Organizing a DjangoGirls in Africa- Excerpt from #DjangoGirlsLagos with lessons learned from #DjangoGirlsWindhoek
This blog post was written by Aisha Bello. Thanks ❤️
So earlier this year in January. I joined a team of amazing ladies to organize DjangoGirls in Namibia. Helen did a great job in analysing what it entails in a blog post here but I am writing with a different purpose to bring to limelight the challenges and how I quickly had to learn how to quickly overcome them during the Lagos workshop. Even though Africa is a really huge continent and I could say I experienced organizing in Namibia another African country which had many similarities, Nothing quite prepared me for DjangoGirls the Nigerian way #Lagos Edition.
For DjangoGirls Lagos we had a total of 137 applications with only space of 30 attendees. There were so many great and quality applications and haven gotten help of 3 other DjangoGirls organizers it didn’t make the process easy as they had this to say. Lacey sure predicted very accurately when she said it was going be an amazing workshop. Even after scoring a lot of people scored highly, we ended up having to increase the number of accepted applicants to 39 and putting 10 on the waiting list. About 7 of the people on the waiting list who confirmed they were still able to come got accepted as people cancelled in the last week.
How we Spread the Word.
After setting up the twitter and facebook i realized that a place where people go to get loads of gists were blogs so after sending a couple of emails to some bloggers with our press release and also with the help of members of the Python Nigeria community who had affiliations with most of the bloggers. The month leading up to the workshop there was so many social media attention we got from Olori Supergal , Stella Dimokokorkus , Tech cabal , Nigerian Computer society, Techpoint , to mention only a few.
PRE-INSTALL PARTY
The pre-install workshop started 3:00pm prompt with attendees already arriving 30 minutes before the time. If that didn’t speak commitment and eagerness to learn I don’t know what does. Before 6:00pm a majority of the attendees had all the necessary packages and software installed and were good to go.
THE WORKSHOP DAY.
The day started at 9:00am prompt with loads of smiles and enthusiasm for the day as before the opening speech some attendees had already began to dive into the tutorial. What was the most intriguing was that at about 11:00am when it was time for a short break, people were refusing to go on break. Even after announcing over the mic that it was break or lunch time both attendees and their mentors kept at it and continued learning Many a times I had to go table to table to appeal to the groups to take a break. It was really fulfilling to see the attendees were so eager to get their websites up and running before the end of the day that they were willing to forfeit taking a break.
By the end of the day amidst all the challenges many of the attendees were going home with a lot of determination with a fierce hunger to learn more and do more.
A week leading up to the workshop I started a campaign soliciting for old laptops, because some of our attendees had emailed me saying they didn’t have laptops and would be happy to borrow. I thought long and hard. As much as it would have been easy to encourage to borrow laptops I thought to myself, what happens next after the workshop? When they have to go back home and return the laptop, how do they continue in their coding journey, and there wasn’t enough time or resources to try and get Raspberry Pi’s. So I reached out the PyNigeria community and used twitter to do more campaign. So towards the end of the workshop a kind hearted person from the PyNigeria community came and donated two laptops. I vividly still remember the tears of joy in the eyes of one of the recipient when she received her own laptop. This meant she could go back home and continue coding. It was Amazing. For me all these made me feel fulfilled and i finally said to myself “What a great job you pulled off”
Immediately after the workshop was the first gathering of the Nigeria python users group which went really well. You can read more about it here
What Happened Next
During all of the planning of DjangoGirls Lagos a conscious effort was made to include women from other states in Nigeria to attend the workshop so that they could go back to their various communities and replicate these learning process. It has been delightful to see this dream coming true with DjangoGirls in Ogbomoso, Ile-Ife, Akure, Port-harcourt, Ota happening in differents states in Nigeria within the next 6 months co-organized by DjangoGirls Lagos attendees. Many of the attendees have also applied to coach at these workshops in a bid to not only pass on the knowledge but to also get better. What better way to learn more than to teach someone else.
Due to the time constraints some of the girls who couldn’t finish their tutorial on the workshop day went back home and still persevered in finishing the tutorial among other real life commitments, one of which just announced her website with the help of her mentor while doing the Limbo dance.
A mentor at the workshop went on to give a wonderful account about his coaching experience and even admitted “ I daresay, Ladies would make better programmers.” Wow!!!
Challenges
My experience with Windhoek gave me a leverage in foreseeing many challenges that I was able to proactively curb for the Lagos workshop. One of which was the internet. Even though our Venue Sponsor had promised us, I got a backup internet and it turned out that the username and passwords to access the venue internet was limited so we had attendees who couldn’t access the internet connect to the backup. Although towards the end of the workshop the data bundle had run out on the backup internet. We also had pen drives with the major software and packages preloaded for mac and windows. With the issue of power I bought extra multiple extension sockets to make up for the small number of power ports that was available and that turned out great and our Venue sponsor had the standby generator up and running even when electricity went out. As it was the case in Windhoek 90% of the attendees used Windows and that in itself posed some problems.
GRATITUDE
Immense gratitude goes to all our sponsors for helping us give this learning opportunity to many women, the DjangoGirls WIndhoek team for their support during the planning phase, to everyone who helped in the scoring, to all our amazing coaches for taking the time out of their busy schedules to mentor, and to everyone else who supported us during the workshop - you are all Awesome!
Pictures: https://www.flickr.com/photos/djangogirls/albums/72157663207417834
Video: https://www.flickr.com/photos/djangogirls/25216315389/in/album-72157663207417834/