[Events] User group outreach, weekly report, 2014-01-29 edition

[Asheesh Laroia]

(As context, this is a weekly updated as regards 
http://openhatch.org/blog/2013/psf-funds-openhatch-to-reach-out-to-and-help-python-user-groups/ 
)


This week, I accomplished:

* Identified a person who is willing to lead an SF-area Django workshop for 
women and their friends, namely Sandy Strong. Next step will be scheduling and 
finding other volunteers.

* Identified a person, who has already set a schedule, who is interested in 
running an intro Python workshop series in February 2014 in Seattle, namely 
Mako Hill.

* Started a conversation with a few London-area Python groups, many of whom 
collectively identify and are interested in addressing their gender diversity 
problem. Attendee retention is one of their concerns. I'm not yet sure what the 
best next step here will be; since the London Python Dojo already runs 
something Project Night-esque, perhaps the most "obvious" thing to do is run a 
Django Workshop for Women and their friends.

* Continued to get in touch with more groups. I've successfully begun to 
pre-write greeting messages and ask my assistant to send them out, which will 
help me do this more reliably.

* Worked with my assistant to successfully get a list of contact info of women 
speaking at PyCon in 2014.

* Gathered excitement from Tobi in PyLadies NYC, where probably they're 
interested in at least doing a Project Night.

* Gathered excitement from Jennifer in PyLadies Boston, where they seem 
interested in running a Django tutorial.

* Got one more group to apply for the Python Software Foundation's Meetup 
grant.

* Watched as a Chicago Python Project Night seems to be in the process of 
getting scheduled for a time in the end of February.


My obstacles/lessons were:

* More time on my part would mean more progress per week, but I think that will 
always be true. (Relatedly -- huge thanks to people who have replied to these 
messages -- Akkana, Jen, Jessica, and surely others. If anyone else is 
interested in helping out, I bet I can further subdivide things and find a way 
to have you benefit this project!)

* Generally, I'm less certain of what to recommend for small Python user groups 
(of size 5-25 people) in smallish cities than I am for big-ish ones (40+) in 
big cities. For big ones, the project night and/or Workshop for Women and their 
Friends strategy seems reasonable. For smaller ones

* I've been reading _Better_ by Atul Gawande, and one thing he remarked upon is 
that helping people work together to solve a problem is often more successful 
than telling them how to solve the problem. I try to encourage a collaborative 
approach, but I realized I could do even more, which is why I did got the 
London organizers together on a thread rather than talked with them one-on-one.

* Finding diverse speakers in locations that I don't live in (heck, even in 
ones I do live in) remains hard. I would love to have a "speaking opportunity 
bat-signal". Until then, see below ("Reach out to...") for one strategy. (To 
this extent, extra huge props to PyCon's outreach chair (Jessica McKellar) this 
year.) I had mistakenly believed this would merely be a matter of researching 
people and connecting them with the user group, but it seems to be the case 
that existing organizers are easier to convince to do something novel than 
prospective speakers I have to identify and basically cold-call. (Saying this 
out loud makes me realize that in the SF Bay Area, I could talk to the 
Hackbright organizers about this, which also makes me think about how I could 
see if similar efforts exist in cities like Boston, where I've recently been 
trying to find speakers for Django Boston.)

* I'd been hoping to work more directly with PyLadies, to the extent that they 
have a central planning list, but haven't heard back from Lynn about how best 
to work together, so for now am just contacting PyLadies organizers like all 
Python user group organizers I run into on Meetup.com.


This coming week, I will:

* Help the SF Django prospect turn into an actual event that gets organized.

* Meet with Mako to discuss the Seattle plans (on Thu) and nail them down.

* Meet with Tobi to discuss NYC plans (on Thu) and nail down something, 
hopefully, probably a Project Night.

* Meet with Jennifer to discuss Boston plans (on Fri) .

* Meet with Michelle to discuss Portland (on Mon).

* Reach out to women speaking at PyCon to see if they're interested in giving 
demo versions of their talks to their local user groups, to boost speaker 
diversity. (How to make this a *lasting* change is a different, more 
challenging question. Asking those speakers to invite their friends to attend 
the meetup is likely a start; having more of those groups run Project Nights is 
probably also related, as then hopefully there will be more newcomer-oriented 
events.)

* Continue to stay in touch with other organizers, such as PyLadies Dominicana.

* More precisely tabulate my successes and failures so far to answer the 
question of how I am progressing in achieving the current goal set.

* Beyond this coming week, I will research women who do academic work that 
relates to Python and see if I can connect them with speaking opportunities 
that would enrich their local user groups.

* Wrote this email, which turned out longer than I expected. (-:

-- Asheesh.