I’m really excited to report that the Outreach and Education Committee of the Python Software Foundation awarded us a grant to continue our Boston Python Workshop and spread it to three other cities!

The 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 organize this event because we believe in bringing more people into open tech communities, and because it teaches attendees skills necessary to participate in open source. It is part of the Boston Python user group, and we believe that integrating these events with strong local user groups is one of the keys to our success.

Jessica was invited to write about the grant on the main PSF blog. I’ll quote just one paragraph:

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.

Read the full story!

As a disclosure, Jessica and I are members of the Python Software Foundation and members of the outreach and education committee; we abstained from voting on the proposal. We’re grateful to all the people who have inspired us, participated as volunteer teachers, and otherwise made the workshop a success!