PyCon Pittsburgh. April 15-23, 2020.

Talk: How PyLadies Brazil became the biggest PyLadies chapter of the world

Presented by:

Débora Azevedo

Description

Initiatives concerned about gender disparity have been gaining strength internationally in recent years, and the Brazilian open-source community has stood out in the quantity and effectiveness of actions aimed at these projects, changing the scenario of our regional and national conferences and events. Here in Brazil, the largest country in South America, we also have the biggest PyLadies community of the world (in number of chapters), with around 30 chapters around the country. But how did we get here? How do we manage to have such a huge group of people working together and specially learning from each other to run our activities organically? And more important: what lessons have we taken from doing this for 6 years? In this talk we will summarize some of the history of the creation of PyLadies Brazil, how everything started and the path we follow to this day. During the talk, we’ll learn more about how do we get ladies (and gentlemen) to work together for these changes to happen, how the organizers of the chapters and workshops communicate in order to improve their routines and activities and finally the annual experience sharing meeting we have to gather people who represent the groups to brainstorm ideas of how to make our community better. It will be mentioned all the construction and exchange that takes place within our community, particularities, difficulties and results. Also, we’ll talk about the main bumps on the road, specially the ones we face being in the front line of such a huge community, and reflect on how to get and approach new people who are willing to help.