After months of preparation, the Python African Tour has started with our first participating country, Morocco.
Thanks to the involvement and talents of Amine Souleymani and Daniel Nouri, we were able to introduce Python to students of EMI (Ecole Mohammadia d’Ingenieurs) in Rabat. Daniel blogged about his participation here.
A sprint also took place in Casablanca to get the PloneGov team and some african partners to work on Plone and PloneGov related stuff.
A detailed report of these first events and achievements will follow !
A big thank goes to our initial supporters and facilitarors:
- The PloneGov team for supporting the tour, by accepting our sprint idea and finding funding to help us with the organization costs for Morocco.
- The EMI students and staff who helped organizing the Rabat sessions. You can check their local site here. A special thank to Aida El manar El bouanani for her enthusiasm and hard coordination work.
- Nextma for supporting the sprint in their offices in Casablanca.
Next things that should happen:
- We are going to work for the next interested countries (Zambia, Senegal, Nigeria, etc) and the precise plan should be announced in January.
- We will make a proposal for involving the trained people on technologies, beyond the Python language, that they could use for enterprise projects.
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 !
Aida El manar El bouanani, a student of Ecole Mohammedia d’Ingenieurs, in Rabat, Morocco, is an active member of the Python African Tour project team. She has started promoting the project among the students and the school management.
Last week-end, she had the opportunity to present the project at the AfREN (Africa Research and Education Networking) meeting taking place as part of the AfNOG and AfriNIC events called “9èmes Rencontres AfNOG - 8èmes Rencontres AfriNIC”.
She reported that, after her presentation, she talked with several participants who expressed interest in the project. Participants from organizations such as:
- A research center in Egypt
- A university in Senegal
- A university in Malawi
It’s great to see such interest and we hope to quickly start organizing these local events across Africa, and help students, engineers, researchers and others discover or increase their usage of Python.
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.