Three lucky volunteers, Emmanuelle Gouillart, Daniel Nouri and I, went to Dakar three weeks ago (from July 6 to 10) for the second Python African Tour stop. The hosting organizations were the AUF (Agence Universitaire de la Francophonie), the Dakar Linux User Group and the ESP (Ecole Supérieure Polytechnique, a master-level engineer school).
In addition to helping for the organization, three members of DakarLUG, Thomas Noël, Ousmane Wilane and Sergiu Mihai, served as additional volunteer trainers, which allowed having each class/workshop led by a pair of trainers.
Our busy week featured the following activities:
- A general Python tutorial (1.5 day) for 3 groups of 15 participants. One of the tutorial sessions was oriented toward using Python’s scientific tools (SciPy/NumPy), and was led by Emmanuelle Gouillart.
- A barcamp day with informal talks showing how we use Python and its related technologies in our daily work.
- A workshop either on Django mainly led by the Ousmane - Daniel - Sergiu trio, or on “Python for scientific computing” led by Emmanuelle. The last day of the workshop part was advertised as a sprint, but was more practical work or achieving a small goal the participants set themselves for the day.
In addition, the core of Python fans in Dakar has decided to continue to promote and exchange on the use of Python ; a mailing list has been put in place by the end of the week to facilitate that.
Some pictures of the event are online at http://dakarlug.org/pat/galerie.
You can also read the report sent by Emmanuelle to the SciPy/NumPy mailing list.
Again, we want to thank the companies, organizations and people who helped make this possible :
- PloneGov / CommunesPlone represented by Joël Lambillote, who sponsored the Moroccan stop.
- Onyx / Proxyma, NIC Senegal, ISOC, ADIE (Senegal’s government agency for IT), and AFPY (in France) who sponsored the Senegal stop.
We are already preparing the next possible countries. Zambia is not confirmed yet, but Nigeria has expressed strong interest for early 2010, and we have been thinking about Togo and Benin too. Next stops and their dates will be announced once organization details are confirmed.