KEYNOTE: Django Girls: Decade in Review and Beyond

Speaker 1: Hello folks. We're excited to be here to present our talk, Django Girls A Decade in Review and Beyond. What we explore the journey Django Girls has taken since the inception. years ago uh and the plans that we have for the future and before we get into our talk we just want to introduce uh ourselves and also introduce Django Girls. So Django Girls is a nonprofit that is registered in the UK that empowers women to organize free workshops by providing the resources they need, such as a website, emails, designs and manuals and all our resources are open source. So about myself, so my name is Anna Makaruze.

Speaker 1: I'm uh a software engineer based in Harare, Zimbabwe. So I'm part-time fundraising coordinator for Django Girls, and I'm also one of the trustees. I'm a former president of the Django Software Foundation, uh chair of the organizing committee for Django Africa, and I've also Organized PyCon Zimbabwe 2016 and 2017, uh Django Con Europe 2018 and many other events. Okay, so uh I had introduced myself. Uh so next up we'll go to Rachel.

Speaker 2: Yeah, hi um I am a bit nervous, I'll tell you that, but I'm so excited because I'm just here with a bunch of friends. So thank you for joining me. My name is Rachel Calhoun. I'm a software developer at a medical device company called Striker. And uh if you want to talk about how awesome I am later. I use she, her pronouns, so feel free. Um my journey with Jamal Girls began in 2015 in Korea. So I started learning Python there with a little community and then I became an organizer of Django Girls. And through that, I got connected with the Django community. And my first conference was actually DjangoCon Europe through an opportunity grant

Speaker 2: where I met some great people. and actually that was when I decided that I wanted to pursue Django as a career. So thank you. And from then I've organized and coached with Django Girls in various locations. And now I am a Django Girls trustee. Oh, I've also co-founded Janguana Space. If you haven't heard of that, come find me. I'll I'll I'd love I'd love to talk about that as well. Um and I have an updated bio, which I have to tell you about a couple days ago, a friend of mine who I received respect and look up to in the Django community said that I was one of their Django heroes. So I'm gonna get myself a cape and put that in my bio. So yeah, that's all right. So today we're going to talk this is an overview, we're gonna talk about the origin

Speaker 2: origins of Django Girls, how it evolved over time, and then the challenges we've had to overcome in the solutions we found to do that that kind of have shaped us as an organization. We'll also look at some success stories because we're awesome. We want to share that. It's because of you, it's because of us. Let's celebrate. It's our 10 years. And then going forward, what's the plan? And then of course the call to action.

Speaker 1: Alright, so I'll I'll take you through the origins. How did it all start? So uh Django Girls was started uh in 2014. Uh the first very the very first event was held uh in Berlin, Germany. As part of EuroPython, uh, it was organized by Olasitaska and Olase Jeska, and the reason why they organized the first uh event was they saw how many uh how women were under. represented at tech events there would usually be more white male than any other uh proportion including women so they decided to organize free workshops to inspire women to fall in love with programming by creating their The wa

Speaker 1: the first experience with tech to be fun and uh the amazing first experience with technology comes from being introduced to the tech and programming world in a friendly and not so formal but also welcoming. Environment that showcases all women is software engineer role models. So what we do is we introduce women plus to programming and web development. Using Python in Django. We have developed resources that we use. We have our tutorial, which is used by I've heard many organizations in the Django community telling me that when they have new developers whom they want to introduce, their new highers to introduce the them to technology.

Speaker 1: They actually use our Django Girls tutorial instead of the tutorial that is on the Django website uh on the Django or the official Django uh website. Then we also have uh organizer manual that is meant to help organizers on how to organize their first free uh their first workshop. We also have coaches manual if you are going to be a coach at our Django Girls event. We also have guidelines on how you are supposed to be doing the coaching because our format is different from the other workshops that you normally know where You have a presenter or an in the front and giving people instructions on how to do anything. For our our setup is each participant yes, yes, their own laptop and they go through the tutorial at their own pace. And as a coach, are only there to explain concepts that they don't understand.

Speaker 1: So you you treat each uh attendee as an individual and uh uh help them with their needs, uh not as part of a group but as an individual. We also have uh tutorial extensions which are meant to give uh our participants some sort of homework to do afterwards and then we've frequently asked questions for organizers. In case you are stuck with your event, you don't know how to do it, we have uh frequently organized questions where you can see what other organizers is have gone through. So uh after the first event uh within the first year there were fifty four events organized uh in twenty four countries across the globe with ninety three following years.

Speaker 1: So already there was like uh demand for support which was greater than what OLA and uh Ola could do. Uh so they needed uh people to Help them handle the workload. So this led to the creation of the first support team to help them deploy events, response to emails to organizers, because at that time Django Girls was not registered. So they could not employ anyone to manage the workload. So uh the first support team was made up of Ola and Ola, and then we had uh Baptiste uh who joined Together with uh Ania, they joined uh in January 2015.

Speaker 1: Then we also had Katia and Geoff who joined uh in June 2015, and then Lacey joined in July 2015, and together they Uh they worked with Ola and Ola to support the organizers to maintain the resources, uh meaging pool requests to our open source resources while they were working towards uh registering uh the nonprofit. And then in twenty fifteen Uh on the 24th of August, Jumbo Girls was registered as a non-profit in the UK with the mission to empower women to organize free programming workshops for women by providing the tools and resources like this. Saint the uh before. And the first board of trustees was set up uh

Speaker 1: uh it it had then Anya and Baptist and they saved from August 2015 to August 2020 when they step down for for the new board to take over.

Speaker 2: Alright, thanks Anna. So how it evolved. Um we're going to look at like a had mentioned before in the overview some challenges that we've had to overcome and the solutions that we've chosen to approach those different challenges um and how that's shaped us as an organization. So I don't know if you all are aware, but burnout is a thing that people struggle with in open source. Also sustainability. We have not found this the solution, uh, but we have found some solutions that work for us. And you can see here how fast Django Girls has grown. So challenge scaling burnout and sustainability of the organization. We see Django Girls growth in the first five years. And you can see 2014

Speaker 2: and uh from then it keeps increasing at the and it peaks at twenty seventeen with or lots of workshops and organizers all around the world. And so how does an organization how do we how do we maintain that? Um just to keep things running, maintain the website, um translations and all the material. So our solution was to uh get some new help. And so Dae Young, my beautiful wife, and myself, and Aisha Velo, she we all all joined as the um support team to help in different aspects. And then another solution was to pay people. So uh it turns out

Speaker 2: alright um paying people um is a solution to uh burnout or and it's helped us immensely. So uh Lucy Day was hired as the awesomeness ambassador um from twenty fifteen and she worked amazingly keeping things running on the admin side of things of Django Girls as a nonprofit organization. And she um uh she had to leave in twenty seventeen, go on to new adventures. Um but we lucked out and we found some uh great folks to help out and fill those roles. So we actually ended up splitting the awesomeness ambassador into two roles. Anna here, she had great experience with fundraising, so she became our fundraising coordinator, and she's also taking on

Speaker 2: since then she's been managing our website, um the heavy lifting there. So thank you Anna. And then Claire Witcher, she had an experience with uh a lot organizing a lot of tech events in the UK and she was really plugged into the community there. So she joined um as the awesomeness ambassador in the admin side of things. And so t together uh they've brought us uh here until today. And so it's been a while, it worked, we laid the foundation for years in the future. Um so it turns out Pink People helps. And to pay people, I'll plug in, we need money, so donations. All right. Um another solution um tackling the same challenge with burnout and sustainability for our organization is a new uh new board of

Speaker 2: Trustees. So we have Leona Sow joined us. She's in the UK. Anna, Aisha Vale, me, and Claire Witcher. We're all the trustee, uh trustee. Alright, uh the next challenge I want to talk about is It can be a little heavy, um, but we're we have to talk about heavy things. So uh diversity and inclusion. So as an organization we try to champion that we are inclusive, that we are welcoming and that everyone should feel safe. And so we need to ensure that we are actually inclusive and devoid of racial bias in our processes and resources. And this includes our language, uh, imagery, materials, and practices. So in

Speaker 2: With the horrible murder of George Floyd, uh that kind of awoken um folks to some racial disparities and systemic racism all around the world. And as an organization we looked inward as well and how can we improve ourselves and what can we do in our smart small corner of the world. And so one thing we did was we got a recommendation to talk to Prabhan Patel at theteach. com. And the image here says becoming anti Anti-racist is not a quick fix, it's a lifelong education. And so we invited him to do an audit of all of our resources and processes to see what could we improve on. And so let's look at what we found. I won't talk About all of them, we don't have time, but I'll highlight some interesting ones we found.

Speaker 2: The first one for the inclusion audit findings and actions. Using photos from workshops that show our global and diverse audience on our website. our sponsor decks and social media. This was an easy win because we have a Flickr account where we encourage organizers to upload their images. So we had a great number of photos to choose from and we've been using those uh to try to represent folks from all over the world. Um and we've also updated our sponsor deck, thanks to Anna. And we've been using them in social media. We've also had a new video made. I don't know if you've seen our website, but we had a video, I think from the first year of Django Girls and have since Finally, we got a chance to update that, and that'll be a fun surprise later. The next thing is using inclusive language.

Speaker 2: Um, Django girls. Well, girls, it does that include me? Like, am I welcome in this space? So we wanted to be Very, very explicit that we are inclusive of our non-binary and trans friends. And we have that on the website. We try to be really explicit about that. The next example was remove examples in our Materials that are exclusionary. And the one example I'll share here is when trying to explain how magical Django Girls is, that feeling of like doing some amazing thing and getting exciting. They were using, or our materials were used, was using the example of going to Disney. Disneyland. But maybe not everyone knows what that is, or maybe that's not something in their world, so we and that's you're very

Speaker 2: Eurocentric. Uh so we wanted to remove that. And we have um we can find better words because words do matter. Um and the last uh finding was to encourage and support translations of our resources. I hope you all so something that I'm really proud of, we have our tutorial in 20 different languages. That's pretty awesome. We can always add more though, so uh contributions welcome. But our website had not been translated. So thanks to Anna and Mark Mark Walker, we have started on that as well to try to be more inclusive.

Speaker 1: Uh the other challenge that we had was that um diverse perspective and uh cultural differences like Rash uh Rashad is from the US, I'm from Zimbabwe and uh our most of uh our board of trustees were uh I either in uh North America, the uh the UK or Africa. So we realized that uh our perspectives were not as diverse as our community. So uh we we decided to we w we needed to address that because we felt that other communities were not represented given that we by twenty twenty we are already up up operating in more than ninety countries across the globe. So what we did was we came up uh with

Speaker 1: the solution to come up with an advisory board um to help us uh shape the direction of Django girls so um what So what we did uh we e call uh for applications uh to s to see to to find people uh on social media so that um and what we what we are what we're looking for was what is the benefit to Django girls if somebody joined art uh does the applicant really want to be involved with Django girls uh will they provide uh insight into specific area of diversity inclusion

Speaker 1: Or do they have like specific uh ideas that they want to that they have that can help improve or shape the future of Django Girls? And uh we tried our best and this is our advisory board. We have We have uh Sandra Item, uh Giso Frederick, uh Noah Aloru from Ghana. We also have uh Hara and uh Kalton, uh Gibson, so Okay, so we tried to incorporate uh everyone who had a different background from what we already had uh in our uh Board of Justice and together we make up the support team. But the difference with uh Uh our

Speaker 1: advisory board now is um they sit out with us in meetings and give us ideas though if uh they don't do so much hands-on work like we did with uh the first support team where they had to do lots of work because now we have paid staff. So they are just there to help us shape uh the direction of Django Girls by providing uh their diverse ideas from what we would actually have if if it were just left to the five of us.

Speaker 2: All right. Um, thank you. So the next challenge that I wanted to discuss is reach. Um I saw something uh a few months ago, I couldn't find it again to share it with you, but it was talking about like it's not enough to do good things or amazing things. You have to tell people about it. it. And it's not just bragging, bragging rights. It's also to find people who are also passionate about that and to inspire others. And so the challenge for us was we used to have and we used to upload frequently on our blog. So if For the first few years we published your Django stories to showcase on our community blog, but the for the last few years these stories haven't been published, so we had a gap and we had no way of showcasing these success stories. So our solution there

Speaker 2: is a podcast. If you've not heard it, I would encourage you to go check it out. Django Girls Podcast. Our hosts are Leona and Aisha. They're amazing to talk to. They're really friendly. If you have a fun story, then I encourage you to share. I've already met a couple people this morning just at the booth who came to me and said I am Wintech because of Django Girls. Like I'm working in Django because of them. So we'd love to hear your stories. Voice instead of like in written form in a blog, you can hear hear it from themselves, right? And that's really nice. Uh we want to uplift the community, capture the impact of Django Girls with individual stories. Um and so this is uh Maria. If you can see her.

Speaker 2: She was featured on the blog a year ago, I think, and she Aisha last year she did keynote at JammaCon Europe and she had mentioned her, so I'm here to give an update. She's my very close friend, 20 years. But she was occupied. patient therapist, she switched careers um because of COVID, she couldn't work anymore in the hospital. So over the years I kept telling her ever since I got into tech, you should do programming, you should do it. Here here just like slide her some information, like try check it out. And finally she did. And Turns out she loved it, I was right. Um it's not a surprise. But uh anyway, um the the story here is that uh she's a part-time Django developer and that allows her time. She published a book with a major publishing company. She She also

Speaker 2: she had said to me, I'll read it in her own words, she says, because of you, my daughter exists. She recently had a baby, and I wanted to highlight her story because, like, we think of getting a job, right, or leading a community. But like sometimes people's goals and success stories for them is having a family. And in the US, healthcare and child care costs are super expensive. So um and so she wasn't even thinking of having a family before she c got into tech and had that job. So I wanted to highlight that. And that's a valid success story. We don't hear a ton of those, but I think that's amazing.

Speaker 1: Oh, and uh the next challenge that we face now uh is uh benout uh sustainability again and uh This time it was our awesome niece, Ambassador. Uh Claire, she's we started around the same time in 2017, June. Um, but then life happens. Um so by 2022 she had a lot going on. She was uh doing a graduate studies, she had a family to raise. She now has two girls and um she also had uh a full-time job so she had little time and energy left to do the Django girls uh admin work that she had been doing And um so this led to things slowing down uh in our community and

Speaker 1: uh b uh we also like we started losing visibility. Also it also happens to Queenside During this very same period with uh COVID. So we had uh less blog post going blog posts going out, uh and generally things were just slowing down in our Django girls world, and we needed uh to come up with uh solution. And uh we did uh and which was uh to hire more folks. So to address this issue, uh Claire decided to step down on her own from the awesome ambassador role and hire someone to replace here. But then we realized that uh yeah uh he had so much going on there was uh the admin the financial and the admin part replying to emails and then also social media and we decided to split the roles into two

Speaker 1: like um what happened with the fundraising commit coordinator and the awesome Miss Ambassador. So we decided to introduce a new role which is for communications officer and uh we advertised and we on LinkedIn and uh to eliminate bias we used uh blind scoring from each of the trustees and we made sure that there were three people in the interviews. Uh and after collecting in uh our uh the information we hired uh Suze Shadlow and uh Misha. To uh so Suze is our current awesome ambassador. And then uh Misha Below, she joined uh as a communications officer, but unfortunately she couldn't stay long with us

Speaker 1: um due to Moving to another role and some uh personal matters. So yes. And then the other challenge that we faced was uh global reach and inclusive. So our website was only available in English for many years and notice widely to uh translated as our tutorial. So we realized that it was uh a problem because um despite being uh used all over the globe it was in English, which is convenient for native English speakers, but not so much for non-native English speakers. So we decided to do translations

Speaker 1: and uh shout out to Mark. Walker, he couldn't be here, but uh he said you'll be watching for eventually he has been leading uh the translations for our project in Django. And uh so far, uh unfortunately, uh the email Is uh very small, but uh German is the most widely translated uh language now. Uh Spanish, Portuguese, French, Persian, and uh they're a bit behind. So if you are there uh and you want our website to be available in your language, uh this is a call for action for you, you can get involved. Uh the link for joining is right there. We can share it. We can also share it on the slide. So that's an area for contribution if you would

Speaker 1: like to Drain us.

Speaker 2: All right. Um I get all the fun topics. Okay. So uh so the next challenge was um uh COVID nineteen, pandemic lockdowns and so So Django Girls hosts in-person events, having that very positive I don't know if if if you if you know, you know, but having a very positive, energetic, celebratory vibe at these workshops is part of our brand, and because uh workshops or in person Meetings were shut down during COVID. It's had a huge impact negatively on our organization. And the slide says in-person workshops aren't possible due to worldwide ban on gathering during COVID. And you could see in the graph that 2019 we had quite high numbers for organizers. and workshops and then 2020 it dropped drastically

Speaker 2: and so how how could we adjust to this and I'm happy to say that we adjusted quite well and for the better and this will The solution is for us was creating remote workshops and encouraging people to host remote workshops instead of in-person. So right off the bat, for health and safety, we suspended in-person workshops and we wouldn't even um let people apply. On our site, and we wouldn't approve any. Then we updated our organizers manual with instructions and guidelines to remote workshops, also with suggested platforms, and we then opened applications for remote workshops. Workshops. That worked out well, and since then

Speaker 2: we have kept online workshops or the remote workshops available, but also in person. This allows flexibility for local people depending and throughout depending on their local local. Laws and regulations in relation to COVID, but also it empowers them to make the best decision for their community. Another benefit of these remote workshops is if they struggle with finding a venue, a great benefit for people who are who want to attend. If there's no jail girls in their town, they could find one that's online. Or if they have limited mobility and they can't leave their house, for example, they could also join. So I think that this has only made us more inclusive. Um and I I think that's a great thing going forward. Uh

Speaker 1: the next challenge that we face are social media changes. So we mostly lied on Twitter to which is now X uh to showcase our way uh uh communicate with our community. Uh and uh after the ownership of Twitter changed, uh most developers I know I know they moved away from Twitter and uh so Our post now we're getting uh low visibility because uh most uh developers if we had moved to fake the face. Oh sorry. So our solution uh was now try and utilize other um social media channels

Speaker 1: and uh through uh the branding for our c uh and social media plan from our communications officer just for if during the short time that show with us Uh we've shifted uh our engagement from being mostly on ex by and to use uh LinkedIn, uh Fediverse, Facebook and Instagram. So you can follow our socials um which are on this slide. And also when you post something, just give us uh you know, share our our posts so that we have more reach.

Speaker 2: Yeah, go follow us please, um and and tag us and and things that are relevant. We'd love to share your story. with our w wider community and be more connected. So success stories. Um so this is a fun one. Uh we have individual success stories. Two folks came up to me this morning and said, Hey I got a job from Django Girls and I was like, Tell me more uh because me too, I got a job because of Django Girls and the Django community. And that's that's a that's great. We have individual success stories. We also have leadership success stories, people who have stepped into leadership roles because of the support of the community. I want to talk about a little bit uh different as a community, as an organization. And what does success look like for us? So so in the our impact jangle girls survey. What? Django Girls Survey 2024.

Speaker 2: So in 2016 we did an impact survey. And we recently carried out another one for twenty twenty-four because it's our ten year uh ten year anniversary. And so thanks to JetBrains and PyCharm, uh they helped us put that survey together and get it out. It is still open, so the f the numbers I'll show you are or we'll talk about today are not the final ones and I encourage everyone if you've volunteered with Jail Girls or attended a workshop to go fill out that survey. It's very useful. Um and it I can share it in the Slack. It's also on our ex our Twitter account. pinned at the top. So let's kind of look at the results. First we'll look at demographics. You can't see all these, you don't need to. I'll just tell you what they are. So who's attending our workshops?

Speaker 2: The biggest age range is from is 30 to 34. Um I thought that was interesting and it kind of it's a normal distribution seems like after that on either side it kind of decreases as you go. Uh but uh I kind of started around that time as well. Um I feel like that's you know probably a good transitive like uh time for change in someone's Try a new career, learn something new. And the next thing that's really interesting, okay, before I go farther, I will say that the people who filled out our surveys are people that are likely following us on social media or the newsletters or the blog. Things like that. So it might be a bit skewed, I'm just saying. But let's still celebrate. So 69 % are either working in tech or plan to work in tech thanks to Django Girls.

Speaker 2: So I think it was forty-four percent said they got a they got into tech because of Django Girls, and then the rest are planning too. And out of those, eighty-two percent are programming. I think that's awesome. And it's not gonna be a surprise to you that the top languages are Python, Django. HTML CSS is equal. Um and another question we had on the survey is what other impact has this had on you? Um the number one answer with like sixty-five percent was I had fun. And I think that's a success story. If people can come and have fun doing programming, that's that's great. Uh but even besides that, they were inspired by other women in tech. They made friends and expanded their network. Um and another one was that we asked folks h if they're learning or if they continue to learn programming after

Speaker 2: The workshop and 71% said they did. They kept learning, and 10% said they planned to. And another fun statistic is that 84 % of the volunteers, the coaches and organizers said that they got a deeper understanding. understanding of Django because of their involvement with the workshop. I think that's great. So there is various ways to that are we're awesome, okay? Way successful. Um but what can we improve on? So we also want feedback. What can what else can we give you? So they would love a more connected community, we use Slack. Um and so people ask that they would love to see like if we were more active there. The other thing is they would love to see longer experiences, more trainings, um, more intermediate workshops. And Access to quality training and for learning

Speaker 2: people who are learning programming, they said they they hoped we could help provide funding, la tops, because some people don't have them, more opportunities, again, e-learning courses, continued mentoring. mentorship, funding for training like webinars and tutorials, and all of these things we would love to do. And if you have an idea that you I could do that, I I have I have resources or I have money to help you do that, talk to me. I'm at the booth all conference, okay? But um yeah, so we there is room for improvement and we're we're open to ideas. Alright. Next, another success that is important to me are the leaders. So Django Girls doesn't just create programmers, it creates leaders.

Speaker 2: It's an incubator for leadership. And you can see here some awesome people and I'll go through them each. But it Django Girls and the Django community creates a supportive environment that allows folks to step into those roles. And so first we see Katya Nakamura. She's here. I I don't know where she is, but hi. Um she has a similar story to me timeline wise. She started with she attended Jane of Girls in 2015. In twenty sixteen she got an opportunity Grant to come to DjangoCon Europe where she was a coach at Django Girls. And then since then she's organized all around the world at various Django Girls events. And in 2020 she was elected to the Django Software Foundation board. Uh and since then she's been also recently working with the working group for DjangoCon

Speaker 2: Europe. And this is because she got introduced to Django through Django Girls and then well, DjangoCon Europe too. Okay. Uh and then we see uh a couple of so we have Anna Schwendler and Lisa Kwatman. They have been doing awesome work in Berlin. Some of you might know them. They I know that they've organized various locations over the past 10 years. Both of them have been heavy involved. But Berlin just celebrated their ten years doing Django workshops consistently. And so that's like a a really a success story for me. And then okay, another friend of mine, we have Dawn Wages, she's here as well, she'll be speaking uh workshop later. Okay, what can I say? say here she's director um with the Python Software Foundation. She's a Django

Speaker 2: Not Space co founder. She's organized DjangoCon US, DjangoCon Africa, DjangoCon Europe. I mean she's all over the place in And again, her story similarly starts from a Django girl's beginnings, right? And then Anna. Anna is amazing. She is a former D uh Django Software Foundation president. Django Girls Trustee. She's organized she she has organized DjangoCon Europe and she is uh currently DjangoCon Africa organizer. Um and then me, you've heard enough about me, Django uh DjangoCon US organizer, Djangonaut Space. co-founder, um also trustee with Django Girls and uh Django Hero.

Speaker 2: And then we have Aisha Beo and Leona So they're our podcast uh hosts. They're also uh trustees and I know They've organized and coached various times throughout and they ha similarly have beginnings with Django Girls. And I know Aisha is really heavily involved with the Nigerian Python community. Let's uh talk about going forward.

Speaker 1: Okay, so So what's uh next in our future? We have a new a few plans that uh we have for the future of Django girls. Um so uh we are making changes uh to our website and we have added new ways to donate directly from the website. So you can donate using via uh via paper or stripe from our donate pages and we have also changed uh the layout to our website Menu. We've already changed the menu, but we are going to be doing changes to the aware uh layout soon. And we're also going to do changes to our admin dashboard. This is to do. So if you'd like to contribute to our website,

Speaker 1: you can also Always talk to me and uh you can uh join our contributors. Then uh the other thing is uh we want to improve the maintenance of our resources so we've continuously been getting feedback. Beg from organizers and attendees after they've uh attended uh the workshop that the tutorial is too long and uh we need to find a way to shorten it so that uh uh people can be able to go through uh it within a day. is is the plan. So we are hoping to work on that um soon. And we are also uh we've already added uh like um a tutorial extension for Wagtail and we are hoping to add more so that our attendees

Speaker 1: can uh have uh more work to do after they have uh uh attended the workshop so that they we have like intermediate uh workshop plans uh for our our alumini and then uh the other thing that we are working on is uh coming up with the Django Girls bootcamp which is which uh will be started which will be launched first in the UK. So our up this will be a twelve to sixteen week uh coding boot camp. Um Which we feel is an ambitious extension of our mission, but we are trying to tailor to tailor it specifically for women who are busy with uh work, uh family and other things. But it will be uh a congregation.

Speaker 1: receive training in web development covering HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Python and Django. So we hope that in addition to the technical skills, the bootcamp will focus on professional development, allowing participants to work on personal in open source projects. So if you would like to get involved again um with us in developing the materials or you'd like to be a mentor, uh you can always uh talk to us about this.

Speaker 2: Alright, so um small change Django Girls Plus. This is our new logo. It's new we have new branding package, fonts and messaging. And this came out of like I had mentioned earlier. earlier our inclusion audit, but also people keep asking us, am I included? Am I included? So we have rebranded um with the plus to be like, yes, you are included. And it's a very common symbol in LGBTQI plus community and so we kind of borrowed from that while maintaining our name and logo. It's we have really high name recognition, so we didn't want to change it too much, but this was our kind of compromise. And so

Speaker 2: you'll be seeing this from now on, yay. Also happy pride. So we also with a new brand and logo we have a new limited edition t-shirt ten years of Django Girls. Um we have an online store and it we will add it to our website today um and I can share that with you online as well. We have all of our old designs but the new one as well if you'd like to order something. Um and this is to celebrate our 10 years. It's a pretty big milestone. Thank you. Shout out to Joni at YupGup for helping us put those together in a pinch. She was wonderful. But yeah, go get your t-shirt.

Speaker 2: Right.

Speaker 1: Ah, and the call for action. So uh we're looking uh for new contributors to our tutorial, to our manuals to our website. Uh burnout didn't just happen to our support team, but it also happened to our contributors. So the ones that were there at the beginning, uh very few are still contributing. So we are always looking for new contributors to work with us on our resources since they are open source. And then um you can donate to us as well. There are many ways to donate uh to us. We have introduced GitHub sponsors.

Speaker 1: You can also organize or coach at our events. There's an orga there's a Django girls event uh this weekend. Uh you can also participate there. Then with uh website uh and tutorials, uh contributions, how to if you don't feel like you can contribute technically, you can also like contribute our rhythmic guides as well.

Speaker 2: If somebody wants to be our first GitHub sponsor, I'll give you a t-shirt at the booth. So get on there.

Speaker 1: So what's up for Tint and Vesari?

Speaker 2: Oh. Alright, so one way to celebrate our ten year uh anniversary or birthday was we wanted to put a new video together. And so we We asked our uh one of the co founders to submit a message and we wanted to share that with you. I spent hours, hours looking on YouTube, um, finding all of the Django Girls videos from like workshops all around the world and I I I'm hoping that we can put a playlist together so you don't have to do that yourselves. But it was really heartwarming to see like how big the impact has been. Um and how how like happy it is. Um so we wanted to share this video with you. I'll let Anna touch the computer.

Speaker 3: Desarrollar no solamente ser de hombres, debe ser de todos. Decide what you want and go for it.

Speaker 4: Hi, I'm Ola Sandetka, one of the founders of Django Girls. When I was preparing the very first Django Girls work, 10 years ago with my friend Ola, I wouldn't have imagined what a wonderful chapter of my life this event would open. These years proved to me that every one of us has a power to change the world. What we need is working together as a community, taking one step at a time, showing up every day to make big things happen. Ten years ago, I wouldn't have believed that Dunga Girls would be. present in 100 countries, then thousands of women would fall in love with programming. That I would see Django Girls alumni

Speaker 4: and conference venues as speakers and open source contributors. That wouldn't be possible without the amazing Django community and thousands of organizers around the world who wanted to give something to others, share their love and passion for tech. From the bottom of my heart, thank you so much. Happy 10-year anniversary.

Speaker 1: Oh yeah. So uh as you know if somebody has a birthday they do get presents. So We're kind of uh expecting birthday presents. That's why we came to Django Kong Europe to celebrate our birthday here. So you can donate to us uh via GitHub sponsors like the show is Saint. Uh the first person to donate through our git up sponsors will get a Django girls 10th anniversary t shirt so please are up and joy uh and donate to us you can also join us on patreon uh uh the link is on our website uh you can Up for monthly donations uh through Patreon. Then if you would like you can donate uh via our donate page where there is a PayPal uh form

Speaker 1: or a stripe form, or you can scan the QR code there to donate. via Stripe. Uh if you if your company would like to become our corporate sponsors, uh fundraising has been a bit tight this year, finding new sponsors, you can come talk to me and we'll discuss uh the corporate sponsorship packages and how we can work together. So please please uh let's get the birthday presents rolling. Uh my o my birthday is also my personal birthday, thirtieth June at the end of this month. So for my birthday also you can also donate to Jacob Joseph again. So we are really calling out for the 10th uh anniversary presence uh through your donations uh and you can also help amplify our fundraising uh

Speaker 1: this month in July because uh our birthday is in July is that Baptist? Oh, one of our founding trustees is the audience. Good to see you. So please donate to us and uh yeah, thank you. That's all from uh us. We'd like to thank every organization. organizer was here, uh every coach who's here, uh everyone who has contributed our resources uh online, our old supporting member members, trustees, our advisory board members Everyone has contributed to making Django Girls what it has been. Uh we are just the faces that you see, but uh the reach that we have had isn't been

Speaker 1: made possible by what just what we have been doing, but because of all of you Uh I've never been to the many countries where events have taken place, but uh events are still taken place there because of all our volunteers who have made this possible. I would also like to thank all the companies that expose. supported us s since we started uh as our corporate sponsors. Uh Django Girls wouldn't have been able to get to ten years without your support. So everyone will support us through donations or through sponsorship, through organizing an event, coaching. We want to say thank you for your work and keep supporting us. Uh yeah.

Speaker 2: Thank you.

Speaker 1: Thank you.

Speaker 5: Hello. Uh if anyone has any questions, uh please, yep.

Speaker 6: Thank you, Anna. Thank you. Is this on? Thank you, Anna. Thank you, uh, Rachel. What do you think you might be talking about in twenty thirty four? If you're on stage. That's a lot. You go ahead.

Speaker 1: Okay. Uh so uh we have plans for the boot camp. Uh and while we are planning to launch it in the UK Uh first we hope to be able to spread it to other countries as well. Uh like what happened with uh Django Girls. It started as an event at EuroPython and then it spread uh to everywhere else uh globally. So our plans uh for 2030 we hope to be uh probably um calling for action for people to help us with our boot camps for Mendoz uh also uh hoping uh for more career opportunities for the women who attend our boot camps

Speaker 1: for people to be hiring them because uh the the c the current scenario that we have is people attend a workshop and uh And then is the honors is up to them to keep learning and get themselves a a job. And we want to be a part of their programming journey, uh going forward helping them, you know, get their first step into getting hired in tech, getting their first job. and uh keep introducing more women to be working in tech. So we are hoping that uh for twenty thirty probably we'll be calling out for people to hire our hire of the of our boot camps.

Speaker 2: Um and kind of going back to that survey results, people are telling us what they want, right? They want more training, they want job opportunities, um and and they want laptops. Like how okay, wish lists, right? We could pay for people's laptops um for p in our community or provide laptops for folks who don't have them and and help them learn programming and create have a boot camp and they can complete that and that would smooth right into an internship with some of our like uh sponsors for example if there were some. Like how could that be if we had a pipeline from Django Girls all the way through developer. That's my kind of wish list. Um is it gonna happen? We'll see. With your support maybe so go ahead and donate. Any other questions?

Speaker 2: Carlton, yeah. We gotta wait for microphone.

Speaker 7: Thank you for the talk. You both you said Jangoz has been active in over 90 countries. Do you have an estimate for the number of people that have been through the workshop? How many people have

Speaker 1: been through? Okay. Uh The last time I checked uh we're over twenty-two thousand. Uh it's on our website. I I don't have the exact number now because it's it keeps changing but we have now over twenty two thousand. We may we've attended our wake shops.

Speaker 2: And if you have any more questions that you'd like to talk with us about we're have a booth and you can come visit us there. Thank you.

Speaker 5: Okay, thank you, Anna. Thank you.