In my previous post, I presented the “Open Training” program we are proposing.
To bring even more value, there is also the idea of mentoring new African talents, interested in embracing a career in the scientific, engineering, and/or software fields.
Once we have detected such talents, through the training activities, we want to encourage a learning/mentoring relationship and set up an environment (via remote/virtual presence and physical meetings when possible) to:
- Motivate them in pursuing the work started,
- Guide them in the process of becoming Open Source software contributors.
The mentoring would really complement the trainings. Ideally, each training will immediately be followed by 1 or 2 day(s) of gathering with the people trained in order to socialize, discuss and continue working in a free spirit.
The main idea behind this is to get people into joining the emerging Python community in Africa, and start discussing and working together and contributing (through mailing lists, forums, and other tools).
Examples of useful initiatives for this program may include:
- Sprints/hackathons organized in such a way that newbies can participate and be introduced to the Python community practices.
- Demos of specific tools and projects.
- Helping newbies understand important aspects of Open Source through general presentations such as Community collaboration practices, participation to the next Google Summer of Code, participation to the next PyWeek challenge, etc.
You see, it is really about new learning paradigms !