(This is a guest post by Jessica McKellar, a Boston Python User Group organizer and co-organizer of the Boston Python Workshop for
women and their friends.)
I am thrilled to report that the Python Software Foundation's Outreach
and Education Committee awarded a $3300 grant to the
Boston Python
Workshop to support and grow the workshop over the next 8 months. We
are excited to continue our successes at bringing more women into the
Boston Python community and to take the show on the road!
The Boston Python Workshop
The Boston Python Workshop is a free, volunteer-driven introduction to
the Python programming language for women and their friends who have
no or limited programming experience. We run the workshop every 2
months for between 30 and 50 women, and it has run 4 times so far. We strive to:
- Show new programmers and the Boston Python community examples of
smart, confident, capable programmers of all backgrounds.
- Bring new, awesome, diverse people into the local Python community through diversity and outreach events.
- Inspire others to run their own introductory workshops and
outreach events, and to get more user groups thinking about
diversity and outreach.
An important part of our philosophy is a commitment to running the
workshop as part of the local user group.
This Python Software Foundation grant will help us run the next three
workshops in Boston and bootstrap workshops in 3 new cities. As a
result of this grant:
- Over 200 women will learn Python fundamentals and join their local
programming communities as empowered, confident beginners who are
excited to continue learning.
- 3 new Python user groups will learn how to run high-quality
diversity outreach events.
- Volunteers at the workshops will get experience with public speaking
and teaching technical content -- a great stepping stone to leading
future PyCon talks and tutorials!
- The Python community as a whole will continue to benefit from our
shared, online, Creative Commons-licensed workshop material as we
expand and refine it.
Results
The workshop has resulted in dramatic, lasting diversity improvements
for the Boston Python User Group. Many workshop alums are now
fixtures at our hack nights and lecture-style events, and the group has
gone from 0-3% women at its events to consistently over
15%. Additionally, group membership has doubled since the workshops
started, to over 1350 people, making it the second-largest Python user
group in the US.
If you do the math you'll see that we aren't just bringing women into
the user group through the workshop. The secret is that running
beginner-friendly outreach events for women focuses the group on being
more welcoming to everyone. Our monthly hack nights grew out of the
workshop and are one example of bringing beginner-friendly ideas from
the workshop to the group as a whole. The Boston Python user group is
now a more diverse and vibrant community full of beginners,
scientists, artists, entrepreneurs, and people switching to a career
in software/IT, and we're very happy that the workshop has played a
significant role in this.
Beyond Boston
We want to help other user groups see the same kinds of successes that
we've had here in Boston, and a large part of this PSF grant is
dedicated to bootstrapping workshops in other cities. If you want to
bring the workshop to your city,
read the full grant proposal and
get in touch!
All of our material is online and shared through a permissive Creative
Commons license. Check out an
example curriculum and
photos from
the workshops. Our goal of stress-free experiences for attendees makes
our material a good base for other intro events; for example, we believe
our cross-platform installation instructions for Python are the best
we've seen.
We look forward to a larger, more diverse Python community, and we
want to thank the Python Software Foundation for supporting our
efforts. The Outreach and Education Committee,
PSF Grants program,
and
PSF Sprints program are all interested in new grant requests to
push the Python world forward. Make something awesome happen in your
city!
