 They are very good people. I'm always looking forward to having them here. My friend I've been to work for many years. We have a number of others here, so I want to tell you how things have changed here. It's been a special experience. I'm happy to have met them here. I'm glad that they are here. I'm truly proud of myself. Thank you so much for coming to our conference today. Thank you for welcoming our members to the project. I would like to thank this conference ac mae'n gweithio i'r gwaith yn gweithio'n cynhyrch o'r byd, Pytan a'n afliadau, ond mae'n ddau'n gweithio'n gweld yn ynno. A wnes yn cael ei gael gion i gael ei wneud o'r gweithio'r gweithio. Nes ar hyn. Dw i'n cael ei wneud. Rwy'n gweithio'n gweithio. Hi, mae'n Aisha Bello. Rwy'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio'r yng nghyrch, a hynny yw'r ysgolion gyfathorio yng Nghymru Cyfaint ac yng Nghymru Cyfaint i Gwyddon Gwyddon. Yn amlwg y dyfodol, rydyn ni wedi helpu i gael yng Nghymru, rydyn ni'n gweithio ddechrau ddechrau ddechrau i Nigeria ac rydyn ni'n helpu i gael y cyfaintau a'r cyfaintau. Rydyn ni wedi helpu i gael cyllidiaeth yng Nghymru. Dyna'r ysgolion ymloedd wedi eu bod yn ddiogelio'r hynny felly mae'r unrhyw ym ni'n ddifrif i'r UK conference a'r unrhyw ffas yw'r ystod o'r cyfnod gyda'r cyfnod ar y cyfnod ar gyfer y maen nhw. Felly mae'n mynd i gyd yn ymwysig i'r gweithio gallwch arna yn y dyn nhw? I'm Daniele Plachida, I work for DiDio, a Swiss Django company that provides hosting and development services for Python and Django developers. I'm a great lover of Django and Python in its community and its conferences. I'm a core member of the Django development team. Yesterday there was some remarks about people's level of Python power from Tracy Osborne. I'd just like to point out that this is what I look like on television by the way. I don't know if you can see but it says that I am in fact Python software. So let's not have any arguments about that. Now, what I and I have been talking about a lot and what we're interested in is what Python means for each other and what emerges from the encounter between them. And as always in an encounter, the most important kind of encounter is an encounter between people and here it's the encounter between people that Python in Africa represents. And encounters really matter because they are what change people when they happen. And in our Python world we can trace these encounters through the events that we stage. So we're going to start with our Pycons, our national scale international events where you get to meet new people. So we've got Python, Python South Africa, which is well established. South Africa is quite different from most other African countries. And then after Pycon South Africa, since 2015 we've had Pycons in Namibia and then since 2016 in Zimbabwe and then coming later this year the first Pycon Nigeria. And people are just like ideas. You have to spend time with them. You have to hang around with them and try and work with them in order to understand them. And that's why events where people meet are so valuable. And another way you can measure activity is at Jungle Girls events, which is like, as you can see we've had 62 workshops since Jungle Girls ever happened. The first one was in Uganda in 2015. And since then we've had 62 workshops and the highest of them being in Nigeria, which is 31 workshops. And I think what is more important for us to notice is that Jungle Girls events are happening in places that don't even have an established Python community in Africa, in places in Africa. And for example, in Africa the World Bank had a report that published sometime in 2008 where it says 70% of SMEs are owned by women in Africa. So 70% of entrepreneurship in Africa are owned by 70% of women. Now if you translate that to what that could mean for programming, it goes along with to show the possibilities that Jungle Girls or even events like Pilates can have an impact. Not just Africa as a whole, but the African women. Well, how do we get here? By the way, Aisha is very modest. I don't know if you saw that fully 50% of those Jungle Girls events have taken place in Nigeria. And the reason is right here, so she's too modest to say that. So how did it get started? Not the Pycon South Africa, which was already established, but since then. In 2014 I was working at Cardiff University School of Medicine, where I was the web team. And I had the notion of somehow helping to start a new Pycon somewhere in Africa. It was there being these Pycons in South Africa since 2012, but nowhere else. And I was trying to find an African Python community large enough to host a Pycon. And I went to see one of my colleagues who'd done a lot of work in Africa for some advice. And this was Professor Judith Hall, the head of the anaesthetics department. She just looks like an ordinary professor, but in fact she's actually a force of nature, isn't she? Yes, she is. So she did have some advice. But much more interestingly it turned out that she was starting a major long-term engagement project called the Phoenix Project between Cardiff University and the University of Namibia. There's Namibia in case you don't know where it is. It's a large place. It's larger than the land mass of Germany and Italy put together. But there are only two million people, just over two million people living there. So the professor had many questions for me like what is Python? What is open source software? What's a Python? Why? And we had some lengthy conversations. But to cut a long story short, the idea of a Namibian Python software conference was adopted as an official part of the Phoenix Project. And suddenly it wasn't just a notion anymore. We now had significant backing from two institutions. We had financial and logistical support. We had a lot of expertise. We had a venue and we even had a guaranteed audience. And then we had dates and we had sponsors to whom we are eternally grateful. And we had speakers and people who were committing themselves to travel from different continents to Namibia in February 2015. And this was to run a new Python in a place that I'd never been before, with people I'd never met except via email and Skype. And for an audience whom we discovered, didn't even know Python yet because even the computer science students studied Java and C and other things. And they simply didn't know Python at all. So my main thought was, this had better work. Because in my darkest moments, you know, at three o'clock in the morning, I was convinced that the whole thing was a preposterous lunacy and that this couldn't possibly work. And I imagine people speaking about me in the future, you know. Do you remember that idiot who tried to organise a Python in Namibia? Did you also wish that the plane crashed? There was a volcano and you didn't have to go anywhere? So I was praying for ash clouds or international bans on Python events and anything that would mean I didn't have to go ahead with what I said I would do. But despite all of this, we found ourselves on our way to Namibia and then walking into the venue for the first time where we found all these people waiting for us with some excitement. And then suddenly we were in the middle of a real live Python conference where all the things you expect from a Python doing all these things together, people meeting each other for the first time and discovering things for the first time, and that Python was a great success. But it wasn't actually that event that really mattered but what happened afterwards because at that conference, the Namibians formed their own Python society, the Python Programming Society of Namibia, and they got to work straight away. So the undergraduate students who'd been at the conference and had literally just learned Python, the next month they'd managed to organise themselves with local high schools and they were doing programming demonstrations and lessons for high school students. So there's Jessica, she's the chair of Pineham, and this is from the second year of Python Namibia and those are some of her high school students who came to the conference. So the Namibians took the idea and really ran with it. Earlier this year we had Pycon Namibia 2017, the third edition of the conference, and just two years after that first event, Pycon is now taught at the university as a result of the Pycon. It's taught in high school thanks to Jessica, Namibian businesses and developers have discovered Python. They say, wow, there's a software conference coming to Namibia. They don't get many of those. We'd better go and find out what that's about. So there's an active growing community that's already organising a Pycon now, Pycon Namibia for next year. And one lesson from this is that you don't need a community to have a Pycon because you can create your community out from the Pycon. And another thing that the second Namibian conference last year did was to lead to a Pycon in Zimbabwe because to the people who came in 2016 were Anna Macaroodze and Humphrey Boutau, they travelled well over 30 hours each way in a minibus, an absolutely horrendous journey. After hearing about those travels, I was dreaded of complaining about my own long-distance journeys. And later that year, they launched and held the first Zimbabwe and Pycon. And if you think that organising a Pycon is an achievement, organising one successfully in a country like Zimbabwe, which has many internal problems, is facing international sanctions, is really a triumph of perseverance and strength and ingenuity. And if they can do that, they can do anything. So their first conference was a success and the next one is taking place next month. And really importantly, it's sponsored by some companies that we already know and love. I mean, three of these sponsors are sponsors of this event. So I'm really grateful to these companies. I hope there's somebody from JetBrains or Nexmo here in the audience to see this because this really matters and we're so grateful for your support. To see not just that the Python communities are growing and developing in Africa, but that the rest of the global community is stepping forward to be part of them is literally a dream coming true. Zimbabwe, unlike Namibia, already had an established Python community. It's a much bigger country. Very briefly, there's Marlene Mangami. She's the first African board member of the Python Software Foundation. She's a woman. Yes. There's some Ronald and some of his fellow leaders of Zimbabwe, which is an organisation dedicated to getting girls into coding. And finally, last year in Namibia, there was another important person who also went back home full of plans and she went back home to Nigeria and here she is to tell them about them. And that's the southern side of Africa. Now let's go to the western part of Africa to start with. We're going to be having our first-ever conference, Python Nigeria, September 15 and 16, and just take this as a personal invitation to come over to Nigeria, or come over to your first African Python conference. I want to take a moment to appreciate the team I'm working with. They've been so dedicated and I have more on the next slide. It's our first conference, so trust me, we need all the hands on deck. That's why we have so many organisers at this point. Thankfully, I'd also like to say thank you to our sponsors so far that are sponsoring us, like the PSF Github and Endella, which is a local software company in Nigeria. Now moving on to Python Nigeria. Python Nigeria organically grew from a Jungle Girls event. Now we have over 700 Slack members because we have a Slack Python community. We have over 1,000 PyLadys subscribers. I have a good explanation for why that is. We have just in a second. Over 500 PyLadys enthusiasts. One of the things that we have in Nigeria or in Lagos is that the knowledge starts after. People want to learn a lot. PyLadys is an opportunity or it's the only event that has consistent Python tutoring. The thing is, not just girls actually come. Sometimes we even get more guys coming than girls to PyLadys event. At the point where we were like, you know what, guys, if you want to come, make sure you come with a girl. Or don't come with a girl. You can't come with the representatives. No, I won't even ask. No, it just doesn't work. It was a bit of struggle there. Just to talk about numbers and how much of an impact this has been. We've had over 919 girls attend Jungle Girls events in 28 cities and 31 workshops and there's still more coming. What's also important to note is that girls from Nigeria went on to Ghana and organized one workshop in Accra and that enabled the Ghanaian women to go on and are currently, just from two months back, going on to organize their own workshops and places like Comasiho, Coferidwar, which is very, very, which is how the movement, the Python movement is spreading to other parts of West Africa, especially where there is no Python community or no Python presence. Jungle Girls is sometimes not regarded very fairly. So some people think that Jungle Girls is all about cupcakes and heart-shaped balloons and a kind of girly party. It means a lot to us. In our part of the world, it's not news that Nigeria two years ago had made world news and where a set called Boko Haram kidnapped over 200 girls in the middle of the night from their dormitory and I've held most of them for over two years now and there was this huge campaign and we even had Michelle Obama say, bring back our girls, bring them now. We want them alive. What I wanted to mention here is how Jungle Girls have gone on to help these girls that are internally displaced from the North and trying to absorb them into the community based in Lagos and a team called Abu Qudas they're very passionate about tech education in the North and they're like, Aisha, we need one specifically for internally displaced girls and this was quite different because even the organizer had seen me she had to organise a workshop for the coaches because they had to be that conversation with them to say, you know what, these girls are not like your regular maybe girls that you already coach, these are very special and there is a way to approach how you teach them or how they ask questions and how you should answer and sometimes we even had translators actually trying to talk to them in how the language is but most of the language that they use for the most part. So Jungle Girls is literally going into places where other people wouldn't even have the first idea how to begin working there so I think that's really important to recognise the significance of this. And who's the people in this photo? So Hamdela is actually a treasurer from the Python-Nigeria community and the girl, she was one of the girls from Bono State where Jungle Girls have been no actually, where Boko Haram has been like a terror and it's on in so many people's flesh. So moving on to how much more we've done the Python-Nigeria community with actually partners with also other organisations and this time we went to Ajegwile Ajegwile is one of the major slums in Lagos and we went to a public school and picked 60 girls over a period of 12 weeks and we taught them how to code. Now this is quite unusual because many of these girls haven't ever had to see they haven't seen the computer before they probably learn about it in class as an abstract concept or as something as a computer that you put in the shelf and is admired from a distance and most people are scared to go touch it. And so with the help of Python Software Foundation we're able to give these girls raspberry pies at the end of the programme not just the pies, the screens, keyboard, mouse because most of them are coming from poems that they probably could not afford computers and what is important here I'd like to note is that in the picture is Tocin and Tocin is teaching them was at the beginning where we had to actually teach them how to type we had to teach them what to computer is before you even begin to say let's go to the command line we had to go from the very basics and teach them this which we had support also from a youth fellowship initiative and the founders of Techni One of the girls called Jane had this to say so the smart girls project made cover page of a major newspaper in Nigeria and she had this to say I hated computers because I kept failing the subject in school I mean who would blame her right I couldn't even put it on and off I was scared each time I saw a computer always thinking if I touched it it would spoil meaning if I touched it it would just break so it felt like this abstract thing now all my fears are gone I can now code very bold now in the class when it comes to answering questions about computers this actually is resounding because even giving the confidence in these girls, these little girls and saying that they can do it and it's not so much of a big deal you know I was going on to actually change a perspective from a concept that I'm very scared of to a concept that you know what I think I want to keep learning and I want to be a developer so yes this is how it went so we've talked a little bit about what's been happening and now we want to talk a little bit have a bit of a discussion about some questions that will help clarify the implications of all this and I think the most challenging two words up there are in Africa so we've talked about this quite a lot actually what is one of the biggest problems about talking about Africa? Africa is not a big country it's a huge continent and it's not just huge we have very different go on and clap it's made up of very different people and very different communities and you'll find out that even in a country for example like Nigeria we're in ourselves very different and probably have more in common with an Italian that we would have with a Ghanaian or a Namibian so we're very different so there is no summing up Africa in one continent Africa is huge and it's different experiences for different cultures and for different places so just to give you an idea it's something like one fifth of the world's landmass so you could cram most of the other continents on top of Africa home to 1.2 billion people some 50 plus countries and depending on how you count them between up to 3,000 different languages so this is vast ethnic and cultural diversity so you know if you an Italian and you're going to Belgium or something saying wow it's so different here you've seen nothing and Africa is not just different Africa is very different from Africa Africa is different from Africa the difference is great as much as between a Nigerian and a Namibian as opposed to maybe a Nigerian and a British it's actually very hard to travel within Africa I'm a Nigerian and I need to get a visa to go to South Africa to Kenya to anywhere else which is a luxury that I see that the European Union have because once you're from Europe you can go and you have freedom of movement but we don't have that and actually on Namibia was actually the first African country outside of Nigeria that had ever been so we don't even know ourselves for the most part because the ease of movement is not as easy as it seems oh it's just Africa but no we have to get a visa no one else that's coming from anywhere else it's sometimes even easy if you're from Europe to come to a country like South Africa then it is for like a Nigerian to go to a country like South Africa absolutely or Namibia where most Europeans don't need visas but Nigerians have to jump through hoops exactly here's a question that we've encountered and also spoken about what does Africa really need does Africa need access to software and high technology or does it need things like universal basic education vaccinations, clean drinking water and basic healthcare in other words aren't pycons or are pycons a kind of frivolous luxury in the African context African is technology too so we use technology and this is where I see a role in open source software such like python we use it to solve our own problems now we have people developing apps that can help with waste management that can help people access better healthcare Africa it's not a luxury to have python it's a necessity that we need and that's our reality we need technology too we need software, we have businesses we have telcos and no it's not a luxury Africa is going to need software it's not an alternative reality where they don't use software and since it's going to need software it faces the same choice that everybody faces between being a producer or a consumer of the things that you need and the choices for African economies are pretty simple either it can buy the software it must have or it can find a way to build it maintain it, adapt it and own it itself and do that it will have to buy it and that will mean valuable money leaving African economies and this is where open source software comes in because open source software I mean don't think that open source software is something magical but it's an opportunity it represents a possibility to make that possible to make it an economic viability and pycons as we saw from the Namibian case are really important as a way of helping open source software get traction and users in Africa there's another thing I want about technology so if you think that technology is MacBooks and iPhones and wearable technology and things like that maybe Africa doesn't need those things but if you stop thinking of technology as stuff that you buy and instead think of it as skills then the question looks different and saying does Africa need technology becomes a question does Africa need skills does Africa need practical knowledge and then it has a very different complexion and it's much harder to think that skills are much easier we like denying that Africa doesn't deserve to have knowledge I don't know if you know these gentlemen they invented my MacBook there's Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs now paradoxically and I shall tell you more about this in a moment free things can be unaffordable because they're free but in the African context the hobbyism that strongly characterises the open source software movement really is a luxury because we're used in the West to building projects, skills, contacts even industries as hobbyists, as amateurs spare time enthusiasts but all that is only possible when there already exists a well established industry and networks when there's an established faith in the industry when there's plenty of spare money and spare time and easy access to resources and information so hobbyism is kind of parasitic on established business success and you've got more to say about this subject I'm sorry did you say hobbies we don't have time for that the thing is we need to make sure that whatever we're doing can at least generate revenue because money is not a dirty word if you don't have lots of it if you have to if you're living in a place or in a country where there's not 24 hours there's not 24 hours access to electricity and you have to buy generator and buy fuel to run and you have to ration how much charge do I have on my laptop when do I turn on the generator and get charge and how much longer can I work with and you have to deal with noise pollution everything we don't have time for obvious we need to make sure that whatever we're doing is profitable is productive I think you should say though where we're talking about that you can't rely on 24 hour electricity are you talking about the remote backwards of no sir this is Nigeria which is a different reality for Namibia in big cities so even in big cities you can't rely on so you can't rely on that and we don't have time for that so there is the aspect of we need to make sure that whatever we're doing can generate money so we need to make sure that we can afford the time time is a luxury for most people because you have to make sure the power is banked some people don't even have computers at home so they need to borrow so there is like so much we're walking against us that even sometimes the basic necessities are like a luxury where you don't even have internet for the most part so it's work it's not fun and that's why PyCon is for us a serious business so I don't know how many people here have also been community event organisers anyone else organised a PyCon here or an event or even a meet up or something well you'll know that you'll have faced all kinds of challenges and spanners in the work and you don't have to go to Africa to find them so this is from my DjangoCon Europe in 2015 when a boy band disrupted our conference by suddenly selling every hotel bed in the city after our conference had already started selling tickets or in the PyCon UK a couple of years ago so anything can come up unexpectedly but still let's look at it this way Python in Europe is funny there's Monty Python and Python software is characterised by this light hearted tone that Grudafod Rossum very wisely established right at the beginning and we enjoy it in all kinds of ways so it's fun, we have funny snakes and so on what do you have to say about funny snakes snakes in Africa it's not funny I'm really serious take for example in Nigeria for a period of six months we were trying to register as a not for profit with the government and it took us a lot of going back and forth and we had to change our names so many times because the government or the officials would be like Python are you a cult we don't approve such and no this is actually after giving them a five page document explaining open source and what Python does and how Python is a software we eventually convinced them after six months of going back and forth and changing our names and finally say okay and they told us, they gave us a name and said why don't you say Python software community so that is very explicit and no one thinks that because for us Python represents negative we see it as a threat it's harmful, I mean people die from that thing so it's not funny for us another example in Zimbabwe was when a girl a parent actually pulled out a child from a jungle girls event because she saw me with my European Python chef and a huge snake there's no way I'm going to let my daughter be a part of that there is no way and it took Hannah to go to the woman and explain and explain to her what Python is as a software but not Python as a snake or as a demonic idea that many people are used to same thing happened in Shogob in the western part of Nigeria where the girl the company actually at the last minute pulled out from hosting a jungle girls event because they said jungle wave that's like jungle and change if anyone has ever seen jungle and change it's against our religious belief and we will not support that and the day before the event they had to run around looking for another venue sometimes it's preposterous it doesn't make any sense but this is our reality we just have to be careful with our snakes because they might not be as attractive as they are to us as they are to other people do you think if Guido had an African friend he would still have called it Python that's a good point if Guido had been developing Python in the beginning with an African friend perhaps the name Python would have made them stop and think for a minute you can't have too many useful perspectives when you're creating something but this isn't really about snakes it's about meaning because in a global community like ours symbols and images and names are going to have unexpected meanings and we can't rely on a narrow cultural perspective to find things that will work well Aisha can you explain to our audience what African time is I think this might be important for anybody who's planning to go to an African Python right I will cut the long story short but an advice to everyone here if you're ever going to organise an event where you expect Africans to attend and the actual time is 7pm in the invite you send out tell them it's actually 4pm give them 3 hours buffer because if you say 7pm no one is going to arrive at your event until 9 and you don't want that right organising the events in Namibia we Namibians are extremely relaxed they're too cool to hurry so everything does happen but it happens in Namibian time meanwhile the European co-organisers are sitting at home going because nothing seems to be happening but in fact it all just happens at the last moment the other important thing is that the personal touch I think this is a consistent thing in Africa isn't it Did you experience this? Well you can bombard people with email messages for months and nothing will happen and then you walk into their office and talk to them for 45 minutes and the first 30 minutes of the conversation will be about their children and in the final 15 minutes absolutely everything will be organised in a way that you could never do in Europe so there are different ways of doing things it's less stressful if you know that it's going to happen like that Heads up guys there's another thing expectations work in other ways too so there's a long history of African technological brilliance and mastery that when discovered by the west is not even recognised because of disbelief that it could have come from Africa so I don't know if you've heard of the Benin bronzes they came from actually from Nigeria not from Benin from the ancient Benin kingdom I come from that state you come from the Edo state so the the Benin bronzes were these thousands of works created in the 14th and 19th centuries they're not actually bronzes most of them are brass or other materials most of them are now in western museums and collections because they were all looted by the British in 1897 but when they arrived in Europe experts art experts were astounded and they couldn't believe that this stuff had been made by people so quotes primitive and savage not just because of the art but because of the understanding of metallurgy that went into producing things like this so they kept coming up with different theories about how the Africans managed to make these things they must have learnt it from the Portuguese traders for example and they just couldn't believe that this was African technology so that's just one example but I think there's a real danger that if some new technological advance comes out of Africa it simply might not be recognised because it won't fit western or European expectations but it's not just Europeans who might have to reassess their ideas of African technology is it? No, we will Africans buy African technology so we sometimes have the mindset which I would say resulted from back in the day maybe in colonialism where we feel that things foreign or things are brought up better than what we do or what we build within Africa so we've actually started a lot of movement around buying Nigeria to grow Nigeria buying Naira to grow Naira, buying Namibia to grow Namibia buy Africa to grow Africa and this has also translated into technology where we're trying to encourage companies within Nigeria to buy our own locally made software as opposed to believing in the software that comes from the foreign, anywhere else Asia, Europe or even America and this is just an example of how Nigeria's love Italian shoes there's this class that goes with oh my shoes are Italian, you don't want to say I haven't made in Abbas shoes because Abbas is a city in Nigeria and so we have actually started this movement by making Abbas because we are as good as much quality as you would get anywhere else in the world We've been talking about Python in Africa but what about Africans in Python so if there's going to be a new generation of African Python programmers or Python community members what new ideas or applications or insights are we going to see coming out from them? What could we imagine? We just don't know right? We don't know yet but we better be prepared for it when it comes because we already as a community understand the importance of diversity, diversity not just in gender, diversity in different domain knowledge so now imagine bringing the community of African Pythonistas created with the rest of the world, just imagine what that could mean but I have no idea, we don't know yet but don't be like 19th century art critics and simply miss it when it's staring you in the face so what's next for Python in Africa well I honestly think Python is special and there's a good reason why we out that first conference was a Python conference and not just an open source software conference it was because of the community of friends of companies that we knew we could rely on to make it happen and we've seen how the community internationally has helped start not just a Python in Namibia but also a Python community for Namibia so Python is the way in it's not actually about Python, it's not for us to say what software Africans should be learning Africa is going to need to make its own choices but Python gives us a great way into introducing these technologies and skills into Africa Python because of its community probably also because of the strength of the language itself can lead the way so the future looks pretty good but the last part of our talk just a couple of minutes left we want to address you as our audience who have been so kind to listen to us now and we want to frame a question in your mind does Python in Africa need your help or does it need your participation and engagement in Africa Africa does not need to be saved or taught we can do a lot of these things ourselves but we want to be a part of your community we want to be a part of our community not just about charity, we want you to come we want you to teach maybe and we also want you to learn from us because there's so much knowledge that you can gain just by talking to someone completely different with a completely different experience or to the people around you so yes, we want your participation we want you to join us come to an African Python it's really an invitation you know where to come over the next 12 months we want you to make new friends in Africa and keep them because when you have an experience like that, it's something that will stay with you for your entire life and will be something really meaningful we don't want you to be a tourist be a Pythonista in Africa if you come and have the experience of finding out from an African schoolboy what his plans are for the future in computing for his country that's an experience you'll never have as a tourist so offering you is a chance to literally to change the world and to take back in the future because the future is right here there it is and you'll be amazed what a difference you can make to it and there's the future and there's the future and you'll find that you too are transformed by the impact thank you very much thank you very much thank you very much for this very inspiring keynote as a EuroPython organiser I have an immediate question how can we learn to figure out to set up a conference like this in five minutes sorry I didn't hear the question actually you said if everything can happen there on short motors like in the last five minutes can we do a workshop for this for a EuroPython? I can actually give my microphone is making a lot of noise we can give an example of that in the second Pycon Namibia I'm not sure who's making that noise in the second Pycon Namibia we got a call earlier in the morning to say that the conference wasn't going to start that day because there were student protests at the university now fortunately we had a day in hand because we planned a social day at the end of the conference so we went straight to a hotel and we said we've got a problem we've got 120 people coming for a python conference we need audiovisual services in two different holes and we need catering for 120 people and we need it tomorrow and if you tried that anywhere in Europe I've been saying it's impossible so things do happen and can happen in different ways we're happy to take some questions from the audience keep them short as possible so as many people can have questions as possible hello thanks for the amazing talk it was super expiring the last few days of the conference I met people from all over the world and what would be your advice for them if they want to start a local python community in their own city or country it's to probably reach out to it's only easier when you have someone and they can help out to reach out to community another community and let this collaboration agree as opposed to anyone in the community you still need to be able to have that personal touch that one-on-one contact with someone and honestly emails are great but there's nothing that still beats personal communication and interaction so if you get lucky and find that your colleague is planning this multi-year project things to happen just by chance you have to talk to as many people as possible and you will eventually talk to the right person your turn off your headphones we'll use this microphone instead we'll do that if you have any more questions please come down here please take this route and everybody from here just come down for questions because I was at the sorts event of 3 o'clock I actually met a person from South Africa at last year's Cedar Python and he invited me to pike in Namibia but I kind of chickened out because Johannesburg isn't the safest place in the world to be exact if I come to Python Namibia can you tell me that it's going to be okay and I don't have to worry about anything Africa is unknown to many people Ivan our friend from South Africa he's coming to Nigeria of course he's a wonderful person Namibia is a democracy with a functioning free press a robust free press has elections and governments that get voted out by the people and people who lose their jobs in the correct way it's a really really safe place to be it's much safer than most of South Africa in terms of personal safety and even places that are less stable than Namibia they're not wild places it's not like you'll be walking on the road and someone's just going to grab you for the most part and we're aware of this problem and most communities like for Python Nigeria we're actually putting some extra security measures to make sure, I mean, it's in Lagos we don't usually have as much occurrences like in the northern part where there's Boko Aram and terrorism it's not always Kumbaya our friend Luke who's been to every Pycon Namibia came this year with his six year old son we should mention though that most African societies are socially conservative aren't they so unfortunately for gay or transgender people Africa might not always be sadly the most welcoming place and it's not for Europeans to start lecturing Africans on what standards they should have but I hope that this encounter that we've been talking about might change some of those attitudes just because people are meeting each other and being friends so I mean there are things to be aware of in many places in Africa homosexual activity is not legal so one more question from the audience I might want to skip in one of my questions so are Pycons in Africa then do they have like a similar code of conduct as we do in Europe or is it maybe an issue to set something like out like this so yes we do have code of conduct and we have just like a European having like dedicated people specific for that you know don't do anything just code of conduct because this is very important very crucial because everyone needs to feel welcome yes we do have in our conferences and taken extremely seriously as well yes and we're not we're not shy of putting in the code of conduct that for example homophobic behaviour or language is not tolerated so we can still share the values of our community where we go just have to do it in an appropriate way hi thank you it's quite inspiring you've shown that it's growing really fast my question to you is what does it mean in numbers when can we say that 1% of new graduates know python I'm not sure I get that that 1% of new university graduates had some experience with python okay so for example in Nigeria python is not being taught or as a standard in universities what we have now left to us actually part of the python in the community has been championing teaching python in universities so for example people still learn perl basic and you know some more more than universities do see c++ and Java but we're hoping that we can make it a standard because honestly python is one of the very friendly big enough languages to learn people have said that multiple times to us in Namibia for example hi thank you speaking with friends that works in cooperation in the African countries they told me that after they set up institution for teaching medicine engineering and so on one of the problem they have is that they come from many European American countries to teach and when the students have learned they just live as possible their country so in time where they go after each two or three years they meet always different people because that's it I think one of the things that we've discovered Aisha mentioned she talked about the kind of seriousness in which this is all taken like the Django girls events in Nigeria where they're tackling really serious things and I showed you some of the pictures from the school children giving lightning talks in Namibia towards the end and every time one of these young people stands up in front of a microphone they're talking about what they want to know is how can we bring what we've just learned to other people maybe in rural areas of their country so they are thinking about their own country and about people in their society who actually don't have the same opportunities as them and we've seen them for example the university students going into the schools straight away to share this stuff with the kids so I think the actual python community keeps people together if people have got skills they'll find those skills are at work and they'll be in their community keeping people in the country generating work in the country and revenue and money and so on in the country and that's the hope a personal example is I learnt about python when I had the opportunity of the privilege to be here in 2015 I grew up python and then I went back home and organised just one event and that had a ripple effect where now we have 31 so it's like I've learnt so much which is so amazing, so great I want this back home and I took it back home so I would say it differs for many people people have what motivates them because when I learnt about jungle I was like I need to go and show women in Nigeria that we are not all about fashion and catering that we can code and we can be good and great engineers too so it differs because people are literally there's nothing wrong with video games and the fun part of programming and computing that many people enjoy but you'll see that when people get hold of this technology in Africa they want to turn it so like Ronald's so that a Zimbabwe manufacturing soap can work more efficiently so that market traders can find a better make sure that they sell all their food they're concerned with real local problems and that's what's on their minds and so I think that is what keeps people there Okay we are already running way over time so one last short question short answer but I guess you will you're around today all day and I think you're really happy to ask any questions which comes to your mind I guess Rwanda is ready for a python I don't know how to do that but it really needs to be done He said Rwanda is ready for a python and it has to be done and he wants to be the champion of that Rwanda Oh Rwanda Yeah there is there are Django companies in Kigali for example So from thank you so much for listening to us it meant an awful lot to us to be here it's a huge honour and it means a great deal to us there's some information there that you should follow up or you can follow up with Aisha and me we'd love to talk to you I have some pike on them maybe a sticker if your laptop has got a blank space on it Thank you and we'll see you at a python in Africa Thank you