As already announced, the second “Python African Tour” stop is Dakar, next week. A set of events are planned all over the week, thanks to the unstoppable contribution from the DakarLUG guys (Thomas, Ousmane, Serguei, and the others) managing the organization with love. What’s more amazing is that we will be training and showing Python-related stuff to more than 60 people ! Thanks to the companies and groups/organizations sponsoring these events.
Here is an overview of our busy agenda:
Trainings and workshops (monday, tuesday, thursday)
- Python tutorial
- Advanced Python training (objects, classes, iterators, decorators, etc)
- Scientific Python training
- Django tutorial
- Django workshop and Scientific Python workshop (taking place at the same time on thursday)
The conference day (wednesday) ; we will have various talks and discussions on topics including:
- The “Python African Tour” project
- The Python language for newcomers
- Using Python for scientific applications
- Demos on tools and applications (DemoCamp)
Other activities
- A sprint on friday and saturday, for those interested.
- A PloneGov meeting (friday morning).
We’re really excited about this, and hope Python will really take off in West Africa !
For more information and following our activities:
I’m pleased to announce that our next event will take place in Dakar, Senegal, the week of July 6-10.
The event is organized with the help of AUF (Campus numérique francophone de Dakar), some local Open Source advocates and developers (DakarLUG), ISOC Sénégal and NIC Sénégal. I really want to thank them.
We are planning several tutorials/workshops during two or three days:
- Python introduction
- Advanced Python (an overview of design patterns)
- Django
- Scientific Python
There will also be a barcamp day and a sprint for the social and exchange part of the deal 
We are still in need of sponsors, so if you want to help promote Python in Africa, if you have some interest in Senegal, or if you want to help in any other way, please contact us. You can sponsor the event as a whole, or just contribute to the sprint or the barcamp.
For more information, check the event site.
This is a quick update to inform you of what could happen in 2009.
We’ve been having discussions and started work for organizing a Python event with training, democamp, and sprint in Senegal, and possibly in Zambia too, this year. If you are based in one of these regions or have partners there, and you see an opportunity to help or participate, get in touch with me (kamon dot ayeva at gmail.com).
Also, this project will be featured at the talk “Giving back and helping expand the Python community. A roadmap for South America and Africa“, at PyCon in Chicago next month. Roberto Allende and myself are going to present our ideas to spread Python in new regions, taking South America and Africa as examples. After the talk, we hope to contribute more by organizing discussions and some kind of advocacy mini-sprint in one of the Open Space rooms.
We have been busy planning for the first country our Tour will feature: Morocco.
Amine Soulaymani, a developer living in Morocco, and Daniel Nouri have volunteered to participate as instructors for two groups of students at Ecole Mohammedia d’Ingenieurs, the school who has accepted to host these free Python introduction events in Rabat on December 18, 19, and 20.
After the fisrt 2 days dedicated to training, we would like to have at least 3 days of community activities: an unconference-style day with demos and talks, followed by a sprint to learn more and contribute.
A group of people from Belgium, participating to the PloneGov project, have agreed to join us, and co-sponsor the sprint, to work on Plone and PloneGov related stuff.
Other possible topics, still in discussion, are:
What we need to make sure all this can work:
- A host for the sprint, since Ecole Mohammedia will only host us for the training and unconference part.
- Other co-sponsors who could put money to help assist in the travel costs of Python developers who will participate, and contribute to the work that will be done.
Contact us and let’s discuss about this opportunity to promote Python in Africa and get new developers from that continent on board !
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 !
The “Python African Tour” is about getting advocates and volunteers to promote Python in Africa through sponsored training sessions.
We hope to get started in the coming months, once we find sponsors and with the help of local organizations (schools, universities, NGOs, etc).
The proposed trainings are:
- Python introduction (the main one)
- System and Network Administration with Python
- Scientific Computing with Python
- Databases with Python
- Web Development with Python
- Desktop GUIs with Python
Any organization can discuss with us (through the mailing list, python-african-tour-discussion AT lists.openplans.org) about preparing a training with specific topics as long as we get the request early enough to be able to find qualified volunteer trainers for those topics.
We are currently having final discussions on how we do things, and how we get the trainings sponsored.
Any help or giving ideas or feedback is welcome !
The Python African Tour wants to come to your country !
If you are an organization based in Africa (School or University, NGO, social enterprise, etc…), interested in promoting Python-based technologies in your context, for your community and partners, contact us through the mailing list.
We can work together to set up a Python event (training, barcamp, demos) as part of the Python African Tour.
For more information about this project, check out the project wiki.
Python African Tour is a new project lead by a group of Python developers, advocates and social change actors. Our objective is to help promote the Python language and its technologies in Africa.
Python is a powerful Open Source programming language, which - for the last 15 years - has been helping engineers and developers build great software in various domains such as scientific, financial, and the web.
One of the main advantages of Python in this project’s context is that it offers a great way of learning programming.
The idea of this project is simple: Set up free training sessions that would be lead by volunteer Python trainers, as well as developer events à la “barcamp”, in African countries where we can find local host organizations and sponsors.
We already have an interesting list of volunteers ready to participate.
We also started discussions with a group of students from a school in Morocco, Ecole Mohammedia d’Ingénieurs, where the tour might start. More details on this event later.
