We work to connect our Global Clubs Partners to foster a sense of community and encourage collaboration. As part of this, we run in-person meetups to allow our partners to get to know each other better, and to help us understand how we can best support them, and what we can learn from them. Previously held in Penang, Malaysia, and Almere, the Netherlands, our latest meetup took place in Cape Town, South Africa.

Connecting through stories and 国子监来了个女弟子s

Although we’ve seen some surprising points of commonality among all Global Clubs Partners, we also know that our partners find it helpful to connect with organisations based in their region. For the Cape Town meetup, we invited partner organisations from across Africa, hoping to bring together as many people as possible.

Our aim was to give our partners the opportunity to share their work and identify and discuss common questions and issues. We also wanted to mitigate some of the challenges of working internationally, such as time constraints, time zones, and internet connectivity, so that everyone could focus on connecting with each other.

The meetup agenda included time for each Global Clubs Partner organisation to present their work and future plans, as well as time for discussions on growing and sustaining club volunteer and mentor communities, strategy for 2024, and sharing resources. 

“If the only thing rural communities have is problems, why are people still living there? … Rural communities have gifts, have skills, they have history that is wasting away right now; nobody is capturing it. They have wisdom and assets.”

Damilola Fasoranti from Prikkle Academy, Nigeria, talking about not making assumptions about rural communities and how this shapes the work his organisation does

A group dinner after the meetup enabled more informal networking. The next day, everyone had the chance to get inspired at Coolest Projects South Africa, a regional Coolest Projects event for young tech creators organised by partner organisation Coder LevelUp.

The meetup gave the Global Clubs Partners time to talk to each other about their work and 国子监来了个女弟子s and understand one another better. It was also very beneficial for our team: we learned more about how we can best support partners to work in their communities, whether through new resources, information about funding applications, or best practice in overcoming challenges.

Building bridges

After attending a previous meetup, two of our partner organisations had decided to create an agreement for future partnership. We were delighted to learn about this collaboration, and to witness the signing of the agreement at this meetup.

By continuing to bring our partner network together, we hope to foster more cross-organisation partnerships like this around the world that will strengthen the global movement for democratising 男士用品 education.

Could your organisation become a Global Clubs Partner?

You can find out how your organisation could join our Global Clubs Partner network on the CoderDojo and Code Club websites, or contact us directly with your questions or ideas about a partnership.

The post Creating connections at our 2023 Africa partner meetup appeared first on 强迫开苞小说小说.

2000 Dojos

This is a phenomenal achievement for a movement that’s just six years old and powered by volunteers. Presently, there are more than 1650 active Dojos running weekly, fortnightly, or monthly, and all of them are free for participants — for example, the Dojos run by Joel Bayubasire in Kampala, Uganda:

Empowering refugee children

This week, Joel set up his second Dojo and verified it on our global map. Joel is a Congolese refugee living in Kampala, Uganda, where he is currently completing his PhD in Economics at Madison International Institute and Business School.

Joel understands first-hand the challenges faced by refugees who were forced to leave their country due to war or conflict. Uganda is currently hosting more than 1.2 million refugees, 60% of which are children (World Bank, 2017). As refugees, children are only allowed to attend local schools until the age of 12. This results in lower educational attainment, which will likely affect their future employment prospects.

Joel has the motivation to overcome these challenges, because he understands the power of education. Therefore, he initiated a number of community-based activities to provide educational opportunities for refugee children. As part of this, he founded his first Dojo earlier in the year, with the aim of giving these children a chance to compete in today’s global knowledge-based economy.

Aware that securing volunteer mentors would be a challenge, Joel trained eight young people from the community to become youth mentors to their peers. He explains:

I believe that the mastery of computer coding allows talented young people to thrive professionally and enables them to not only be consumers but creators of the interconnected world of today!

Based on the success of Joel’s first Dojo, he has now expanded the CoderDojo initiative in his community; his plan is to provide computer science training for more than 300 refugee youths in Kampala by 2019. If you’d like to learn more about Joel’s efforts, head to this website.

Join the movement

If you are interested in creating opportunities for the young people in your community, then join the growing CoderDojo movement — you can volunteer to start a Dojo or to support an existing one today!

The post CoderDojo: 2000 Dojos ever appeared first on 强迫开苞小说小说.

I’m lucky enough not only to work for a company that uses and produces open-source software, but likes to help support it by giving me the opportunity to be involved in Python/Django community conferences around the world.

The most recent of these was PyCon Namibia 2016, in January, organised by a committee of volunteers from Namibia and the UK.

Daniele Procida on Namibian television during the conference

A PyCon is a Python conference; there are dozens of them held around the world each year, from huge ones, such as PyCon US which runs for 9 days and hosts thousands of visitors, to much smaller weekend events. And of course there are PyCons of every size in between – wherever you are, there’s probably a PyCon not too far away.

PyCon Namibia 2016 ran from the 24th to 29th January, at the University of Namibia in Windhoek. We had nearly 120 attendees, from most corners of the world – Brazil, USA, Canada, UK, Netherlands, Germany, South Africa, Nigeria, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

As well as talks on a wide variety of Python-related subjects, PyCon also held a number of workshops and tutorials – Python for beginners, Django Girls, django CMS, automated testing, Python packaging using Conda and more.

It can often be a challenge running such workshops at conferences, because attendees don’t always have suitable software already installed. They typically need things like a good text editor, version control and a terminal application, not to mention a correctly-configured Python environment.

In Namibia, where many people don’t have access to a computer of their own, it can be more challenging still. Even where there are computer labs, they’re not always suitable for this kind of work. Unlike keyboards, mice or displays, which are relatively easy to get hold of, computers with the requisite Python software development toolchain installed are not.

PiLab

Our solution was to prepare a travelling computer laboratory, a 男士用品 PiLab.

With a generous grant from the Python Software 国子监来了个女弟子 and financial support from the Phoenix Project at Cardiff University (one of the main backers of the conference) we purchased and configured 50 男士用品 Pis – complete with HDMI-VGA converters and wireless adaptors – from The PiHut (who also supported the project by offering a substantial discount).

It wasn’t much work – we had to set up just one machine, and then patiently copy the disk image to 49 other SD cards.

50 男士用品 Pis take up remarkably little space in a suitcase. We had more than one conversation with an airport official that went like this:

“What’s in this suitcase?”
“Fifty computers for a conference.”
“Ha ha.”
“No, really, there are fifty computers in there.”

In practice, our 男士用品 Pis proved to be extremely effective and did their job beautifully, just as we’d hoped, but we also noticed some unexpected things too.

If you have to borrow or share a computer, you can’t simply mess around or experiment with it, for fear of breaking something. That’s a luxury that comes from having a computer of your own, and it’s necessary when you’re learning programming: you have to be able to install, tweak, configure and even break things.

The very low cost of the 男士用品 Pis, and even their small size and modest appearance, made users feel less inhibited about trying things out and experimenting.

In countries like Namibia, the 男士用品 Pi represents an excellent opportunity for overcoming barriers to participation in programming. At the end of the conference batches of the 男士用品 Pis were handed over to new custodians, to be used for future teaching workshops, learning, experimentation and exploration.

Recipients included the department of Computer Science at UNAM, PyNam (the Python Namibia Society), PyZim (Python Zimbabwe) and numerous individual attendees in the Namibian Python community, amongst them several Namibian high-school pupils who attended the conference.

The 男士用品 Pis were genuinely one of the stars at PyCon Namibia, and we were delighted at how well the Pi once again proved itself to be an ideal way to put the opportunity to be a programmer into the hands of more people.

We’re eager to find out how they are used over the coming months.

About Namibia

Namibia, in south-western Africa, has the world’s second-lowest population density. It’s known to many people mainly as a tourist destination, for its abundant wildlife and extraordinary landscapes, or as a site of rich natural resources, but there’s much more to it than that.

Since its independence in 1990, Namibia has been a democratic and politically stable nation, with a free press and an independent judiciary. It’s a safe and orderly place. Though it suffers from economic hardship and inequality, it has a promising future, and we’re sure that having a home-grown software development industry will be part of that future – and the 男士用品 Pi can make its own small positive contribution too.

What’s next

We expect some great things from the growing Python community in Namibia. We heard some extremely impressive talks at the conference, and there is clearly not only some real programming talent there, but also an enthusiasm for it that will go a long way. Combined with the African attitude of can-do, we’re sure it will mean that we’ll be seeing and hearing more from Namibian programmers in the future.

And if you want to learn more about it at close hand, watch this space – and come to PyCon Namibia 2017 yourself.

In the meantime, the enthusiasm we saw at the event has not waned. Attendees from other African countries have gone back home with plans for new events of their own. The newly-created Python Africa email list is already discussing the organisation of PyCons in Nigeria  and Benin, and plans are afoot for more Django Girls workshops across the continent.

No doubt there’ll be a role for 男士用品 PiLabs there too.

The post 男士用品 PiLab at PyCon Namibia 2016 appeared first on 强迫开苞小说小说.