small projects in Python. In 2014, I decided to start participating in hackathons. I worked at a startup that introduced me to Django. How awesome Django can be, theoretically. I wanted to try it. So I started learning it.

I choose Django, Bootstrap, PostgreSQL as my stack for my first hackathon. I realized that there is so much to learn, and how awesome it can be. Since then I’ve been using it, in all the hackathons I participate. Most of my side projects are in Django. I have a lot to learn in Django.

What cool projects are you working on at the moment/planning on working on in the near future?

I’m working as a Software Developer at SAP Labs. Apart from that I’m a GSOC mentor for the Systers Organization. I mentor the Systers VMS project that uses Django. :)

I’m an OWASP Summer Code Sprint 2015 student. There I’m contributing to OWASP’s Hackademic project. My timeline includes making the large codebase follow PSR standards, adding Travis CI to the repo and many more interesting things. :D

Apart from this I contribute to the Linux Kernel. :)

I have a lot of side projects, that need some fixings. I’m unable to find time, to even look for the pull requests I get from them. Recently I attended a hackathon, there I created a web app that is gonna help women to fight against crimes against women. One of the features of this app is to report once. If a victim wants to report her case, she needs to tell her story to a lot of people. For example if she has experienced domestic violence and she wants to report her case. She will go to police, and answer all their questions. Questions like how many times did the accused beat you, where all he hit you, did he used some sort of weapon, have you faced any sort of sexual or mental harassment as well, what all happened etc. Then after the police gets all the answer, they may direct her to someone who’s gonna write all these things. Then she needs a lawyer, she will again answer all these questions. Apart from the physical pain she has experienced, she is again and again going through to all the mental trauma. I felt this can be avoided, so I came up with a feature called report once in this web app.

In this she will be able to write about all the general questions (mentioned above), and can save it. We have added a send email button. Using that she can simply type the email of her lawyer, police, doctor, ngos, agencies and send her answers. She can also save it as a PDF. Then when she goes to her lawyer, they can avoid asking the questions which are already covered and ask some specific questions connected with her case.

One other feature is to help women with information. Not everyone who goes through such crimes knows about her rights, what all tests she needs to have, what all agencies are there to support and help her, what all government organization are there. So we added all that information to our web app and provided her the option to share the link of that web page using a send sms button. She can also opt for automated call which will read out loud what is there on the web page. So may be her parents, or some other family member, who does not know how to use websites, they can simply hear and get the information. I plan to launch this website with as few bugs as possible. Right now there is a lot to fix in this. I will open source the code, so that whoever is interested can come forward and contribute to this.

I’m also planning to contribute to AAP’s portal, which uses Flask and Python.

What are you the most proud of?

I’m proud of my habits. How I plan my day, how my thinking process works, how I manage things, how I do what I like, how I learn things, and there is a lot to improve. I think I will be able to do what I’m planning to. I hope. :)

The session 2013-2014 was eye opening for me. I learnt a lot. I came to know about a lot of new things. I found a lot of good things in this time, when everything was going wrong.

I now know even if everything falls apart again, I know how to build it in a much more beautiful way. I know how to manage failures.

What are you curious about?

I love Operating Systems and compilers. I’m curious about a lot of things in them. One of them being not sure, that the best way (practically) to avoid deadlocks is using the Ostrich Algorithm (not testing for them at all). May be I need to read more to believe this, or may be I can come up with something which makes it a fallacy.

I’m curious about can we do something with technology that can measure gender bias in an environment be it conscious or unconscious.

Can we build some sort of app that will help anyone to come out / control the impostor syndrome inside them, and many more things.  

What do you like doing in your free time? What’s your hobby?

In my free time, I take pictures, of anything. I like photography. I enjoy doing it. I’m religious and I enjoy travelling, so I like going to temples. I have a lot of plants in my home. I like spending time with my plants. I also like trying Origamis. This is my todo list. :)

When I do not have anything to do or I need a break, I use Quora. I write, I read, alot. I love the product.

Do you have any advice/tips for programming beginners?

Don’t get scared, get started. Almost everything is doable by anyone. Most of the things are easy to learn. So start doing what you like. There are lot of things on the web to help you out. Just be truthful to yourself.

Everyone is learning. So do not hesitate to ask questions. May be from your question someone else will be able to learn something new.

Feel free to ping me at @TapasweniPathak, for any help, I would be happy to help. :)

Thanks Tapasweni! :)

Anna Ossowski

@OssAnna16

Your Django Story: Meet Sonia Arcelay

This is a post in our Your Django Story series where we highlight awesome ladies who work with Django. Read more about it here.

Sonia is a Latina into yoga, coding, social media marketing, and running. Animated and tea + wine aficionado.

How did your story with code start?

I learned Basic and Cobol on a Macintosh in the 5th grade. I spent time at the library to utilize computers outside of the classroom. Which also evolved into a love of reading.

What did you do before becoming a programmer?

In past professional positions, I worked at an art gallery, excel spreadsheets, databases, copywriting and copyediting, cosmetic marketing, revising corporate manuals and teaching/training colleagues on various programs for commercial real estate.

What do you love the most about coding?

Coding allows me to slow down and develop more patience. When I see my code displayed as the site or image that you were aiming for it makes me feel inspired. All the hours put in learning, trying and gaining a second set of eyes all begin to pay off. That reflects on the road ahead; the joy of heading in the right direction with my coding goals and aspirations.

Why Django?

Django is a clean framework that works well with Python. My first language being Python, it seemed like a bright opportunity to get into web development and also work with FOSS.

What cool projects are you working on at the moment/planning on working on in the near future?

I would like to enhance my skills with Django/Python, HTML/CSS and Javascript. The goal is to become proficient enough to take applications from concept to completion, quickly, accurately and as securely as possible. At the moment, I’m learning and developing at a moderate pace. Django’s versatility will allow me to build content management systems, social network sites such as Instagram or Pinterest.

A cool project will be my future Science Fiction inspired website currently in concept phase at the moment. However, it will reflect Octavia Butler, Ursula Le Guin, James Tiptree Jr., Margaret Atwood, Isaac Asimov Haruki Murakami and William Gibson. The science fiction will be women centric as it once was in the technology field as well.

What are you the most proud of?

Completing the Django Girls NY tutorial/workshop, finally getting it on Github and its a pretty good attempt:)

What are you curious about?

I’m curious about as many aspects of coding that will enhance my abilities. I spark interest in the most minute to the most diverse. Culture, science and linguistics are a few on the fairly large list of curiosities.

What do you like doing in your free time? What’s your hobby?

In my free time, I like to run, read and learn more coding. Although, at times nothing beats Meditation, yoga and cooking. I like to help others especially teaching senior adults technology.

Do you have any advice/tips for programming beginners?

My advice is if you can utilize a book for some basic understanding. You can learn to practice and try on your own. If and when you need help, ask. If you can help, do so. Go to Meet-Ups, and events; get to know people who can assist you in your learning process. A mentor or a few mentors can also be helpful. Develop a rapport with someone genuine and become invested in the relationship so as to get as much out of the advice and time of your mentorship.

So when you’re no longer a novice, pay it forward and send the elevator down for the other ladies.

Anna Ossowski

@OssAnna16

Your Django Story: Meet Jessica Hamrick

This is a post in our Your Django Story series where we highlight awesome ladies who work with Django. Read more about it here. 

Jess Hamrick is a graduate student in the Psychology department at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research involves writing programs to mimic human behavior in order to understand how people reason about the world. She’s been an avid Pythonista since 2008, and uses it in nearly every aspect of her research.

How did your story with code start?

Before I was born, my parents were both programmers, and although they changed professions when I was very young, we still always had computers in the house. For whatever reason, I was always drawn to our computers, and one of my earlier memories is sitting on my mom’s lap and playing with a vector graphics program called Corel Draw. I was fascinated that you could draw shapes and fill them with so many different patterns!

A few years later, I discovered video games. In particular, I had my heart set on a Game Boy, so that I would be able to play the new Pokemon video game. My parents disapproved of video games and refused to let me have a Game Boy, but they did tell me that if I created my own game, I could play it as much as I wanted. That was certainly motivator enough for me!

I never actually created the video game I wanted, but that challenge set the wheels in motion. In middle school, I learned HTML and CSS and created all sorts of websites for me and my friends. In high school, I started taking programming classes, and I eventually went on to major in Computer Science in college.

What did you do before becoming a programmer?

You could arguably say I’ve been a programmer for most of my life, so not very much! I did go through a period of time as a kid when I was certain I would grow up to be an ant scientist.

What do you love the most about coding?

I love figuring out how to break a problem down into its constituent parts, implementing those pieces and then finding the right way to put them back together. To me, coding is a bit of an art form: there are many ways to build something, but some of those ways are more beautiful and elegant than others. Many times when I solve a problem, I’m left with the feeling of, “there really ought to be a better way to to do this…”. But then at other times, I manage to solve something in a way such that when I look at my solution, it just feels right*. Like, “of course that’s the way to solve it, why did I think there could ever be a different way?” Figuring out how to get from the first type of solution to the second is incredibly challenging, but also incredibly rewarding for me when I manage to finally get there!

*Side note: I don’t actually think code can ever truly be “right”, and usually when I come back to code that feels “right” after a few months or years, I no longer feel that way about it. But, to me, it’s the feeling at the moment that matters, rather than the objective truth of “rightness”.

Why Django?

While I was an undergraduate, I lived in a coop, and every semester we’d have a “work week” or “work weekend” where everybody pitched in to keep the house functional. During one of these work weekends, I was tasked with organizing the hundreds of books scattered about the house. We started cataloguing them, but I realized that it wouldn’t do us any good to catalogue them if we then couldn’t easily search that catalogue. So, I started building a Django app to make it easy to add new books and search for existing ones. Django seemed like the clear choice because (1) Python was (and still is!) my language of choice and (2) I knew I was going to need something building on top of a relational database. I didn’t actually know very much about databases at the time, though, so it was a great learning experience for me!

What cool projects are you working on at the moment/planning on working on in the near future?

Since starting graduate school, I’ve become increasingly involved with the scientific Python community. In particular, I’m heavily involved in the IPython and Jupyter projects. The Jupyter notebook is a coding environment that runs in your browser and mixes together code, text, and images, making it perfect for anything requiring interactive code or data exploration. In particular, it’s great for class assignments, because you can alternate between text giving instructions and coding exercises within the same document. For the past year I’ve been working on a project called nbgrader which is a tool for grading assignments in the Jupyter notebook. It’s been used in only a few classes so far (mine included), but I’m excited to see other people starting to pick it up as well!

What are you the most proud of?

This past spring, I was a teaching assistant for a class on computational cognitive science. We created assignments in the Jupyter notebook, and to give our 200+ students access to the notebook, I set up a cluster of servers for the class. This enabled students to just go to a website, login, and use the notebook, without having to install anything themselves. This was a massive undertaking, requiring me to learn all about tools like Docker and Ansible which I’d barely heard of before. Somehow, though, I managed to pull it off, and it worked remarkably well! It was an incredibly fun project to work on, and I think it really improved the experience of our students as well.

What are you curious about?

As someone who considers herself both a scientist and an engineer, there’s a lot! On the science side, I want to know how people how people think and reason about the world. On the engineering side, I’m interested in building tools that enable scientists to do better science.

What do you like doing in your free time? What’s your hobby?

As a graduate student, I don’t have a ton of free time. Most of the free time I do have, I spend contributing to open source projects like IPython. I also enjoy games (of both the board and video varieties) and biking around the Bay Area.

Do you have any advice/tips for programming beginners?

Find a project that you’re really excited about and try to tackle that. Programming tutorials are great, but they’ll only get you so far: to really move forward as a programmer, you need a problem that drives you and that you’re really motivated to solve. If you don’t know how to get started with the problem you chose, try focusing on just one aspect of it. Keep whittling down your goal in this way until you have stumbled on something that you know how to solve. Once you’ve solved that piece, you can start working your way back up in complexity. This process is actually the way that most programmers tend to tackle problems: find the simplest piece of the puzzle that you do know how to solve, and go from there. Most importantly, don’t give up!

Thanks Jess! :)

Anna Ossowski

@OssAnna16

Django Girls is hiring! Lessons learned from our recruitment process.

Lucie Daeye joined Django Girls Support Team in our first paid position last week, which concluded our two-month-long hiring process. Before that, we had very limited experience previous experience with hiring or conducting interviews. Here is what we learned.

Backstory

Back in May, the number of new city requests we were receiving per month suddenly doubled, and we quickly realized that even with a team of 6 people, we wouldn’t be able to keep up with the all those incoming requests.

Around the same time, we had a conversation with Honza Král about scaling Django Girls by hiring someone who could handle the daily operations of the organization, like onboarding new cities or helping organizers all over the world organize their events.

After weighing our options, we decided to raise funds to hire someone to work part time, 20 hours a week, and announced our intent to hire the Django Girls’ first Awesomeness Ambassador.

Details of the hiring process

The hiring process was divided into three rounds.

• Applications: We accepted applications for 3 weeks, and then spent 2 weeks reading and scoring the 67 applications. Each application was scored by 6 people.
• First round of interviews: We invited 10 people to 30-minute interviews on Google Hangouts, each conducted by two people from our team.
• Second round of interviews: Out of these 10 people, we invited 3 applicants to a final interview with two other members of the team.

Application process

To attend a Django Girls workshop, every applicant needs to fill out a simple application form, telling us a little bit about herself, why she wants to attend, and how she intends to give back to the community. We find that these three questions allow us to get to know the person and see if they would really benefit from the workshop and contribute to our growing community once they complete it.

Because those questions work so well for choosing attendees, we used them in our application as well. You can find the application form that each Awesomeness Ambassador candidate filled out here.

We discovered that, although we asked for CVs, the CV generally didn’t give us the information we were looking for. An applicant’s prior experience didn’t play nearly as large a role in our decision-making process as their answers to the application questions did.

We believe that having those questions also helped us to lower the number of received applications, while increasing their quality at the same time.

Applications review

Once the deadline for the applications passed, we informed everyone how the recruiting process was going to look like, describing timelines we assumed for our decision and informing everyone how the potential interview phase may look like. From experience, we all knew how stressful recruiting processes are, so we tried to give everyone a clear idea on the timeline for our decisions about interviews and when they could expect a final decision.

Then, we imported all 67 applications to the Django Girls workshop application system, which allowed us to score applications blindly, without seeing how other members of the team scored them. All six of us read through each application, and we invited the top 10 people to interview.

We also sent a message to all rejected applicants, offering them an opportunity to ask for more detailed feedback, if they want to improve future applications. Here you can find a template we used for these messages. It was important to us to provide decisions to waiting applicants as quickly as possible.

23 people got back to us asking for more detailed feedback. Ola Sendecka and Ania Warzecha spent hours writing a personalized feedback for each of these people. This extra step required a lot of work, but was incredibly important for us; we want to make sure that we treat people the way we would like to be treated. Here is an example of feedback we provided.

Out of 10 people who qualified for a second round, half of them had previous experience volunteering for Django Girls, while the other half didn’t had any.

Interviews round

We made ourselves an extensive list of random questions that can be asked to let us compare candidates. You can find the list of questions we used here.

We tried to keep the interview as casual as possible, and make the questions flow naturally through the conversation. Our aim was to keep the candidate as relaxed as possible, to get the best out of them.

Most of us are not native English speakers, and sometimes it was difficult to make notes and talk to someone at the same time. This part of the process we would like to improve in the future by having someone else from the team who is not an active part of the interview, but instead takes notes.

After the first round of interviews, we invited three people to the next round. We also offered one person a place in the Django Girls Support Team because she was incredibly impressive, but we didn’t feel she was the best candidate for the Ambassador position.

The remaining 6 people received personal emails describing why we decided not to invite them to the next round.

Final decision

The second round of interviews was very similar, but 2 different people from out team conducted interviews with candidates this time, so we have a wider set of opinions and points of view.

After this round, we were convinced that all three of them can do the job really well, and we would be happy to work with them. We chose the most qualified and experienced person, who already had a history of volunteering with Django Girls.

The two candidates we did not select were both excellent candidates, and we learned that making the final decision about who to hire is an agonizing one. We sent them each personal email, wishing them all the best.

Django Girls Awesomeness Ambassador Hired!

On the 8th of September, and after more than two months since the initial opening of the application, Lucie Daeye started work as our Ambassador. If you want to learn more about Lucie, head to our blog to read her story.

We couldn’t be happier to have her on board, and she has been a huge help since her very first day.

Time for a big happy sigh.

:drumroll: Credits :drumroll:

There are amazing people and organizations helped us make it happen. Huge, well-deserved thank you to:

• Elastic for their financial contribution to cover the first 6 months of Awesomness Ambassador salary
• Sentry, Lincoln Loop and Divio, for contributing to our fundraising goal for this role
• Leslie Hawthorn, Honza Král and Dominata Kargbo, for helping us prepare the job offer
• Geoff, Kasia, Baptiste, Ania, Ola and Ola, for conducting the recruitment process
• everyone else who helped us to get the word out and offered advice.

Wait, there is more!

We’re still looking for organizations that can help us make this position and Django Girls growth sustainable. If you’re interested in contributing financially, please get in touch.

Your Django Story: Meet Lucie Daeye

This is a post in our Your Django Story series where we highlight awesome ladies who work with Django. Read more about it here.

Lucie has been a PhD student in geography and Korean studies at EHESS but recently decided to change careers and work in programming in the future. She organized Django Girls Paris in April and launched PyLadies Paris. Lucie attended the first Django Girls workshop at Europython last year and she coached this year at the Django Girls workshop in Bilbao. Lucie gave a talk at DjangoCon Europe 2015 on Django and Social Sciences. She is also the Django Girls Awesomeness Ambassador.

How did your story with code start?

I can remember three defining moments.

First act, 2012: I had to edit the source code of a software to make it work on Linux: it was a horrible piece of software from Korea which required to access results of the Test of Proficiency in Korean. I didn’t know what I was doing: I changed some stuff, copying what I was seeing in the file, and somehow, it worked!

Second act, 2012: I was editing a copy of a research book for my laboratory. I had worked something like 50 hours in one week because they didn’t known stuff like Latex existed… At the end, we had one hour left to merge and alphabetically sort bibliographies from different chapters in one big file. I thought that was something a small script could do so I asked my boyfriend to do it. It took him something like 10 minutes, corrections and debugging included. My advisor was so happy that she invited us both to dinner at a restaurant. I didn’t know how to code but I already knew that it could be really useful for automation of boring tasks. Sadly, I was starting my PhD so learning how to code was out of question (no free time!)

Third act, summer 2014: “Data and spreadsheets everywhere! There must be a software for research in Social Sciences to deal with this pile of data…” Well, sadly no software to save my life. It shocked me so much that I decided to find a way to create my own software: that’s when I heard of this workshop for women happening at EuroPython Berlin and I was lucky enough to attend :)

Before that, I’d been using, modifying, destroying or playing with computers for as long as I can remember! This is an old pictures of me that I love: my father had given me the opportunity to reinstall the family computer. I look very focused on it because it felt like such a huge responsability for ten year old me!

What did you do before becoming a programmer?

I was a PhD student in Geography and Korean studies mixing coding as much as possible with my research! Beeing the Django Girls Awesomeness Ambassador will give me the time to do the two things I love: Django Girls and learning programming :)

What do you love the most about coding?

Coding makes me happy: I write stuff, it works, I extend it, it breaks, I debug it, it works again, etc. I love the fact that I’m building stuff and solving problems. I love the fact that I’m always learning new things!

Also, like in research, there is also the need to let your code alone for a time, and to come back to it one day or week later with the thing that was missing or the solution for this problem that was tearing your hair out!

Why Django?

The admin interface! I needed forms and easy ways to manage data from my PhD: the admin interface was perfect for that at the beginning. Then, I discovered Django leaflet and I had to add it to my app. Then I saw other cool stuff to add, etc. It’s an enjoyable framework to learn, so I stayed :)

The second thing I love the most about Django is its community. Yes, you’re reading this: you’re awesome! I had a horrible experience with a tech group few years ago so I choose to back off and stayed out of the tech community. I was skeptical when I went to EuroPython last year because of that but except that one guy who said something stupid to me about women at tech conferences, I had the most amazing week for a long long time! I also attended DjangoCon Europe this year and it was even better: assistance for first time speakers or Daniele’s amazing work to include the conference in the city (art from Cardiff on our teeshirt! No waste policy, etc). There is so much positive energy in the Django community: that’s what you need when you’re new somewhere and still a beginner. So, thank you all for that :)

What cool projects are you working on at the moment/planning on working on in the near future?

I’ve wrote a Python package to download all the things we need in case of a “no internet crisis” during a Django Girls event. It’s not perfect: right now, it’s mostly hard coded links. I plan to change it as soon as I have the time to finish a scraping tutorial!

What are you the most proud of?

I’m proud to be able to change things: for so long, it feels like coding was only for people from STEM and that suffering microagressions in meetups or IT events was mandatory. Now, I can get help from people who are also rejecting this model and do stuff the way I want: I’ve launched PyLadies in Paris for women, trans men and genderqueer people who are fed up with meetups not aiming at their wellbeing. Seeing people during Django Girls Paris and the PyLadies meetup being able to code and enjoying what they are doing without being annoyed is making me very proud. When people come to tell you thank you and goodbye personally at the end of those event, you know you made something useful.

What are you curious about?

Everything! I want to learn how things work and I love to strip down stuff. I also love to discover other cultures and countries. I try to have friends from everywhere :)

What do you like doing in your free time? What’s your hobby?

I discovered knitting last year and I love it: I have to focus on something and not being distracted by thoughts. It’s helping me when I’m too stressed to think or act. I’m scared to begin my first cardigan but I’ll start it soon!

I also try to meditate and go swimming but I’m bad at maintaining habits!

I love to cook! I’ve been a vegetarian for more than six month now and I’m still discovering so many new things to try. I love to try different food from different countries.

Do you have any advice/tips for programming beginners?

When I’m coaching at an event, I’m trying to explain to attendees that bugs or errors are normal: It’s not your fault, you’re learning and most of all, that doesn’t mean you suck at computers! Errors are scary for beginners so I try to tone it down as much as possible and to give them tools to find answers on the Internet for when they’ll be alone after the workshop.

Also, I try to find different types of tutorials for PyLadies Paris: if one tutorial isn’t working for you, try a different one! Don’t stop at the most famous one. There are tutorials dedicated to Humanities and Social Sciences, video games, biology, etc.

Anna Ossowski

@OssAnna16

Django Girls: Now with More Transparency!

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Ever since we started Django Girls, making it open source was a top priority; our repository has never been private. Today, we still believe that open source is the way to go more than ever. But over the past year, we’ve learned that maintaining and growing a big project like Django Girls is damn hard! The bigger we grew, the slower we started to move.

To allow us to continue growing quickly, we recruited a Support Team to help us divide the workload while still maintaining the ability to make decisions rapidly and get things done. What we didn’t do was communicate about how we made that decision, and that was a mistake.

Challenges

It’s a big job to make sure that 120 organizers and thousands of members of the community are informed and kept up to date.

We overlooked the fact that if we released something in the repository, that isn’t sufficient communication; we also needed to make sure people knew about the changes we were making. When it comes to how we make decisions, like recruiting a Support Team, communication is even more important.

As we’ve grown, we’ve struggled to maintain the feelings of openness, collaboration, inclusivity and belonging that were so crucial to us in the beginning. We focused so much on writing new tools, improving the tutorial, and making the organizer’s docs better that we forgot that communicating changes, decisions and thoughts with everyone is a vital part of any open source community.

Because we didn’t communicate what the Support Team was, or how and why it came into being, a couple months ago some members of our community gave us some valuable feedback: they felt that the Support Team was an exclusive club, of which they weren’t members. We’re sorry that we didn’t communicate better, and that we made members of our community feel excluded. We’re working on making our processes more open, with this feedback in mind.

We believe that in the open source community, there is not one model of really open open source community that is without flaws. Instead of adopting the processes of another organization, we believe that small steps, experiments and trying out different ideas can help us evolve into more mature, open and transparent organization.

Improving transparency of Django Girls

That was a long introduction to say: we want Django Girls to be more open, transparent and inclusive. We’re not perfect, and we have made some mistakes, but we are working hard to create a model that is sustainable, open, and based on trust.

Recent Changes

About the Support Team

Because we haven’t communicated well about the Support Team, there has been a lot of confusion about what the Support Team is.

First, a bit of history. In the beginning, it was just me and Ola. We were handling all the emails coming to hello@djangogirls.org and setting up new events. As Django Girls grew, we didn’t have time to handle the growing volume of emails. We created the Support Team: we invited two Django Girls contributors who had been consistently helping with events to join us and help answer those emails. Then we grew even more, and added more people.

But we never explained what the Support Team means or does. We’ve fixed that by publishing a document describing what Django Girls Support Team is. Here, you’ll see how we make decisions, examples of things the Support Team has worked on, and a description of the Support Team’s duties.

This had the added benefit of helping us clarify what the Support Team was; we’d never really thought about it until we wrote it down!

Django Girls Support Team notes are now public

The Django Girls Support Team meets every month to discuss current daily operations of the organization. We’ve started sharing the agenda of the meeting to the django-girls and django-girls-organizers mailing lists a few days before the meeting, so that members of the community can comment, ask for more details, and suggest topics that should be discussed. We then release the minutes of the meeting as soon as possible after the meeting takes place. You can take a look on previous meeting minutes here.

Wiki is now public

We had about 8 pages of internal documents that helped us remember how to set up new events, add organizers to existing events, manage translations, and other things. Instead of keeping that documentation internal, we put it up on GitHub! Now everyone can see what we do, how we do it, and suggest improvements.

Translations and Resources

There are some areas that we just lack knowledge and experience with, like translations. Or areas on which other people are simply more focused and are helping us a ton. That’s why those who contribute to the Tutorial, translations, or website frequently receive commit access to it. Granting commit access to our repositories to other people allows them to make changes faster and without asking for permission, and decreases the workload for us. Creating groups of people who focus on one area to make it more awesome is the way we want to grow in the future! List of all current teams and members is available in our wiki.

Opening up Trello

Trello is a fantastic tool to keep track of pending tasks and progress. Opening up the Django Girls Trello board to the general public was one of those decisions that makes you facepalm  and say: “Why didn’t we do this earlier?”

Django Girls Dispatch

Sending a regular, fortnightly newsletter to all community members is one of the things that helps us communicate about changes, decisions and how we work. We can also let you know about awesome recent events, profiles of Django programmers, and other great things we find! If you’re curious what’s happening in Django Girls Land, there is no better place to learn about it than in the Dispatch.

Idea for the Future

Opening up Slack channel

The Django Girls Slack channel has been so far limited to organizers, coaches and contributors only. We want our organizers to feel safe when discussing things that are important for them. On the other hand, we love our Slack channel, and we would like to give broader community access to discussions that happen there, but that comes with its own set of concerns.

We want your input: Do you want the Slack channel to be open to the public?

Currently, we’re thinking about creating a private group of organizers on Slack, so organizers still have a safe place to discuss sensitive matters for them. But we would open the rest of channels to general public. Fortunately, Slack comes with moderation tools that would allow us to ban members of the Slack who violate our Code of Conduct. We would love to hear your thoughts on this! Fill out this survey to let us know what you think.

How do YOU think we can improve?

We’re not finished yet. Django Girls is a work in progress, and we’re still working on ways to make it better month after month and year after year.

Django Girls didn’t look the same a year ago, and it’s not going to look the same next year either.

If you see a way in which we could improve transparency, openness, and inclusivity, please speak up. We can’t promise we will implement it right away, but we do hear you and we want you to be a part of this work.

Ways you can make sure we hear your voice:

• Submit an issue to a repository
  Is something wrong in the tutorial? Is there a page you’d like to see on the website? Do you have a chapter idea for the organizer’s manual? Submit things like that as “issues” on GitHub.

• Comment on a Trello card
  Do you have an idea for a project? Make a card for that. Is there an existing card that you have thoughts on, or can help with, or have a contact that could help? Comment on that card and let us know!

• Chat in Slack or on the mailing list
  Do you have a question for the whole community? A suggestion about how we can be more transparent? A general question about Django Girls? Ask the community in Slack (if you’re on Slack), or on the mailing list!

• Email us
  Do you have a suggestion you’d like to make privately, or a question you’d like to ask? Email us! Emails to hello@djangogirls.org are received by all members of the Support Team, and the Awesomeness Ambassador. We aim to respond to each email within one business day.