Organizing the first-ever Django Girls Workshop in Gandhinagar
This post is about my first ever experience as an organizer of a technical event. I’ve attended numerous workshops and also volunteered in helping the organizers a couple of times. I’ve been part of Django Girls for the last two years - as an attendee and as Outreachy community partner. I always wanted to bring this fantastic workshop to my city. And after closely observing other organizers for a while, I was ready to do it this year.
About Django Girls
Django Girls is a non-profit organization and a community that empowers and helps women to organize free, one-day programming workshops by providing tools, resources and support. It is a volunteer-run organization with hundreds of people contributing to bring more amazing women into the world of technology. Their goal is to make technology more approachable by creating resources designed with empathy.
Since 2014, an army of 2017 volunteers in the Django Girls community organized 872 events. Django Girls workshop has been organised in 502 cities in 90 countries. Yes! It is international :). A total of 20339 incredible women attended these events and started their tech journey :).
Format of the Django Girls workshop
[Source - Django Girls Gandhinagar Flicker Album]
Django Girls provides a unique learning experience. You work in a small group of just 4 to 5 attendees. A coach is assigned to each group, and your coach works closely with you throughout the day to help with any problems that you may have. You work at your own pace, assisted by your coach, so you don’t need to worry about keeping up with others.
Learnings at a Django Girls workshop
The workshop refers to Django Girls Tutorial which includes an Introduction to Python, Introduction to Django, Introduction to git and GitHub, Introduction to HTML and CSS, How to integrate a database with your website and How to deploy your website. At the end of the workshop, you have your own blog up and running on the internet and the coaches help you in achieving this.
Organizing Django Girls Gandhinagar
[Source - Django Girls Gandhinagar Flicker Album]
I am also a member of the Developer Students Club(DSC) at my institute. I, along with Tikam(another DSC member), attended Django Girls Workshop at Bhavnagar in July this year. We both were pretty excited to bring the extraordinary learning experience to our city - Gandhinagar.
We discussed the idea with our DSC lead Shadab, and we decided to organize it as a club activity. Our annual technical festival - the iFest was also around the corner. iFest was the perfect time to conduct this workshop as students don’t have academic commitments during the fest. We also had support from Harsh (iFest committee member) to help us in coordinating our workshop with other iFest activities. Soon, we figured out all the logistics and applied for permission to conduct the workshop from the Django Girls Organization. We received the permit within a week.
[Source - https://djangogirls.org/gandhinagar/]
Django Girls have a comprehensive organizers manual which helped us a lot. We also made sure that all of us were well informed regarding the status of organizing activities. We had numerous things to be done well on time like PRs, bringing sponsorships, finding coaches, handling social media accounts, updating our website, opening registrations, accessing the application and selecting attendees, arranging food, beverages, goodies and certificates. We maintained shared ToDo lists and kept all our conversations at the same place (a what’s app group for chatting and an organiser’s account for emails). This helped particularly when I got the dengue fever and was hospitalized for a week before the workshop. I’m so proud of our team for managing everything flawlessly when I was away.
[Source - Django Girls Gandhinagar Flicker Album]
We found fantastic coaches who came from different cities to help our participants in learning Django and web development. We also collaborated with the organizers of the DevFest Gandhinagar as their event was also taking place on the same day and at our university.
[Source - Django Girls Gandhinagar Flicker Album]
This gave us the opportunity to arrange a lightning talk by Siddhant Agarwal - program coordinator of Google Devs India.
[Source - Django Girls Gandhinagar Flicker Album]
We could also introduce our participants with some industry professionals attending the DevFest which created a good networking opportunity.
[Source - Django Girls Gandhinagar Flicker Album]
The workshop day was packed with intense learning, lightning talks and a quiz :).
[Source - https://djangogirls.org/gandhinagar/]
Last but not least, we got support from our fantastic sponsors. Microsoft stepped in as our first major sponsor. Python Software Foundation and Django Software Foundation also sponsored our event. GitHub and StickerMule sent us stickers to distribute at the workshop. A big thank you to all our sponsors.