This blog post was written by Renata. Thank you, Renata :)
This is a not-so-brief story of how one team went from a Django Girls in one city to planning five more for next year. This text was written, reviewed and approved by the following Django Girls organizers in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil:
Rio Grande do Sul is the southernmost state of Brazil. We share borders with Santa Catarina (up north), Argentina (west and southwest) and Uruguay (south). It is the ninth largest state of Brazil by area. To give an idea of how big it is, know that it may take 12 hours travelling by bus to get from farther cities like Santana do Livramento to Porto Alegre - and the bus ticket may end up being more expensive than travelling from Porto Alegre to a city like Rio or Sao Paulo by plane.
In Rio Grande do Sul, more than 62% of the population lives outside of Porto Alegre metropolitan area and not everyone has the means to travel to attend events hosted in Porto Alegre (and, most of the time, only Porto Alegre holds this kind of event). At the moment we wrote this, Porto Alegre had already hosted
Two more happened in Porto Alegre metro area (DG Novo Hamburgo and DG Sao Leopoldo) - as well as other events dedicated to bringing more women to tech, such as Rails Girls, Women Who Go and PyLadies meetings. Of course, given the number of applicants we receive each DG Porto Alegre, we are far from done with events in the city, because a lot of girls were still unable to attend it (hence why we have the next one already scheduled for March 2018), but… Because Rio Grande do Sul is such a large state, as mentioned before, and because we have already hosted three successful Django Girls workshops in Porto Alegre (one of them that was the biggest in Latin America, with 108 participants), we - coaches and organizers of Django Girls Porto Alegre - started a conversation about how we could bring Django Girls to more girls, to girls who don’t live near our city and that, because of many limitations (such as resources and access to information), don’t even know what Django Girls is and that they can too become programmers and want to work with tech.
The first big step we took towards that was organizing Django Girls Caxias do Sul, which happened during PythonSul, the first Python regional conference to happen in South of Brazil (a meeting for Rio Grande do Sul, Santa Catarina and Parana pythonists). By dedication and work from two previous DG organizers (Claudia and Renata) and a new one (Eliane), we hosted a great workshop to girls from Caxias do Sul and region - but we also welcome girls from other cities and states (such as Santa Catarina). We had great feedbacks (that we asked the girls to write on a piece of paper - and then we read for the staff on the “after party”), such as:
“Django Girls workshop is a great way for us, women, to feel like we are in the informatics’ world, which has always been so masculine. It was a great day of learning and colourful letters. I certainly intend to attend it more than once. Thank you, Django Girls!”
“We needed more time! LOL. It was really cool. The room, the people’s mood, all errors and achievements. Thank you!”
“I really liked the event, I learned a lot! The mentors really made the difference, because even though the tutorial is very good, we still need some more deep explanations. Either way, congratulations on the event, I hope it’s the first of many!”
“I liked a lot the project and the intentions. I only think that it could have been split because a whole day is too heavy because is so much content. Still, I loved it!”
“It was so good that you allowed every learner to learn on their own rhythm. Thank you, teachers!”
“I liked a lot, everyone was so helpful. Even though I didn’t know much about programming, I managed to learn some.”
“It was so good to help in this event, it’s always the best experience!”
And… two days later, we were still talking about it! What was the next step? What could be done now? We knew we had a great group of people committed to the community and willing to help, but given our experience with the previous events, we also knew that the task of organizing other events, of organizing more events should not be put on the shoulders of the same one (hey, Felipe, we are looking at you), two or three people over and over, it would be too stressful and be taxing and lead to overburning or worse. So, on the Python Sul after party we had an informal meeting among some Django Girls organizers and mentors and, during it, three workshop proposals for next year were made, most of them by “new people” who hadn’t led a workshop before:
As soon as we got the okay from Django Girls organization to these proposals (thanks for the quick feedback, girls!), we… started organizing! We set up the Trello boards for each event and one Slack to unite and help with communication among all organizers and friends who are willing to help (not to mention work together on some tasks that can be shared among the events, such as getting quotes for t-shirts and reaching out to some sponsors). The girls from Caxias, who couldn’t attend the after party joined us and… guess what? They told us they also had made proposals for new workshops. YAY! Those are:
This isn’t a post to say “anyone can do it” or “anyone can organize FIVE workshops in one state, so why aren’t you?”. It is a post to say: Yes, this can be done. But don’t do it alone. Start small, plant a good seed and wait. If the work is good, people will see and want to help. It will spread. Maybe to another workshop. Maybe to five. Maybe to eight or more (we are looking up to you, Aisha Bello *.*).
See the pictures of our Django Girls on
! Kisses and cupcakes (we really do love those!) Django Girls Rio Grande do Sul team.
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