Django Girls workshop in Windhoek, Namibia

This article as been written by Helen Sherwood-Taylor. Thanks ❤️

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On January 25th 2016 we held the first Django Girls workshop in Namibia. This was organised by Aisha Bello, Katie Barr, Jessica Upani and myself and took place at the University of Namibia in Windhoek.

This was part of PyCon Namibia, a new PyCon which is supported by the University of Cardiff and University of Namibia as part of the Phoenix Project.

We invited 30 women to come and learn to code with us and most of them were interested in attending the conference too. Thanks to the generosity of PyCon Namibia we had 15 free tickets to give away. With the help of our wonderful sponsors we bought the rest, so we were able to give tickets to everybody who wanted one.

We also provided a lot of of financial aid for attendees coming from elsewhere in Namibia, to help with the cost of staying in Windhoek all week.

Coaches were not too hard to find - although the conference is small, it was full of incredibly kind people who were happy to give up their day and help us out. We had a wonderfully international group of coaches from USA, Nigeria, Brazil, Canada, UK, Zimbabwe, South Africa and Germany.

ORGANISATIONAL CHALLENGES

With three of us being in the UK, there were some extra challenges in organising an event from outside Namibia.

Practical arrangements can be hard when organising in another city. (I learned this last year when organising Django Girls Coventry). There are yet more difficulties when it’s in another country. You have to deal with more currencies which can mean more conversion fees and more exchange rates to consider. And you have to think carefully about buying physical items like T-shirts and decorations. Buying those things in Namibia is great as you can put money into the local economy, but communications and payment can be difficult. Transporting large or bulky items into the country has its own problems too - so we had to be careful about planning what we would buy where.

Most of the planning happened over the Christmas break which was especially difficult. We didn’t realise it at first, but in the southern hemisphere this is also the long summer break and the start and end of the academic year. This made things quite difficult as we were dependent on the university, its staff and students. People went home over summer, often to places with not such great internet access, so communication became quite difficult until about the last week before the conference. So despite a lot of planning there was still a last minute panic to get everything finalised!

SPREADING THE WORD

We had to figure out ways to spread the word about our workshop within Namibia.  With Django Girls it is important to look beyond the Python community to bring in new people who might not have coded before.

We contacted schools and universities, unfortunately the summer break meant that wasn’t very fruitful. We did some internet searches and found some press and some women’s groups. Twitter was useful for finding Namibians who looked like they were interested in IT - we followed and tweeted at those people. We tried looking on Meetup but we only found one small group in Windhoek, and it seems Namibians don’t really use Meetup. We later found out these groups do exist but they meet more informally and sometimes just use word of mouth.

We found and contacted quite a few women’s groups. One group, Y-Fem (Young Feminists Movement in Namibia) was really interested and we ended up inviting several of their members to the workshop.

ON THE DAY

Of the 30 women we invited, a few dropped out just before the workshop and we replaced them from the waiting list. There were a couple of no shows on the day, but we also had a few extras from the conference.

The room took quite a lot of setting up - there was some renovation of the university computer labs going on so the room was full of hundreds of old computers, monitors and other equipment that was being temporarily stored - we managed to work around it and it gave the room an interesting theme!

Not everybody brought their own computer - some borrowed from friends or family and a few came without. There were a couple of donated laptops from Cardiff, and some people shared.

We had a lot of problems with internet access, but we’d planned for this. Katie had made some USB sticks which had offline copies of everything and this helped. Unfortunately this meant many people missed out on the experience of deploying their site to the internet. A mobile hotspot with a few gigs of data would have been useful, as speeds and signal strength were quite good on people’s phones.

Most attendees had Windows laptops, which can be harder to set up. We had Anaconda on the USB sticks in an attempt to reduce these problems. This worked quite well but meant deviating a bit from some of the tutorial instructions.

Unfortunately we lost electricity in the afternoon due to construction work outside the university overloading the circuits. We couldn’t do much about this so laptops started losing power and we had to finish a bit earlier than planned.

Because of these setbacks, average progress through the tutorial was less than a typical workshop. However people seemed to be excited enough about what they had learned to want to carry on with the tutorial!

SOME OTHER WORKSHOPS…

It was lovely to meet Humphrey and Anna, two of our wonderful coaches from Zimbabwe. They have also been planning Django Girls Harare, which will happen in April.

Aisha was also planning her workshop in Lagos, Nigeria at the same time - that’s happening really soon.

We also met Codie, a developer from South Africa who helped us out with coaching. She hadn’t heard of Django Girls before but was really excited about it. About a week after our workshop, Django Girls Cape Town was announced - the first in South Africa!

We’d also really like to see more workshops in Namibia in future, hopefully organised more locally - we will wait to see what happens there!

THE CONFERENCE

The rest of the conference was great - the talks were fantastic, everybody was so friendly and the gender ratio was close to 50:50. I left feeling like I have friends all over the world and wanting to go to lots of other exotic PyCons! :)

There were 50 sponsored Raspberry Pi boards at the conference which were used in some other workshops. These were given away at the end of the week and several of the ladies who didn’t have their own computer went away with one.

THANKS!

We are incredibly grateful to all our sponsors for helping us give this opportunity to so many people, the PyCon Namibia team for making it happen in the first place, to all our wonderful coaches for giving up their day, and to everybody else who dropped in to help and support us during the workshop - you are all awesome!

Pictures: https://www.flickr.com/photos/djangogirls/sets/72157662170913594