Django Girls Rome, the Django workshop for a female audience

For all the women who love web technologies: Saturday 12 December 2015, at EnLabs, a start-up located inside the Roma Termini train station, Django Girls Rome will take place! What is it? It’s a workshop that aims at bringing women closer to the world of programming.

At Nephila the activity of the community is of primary importance. Whether a conference, a spint or a clinic session, we always participate with great enthusiasm. We also like to organize such activities ourselves: some examples are DjangoBeer, a monthly meeting during which it’s possible to compare different possibilities offered by new technologies, and DjangoVillage, a community born in 2014 after the national conference held in Orvieto.

The goal of such conferences and open source events is to include everybody, meaning introducing everyone, without gender distinction, to new technologies. Unfortunately at this type of events the majority of the audience is often composed by men. This is a real problematic in Italy: while in the communication field females have an important role, the programming industry counts very few women. We are convinced supporters of accessible technology and we had been thinking for a long time about organizing a different initiative, able to actively involve women. This is the spirit with which the Django Girls Romeproject was started!

Django Girls Rome is integral part of Django Girls, the organization founded in 2014 by Oli Sitarska and Ola Sendecka, with the objective of bringing women closer to the world of programming. Today this Django community counts more than 91 adherent groups, from 37 different countries. These groups operate at a national (or local) level and organize IT events targeted to a female audience. Each group operates independently, but the organizations aren’t left alone: support is provided by the DjangoGirls Foundation, founded in June 2015, which contributes from both the organizational and the communication points of view. 

We met the Django Girls in February 2015. Last winter we sponsored and participated in the Django Girls Londonevent, a workshop held in London at the Potato venue. The meeting, characterized by a strong sense of collaboration, immediately fascinated us. After being introduced to the community, of which we already knew some members of the IT world with whom we had established business relationships, we immediately felt the desire to organize another event ourselves. 

The project started taking shape in the context of PyCon, an Italian national conference on programming language for fast development, held in Florence. On this occasion, we met other women of the Italian hi-tech world that share with us a similar vision, like Doraly Navarro, founder of the PyLadies Italia group. We eventually extended the initiative to organizers such as Patrick Arminio, Simone Federici and Federico Capoano, Italian developers and fans of Django like us!

We decided the location together: Rome. We opted for the capital for two reasons. Above all we had to deal with the logistic issue: it was necessary to choose an easily reachable location, and Rome is well connected both by trains and highways. Secondly, in Rome there is an important djanghist group that enthusiastically offered support!

The event is structured as a basic workshop, it lasts 8 hours, during which the participants will be introduced to the Django technology and will be taught how to realize a blog application. The lab was designed specifically for beginners, thus no special technical knowledge is required. However, this wants to be an inclusive initiative and also proficient users of Django and other programming language are warmly welcome to come. To make sure that each participant will be able learn at her own pace, different groups with different competences will be organized, each one coordinated by a coach. Coaches will guide aspiring programmers through a tutorial that will help them create a blog. 

Two are the requirements to participate in the event, own a laptop and know how to speak Italian!Laptops are essential: the goal of the workshop is to deliver a finished product that participants can eventually study at home. Furthermore, useful programming tools will be installed on the computers. Italian is the language of the tutorial and of the workshop in general. To sign-up just fill in the application form on the website djangogirls.org/rome. Apply asap: limited places! Only 30 participants for this workshop.

Of course, we haven’t forgotten about those who are familiar with Django’s tools and would like to take part in the event: you can be a coach! You will guide other women through Django’s tutorial and coordinate them in order to realize together the blog application. If interested write us at rome@djangogirls.org.

We look forward to seeing you in Rome for this edition of Django Girls!

If you didn’t manage to sign-up in time, don’t worry! Other Italian DjangoGirls events will take place in 2016! Stay tuned!