[Events] User groups grant weekly report 2014-01-02

[Asheesh Laroia]

Hi all,

(Dear outreach-and-education: feel free to reply just to me & the 
committee, leaving the events list out, if that's more convenient. The 
OpenHatch Events list is publicly archived, fwiw.)

Dear events list: I realized it would be interesting to start sharing 
these weekly updates w/r/t the Python user group outreach grant. If anyone 
is interested in helping with anything you see here, do let me know! If 
you have other ideas or responses, feel free to reply to me personally or 
on-list.


Spreadsheet tracking progress: 
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AqO7ZnOSYg1idFZkYWpJUzB0OGVxWGx1ZE9SUEV2ZlE#gid=0


Things I did in the past week:

* Had a conversation with a NYC PyLadies organizer, and got her interested 
in running a Boston Python Workshop-style intro event, and gave some 
advice about user groups and getting Meetup.com reimbursements. Scheduled 
her for more follow-up in about a week.

* Got an introduction to PyLadies Republica Dominicana, and pinged to 
schedule a meeting.

* Pinged 6 other groups.

* Systematized this outreach a little further, with a contact template 
that I work from.

* Have 2 meetings scheduled for next week: Django SF; PhillyPUG, plus 
SoCal piggies scheduling in the works.

* Caught up with Ryan Freckleton of PySprings; their diversity outreach 
workshop is progressing slowly but surely; he has made a list of possible 
volunteers, but hasn't reached out to them yet.

* Fixed the http://asheesh.youcanbook.me/ page so that it shows timezones, 
the absence of which has caused a hiccup in the past.


Obstacles:

* Meetup's only-contact-three-groups-a-day thing seems to refresh every 24 
hours, and then cap itself at 3, so if I skip contacting people one day, I 
don't get to contact 6 the next day, plus celebrating some holidays the 
past week. (To address this, I'll have to more reliably do the 
contact-on-Meetup task daily.)

* It'd be nice if there were a clearer website for running a Boston Python 
Workshop-inspired event. That way, I can point prospective organizers at 
that. I realize that Jessica, you and I tried to make this about two years 
ago. Recently I have been thinking about trying again, based on my 
experience making http://campus.openhatch.org/ . Perhaps Jessica, you and 
I should figure out what the steps would be for making such a website, and 
what the minimal version would be. I can't promise a timeframe for this, 
as I'm defintely at-or-past capacity already.


Things up next:

* Meetings next week.

* More group pinging to schedule such meetings.

* Followup with PyLadies NYC to see how their outreach workshop planning 
is going.

* I'd like to reach out to the women who are speaking at PyCon to give 
versions of their talks at their local user group. Jessica, is there an 
easy way for you to give me their names and emails? If not, just names? If 
not, I can go figure it out myself.

* To create a baseline on top of which we can estimate, I'm having my 
assistant find out how much time it takes to look through a group's 
meetup.com events and see what the gender diversity of speakers is, as 
listed there. If that's time-efficient, we'll do that for a dozen or 
two-dozen groups, so that we can report on if I'm able to bring more 
gender diversity to speakers.

* I'm interested in doing something similar for RSVPs, and guessing by 
name or photo what people's genders are. This seems like it would be a 
better fit for software automation than human work, so I maybe can look 
into this in a week's time or so. It would be imperfect, but guessing by 
name would probably be imperfect in a consistent way across user groups, 
so we could use that perhaps.

Cheers,

-- Asheesh.