 So hello everyone, welcome to the open-source education track in DEF CON for CZ 2022. Let me welcome here and introduce our speakers who will be talking about the power of community. As a very first person who I would like to introduce is Anesh Kamilar, who is a project, even community coordinator in Digital Chesco. But she's also very active in Czech Python community. So she's organizing a lot of local events and meetups. So welcome Anesh Kamilar. It is also a pleasure to introduce the second speaker, Karolina Surma, who is also active member of Pi Ladies. If you do not know what is the Pi Ladies about? So Pi Ladies is a community of women who are actually programming in Python and the main goal of this initiative is to bring more women into the ID field. And it seems it really worked because Karolina, thanks to the Pi Ladies, she changed her job field and now she's working as a software engineer at Red Hat. So welcome Karolina as well. Before I will hand it over to Karolina, let me just mention that this presentation will last 20 minutes. We will have five minutes for the Q&A section. So feel free to contact or to interact the speakers in a chat or use the Q&A section. So enjoy it and now we'll hand over to Karolina. Hello everyone and thank you DevCon for having us here. I just heard a part of the welcome talk and I was very glad to observe the same community spirit we actually want to talk here today. So let me briefly set the scope of the talk. We are here as Pi Ladies, which is an educational and diversity in mind community. But we'd like to focus more on what we think and what we believe is universal for any long-term striving community project. We will not talk about who we are or what we do. If you're interested to get to know us better, we're always happy to have a conversation about it. Feel free to reach us after the talk. We've both been with Pi Ladies for a long time now and we learned a lot during this time. So we asked our friends in the community, what do they think that they gained during their stay and their activity at Pi Ladies? We learned a lot from their responses as well. So we want to share that insight with you. Now I'll hand it over to Aneshka. So thank you. Hi everyone. Karolina will be later talking about what we call a skills playground or why the supply of this talk is a mutual help to grow. But for the beginning, I'd like to share with you some preconditions for all this to happen and how we got to that stage actually. So I will briefly touch the differences between motivation to join the community and how it differs from the motivation to stay active in it and how these changes in the motivation affected our activities over the years of existence of Pi Ladies group in Bernal. So for the beginning, I'm going to share with you the motivations to join basically any educational community without knowing anything about it except the main topic of the community. And those things are quite obvious. For those who are less experienced, usually they join because they want to learn about the topic of the community. And for those who are more experienced in the field, they want to share their knowledge. For both of these groups, they usually want to try something new. They want to get some new impulses in their life or they want to grow their network within the given field or in general utilize their free time with some meaningful activities. All these things may be easily fulfilled just by joining the group. But for some of those people, it may change when they join the community and when they learn what more it has to offer. And here I'll be more specific for Pi Ladies Bernal group because as Karolina mentioned, we asked our colleagues to share their thoughts with us and it's also based on our experience of us both. So I will start with those who came to teach with the more experienced ones and they shared with us two important findings which won't change for them when they joined the community and they start to do things in there. The first finding was that even though they came to share their knowledge and to teach others, by teaching they are actually learning a lot because there's a difference between using something on daily basis and work with it and explaining it to someone who has no knowledge about a given subject or in our case usually no technical background at all. Let's call them newbies. We did a pick from totally different angles. They are asking unexpected questions and have really unorthodox approach because they are untouched from the technical background. So for the experienced ones, it opens new horizons and opens new ways how to view the subject. So with that, they want to apply it for other things they know so they want to try new ways of teaching or teach something else and get these new horizons for new topics. And there's a second finding which is no less important than the first one and it's that when you join the community it's not only about growing the network but it's actually about building the relationships and that's getting to know that people can bring more value and joy than just teaching. This also applies for the newbies, for those who came to learn because when they join the community, they find out that it's not just a random programming course but there's this sense of belonging. Because with the other, let's call them classmates, they are sharing the same starting line and we really encourage the interactions among the community members so they are creating this support net. They are helping each other grow and when they get to know the rest of the community, the organizers, the coaches, the lecturers they found out that even the experienced people were on the similar starting point as well some time ago. So here comes the realization of, I can do this and that through the community activities they can get more experience they want to give back to the community, help other newbies and they want to stay to explore the opportunities and what more the community can bring to them. But we didn't have this mindset since the beginning it was actually quite a journey to get to this point because at the beginning and for PyLadies Burner Group it's almost 10 years ago we started with really focus on getting more women to IT, support the diversity, getting more and more girls involved in our activities so we were repeating the courses for beginners again and again and perceived from the outside there was almost an equal sign between PyLadies and programming courses for beginners for ladies only like almost no difference seeing from the public it started to change slowly because more and more people from the Czech Python community got involved with PyLadies and the Czech Python community is really active one and they are supportive and awesome and they brought us the spirit of real community and showed us what the community can really be and that if we want to grow it doesn't mean just adding more and more people who won't stay with us because they just joined for this one-time game tool and programming in Python and getting more people is not the same as growing the community and we need to nurture it as well we need to give them the reason to stay and address the changes in motivation so we started to add more advanced activities and a bigger variety of activities to address the needs of both the experienced and the less experienced people in the community and it seemed to be the right way to success at that time Bruno Group grew really extensively we had a lot of people coming back and we saw this progress of the newbies becoming organizers or coaches or even lecturers and we were on cloud nine it was awesome and we really felt that the community is growing but then COVID hit and COVID showed us how important it is for our community to be together in real life and it was this part of building relationships and that the human interaction and networking is really a key part of our community and unfortunately we weren't able to replicate this in an online environment and without this presence we were just getting back to being just another programming course which we didn't want so right now we're in kind of like restart phase we want to focus more on those who are already involved with us somehow our strong motivation now is to really build a community and we know we need to build a strong foundation before getting back to the activities for newcomers so right now hopefully the COVID will be gone soon and we're starting again with like real community building so that was a journey of our community and now Karolina will tell you more about how people benefit from being a part of an educational community such as Palliades in Bernouar Thank you, Aneshka As Aneshka just said, we want people to stay with us and the way to do it is to enable them to grow as they find new areas for their development so that they don't burn out doing always the same tasks you know when you organize the meet-up for the 15th time there's really nothing new to it and that's what we call the skills playground let's be clear it's nothing we invented but we like to think about our activities this way and we would like to propose it to you as a method of looking at your own community activities because there are plenty of skills outside of the main community focus to grab let's take a look at how this works in our environment come to learn programming and become an organizer and this involves a great deal of project management you'll learn time management and improve handling with many parties at once and once you know how to handle timelines secure the people to the meet-ups communicate with the attendees you can switch to some other role and maybe you're curious about marketing and how to leverage the way the community is perceived outside or maybe you're more interested in the technical field become a web administration administrator and make sure our online resources are updated on time also you can move towards more expert role and learn how to share your knowledge with the people who are even more new to the topic than you are then you can train a new set of skills like how to plan a session or contents maybe some technicalities like how to stream your session and so on let's then define some skills playground features it's all about creating an environment where there are tasks or res and everyone is welcome to take their piece of pie or come up with the new ideas they want to implement you know it's also about bringing new things to the community it resembles a real world at a small scale you train real life skills in an environment where it's not a big deal so you don't get the $1 million budget project but a one semester programming course that's enough to get the flavor of what it really means another thing is psychological safety in case it works whatever you're trying to do it's great for the community and for yourself it's always benefiting and in case it doesn't work you can evaluate it, make it better and try it again or you can just stop doing whatever didn't work you're not penalized in any way for any kind of failure or what you perceive as a failure it's important to remember that every experiment that didn't work as expected adds up to your hard-earned expertise in the topic and experience you will get and bring with yourself to your further adventures and any time you will get to deal with a similar situation you will already know it in this guest playground you get some community support Aneshka was talking about it so I will not go into it but it's super important and you know it's a volunteer work it's something we do in the free time after work just make it do whatever makes you happy what's joyous for you, what brings you joy by trying out the tasks you're curious about you gain a lot the first thing is the insight about who you are and what's actually fulfilling for you many people have the idea, these random ideas it would be so cool for me if I could do this or that community work can actually let you train it and do some reality check whether the activity is something for you or not this will bring the confidence, self-confidence boost what Aneshka said, I can do it I can organize, I can help, I can teach that's a great feeling this is related also to getting used to being out of your comfort zone which is a great skill to your further life as well this all together, knowing your strong sides knowing your weaknesses meeting people who can act as the role models it all can lead you to redefining your career path for yourself and it has happened to both Aneshka and me although each of us has chosen different direction we agree that without the community work we wouldn't have thought it's possible for us and within time you might have created a personal brand for yourself without any actual marketing activities it can be visible through your work in the wider community and this can also bring you some credit and appreciation in your current workplace what started as a hobby doesn't have to end like one so once you know a certain area you can choose to grow in a new one and prevent burnout from routine and boredom for the community work you will become proficient in all kinds of communication written, spoken, formal, informal, business talk it can send you to explore even wider paths like preparing and giving a conference talk and as for less expected gains when collaborating with volunteers you will realize that you can't control everything because life happens and you shouldn't take it all personally that's what I call the skill of letting it go and I think it's a great skill to train for anyone with some micromanagement traits as women in tech still draw some negative publicity we have developed a very hard skin against unconstructive feedback that's also a gain for life and this is related to another issue sometimes not very often unpleasant situations happen the people responsible for the community must handle them and that's an opportunity to train crisis communication skills and that's a skill we adapted as well that's where you become also mindful about the language you use and the way you act if you really care about the well-being of the people and meeting in the community field and for the completely different area thanks to the decisions made by the people that started the community our websites are approachable by the newbies they can pretty quickly learn how to edit the web and get familiar with open source collaboration model for people who stay longer with us Git and GitHub are no secret as a result people know how to use their tooling which becomes invisible and there's more to it in the beginnings editing HTML and YAML files or Jinja templates committing it to Git and pushing it to remote branch is rather scary with the rising experience and the community support in embracing the new skills people get rid of the fear of technicalities and become tech savvy nothing new will surprise them as much as those beginnings so if you want to teach open source that's the way to do it in short, what are the parts of what we believe will make us a better community probing once in a while who is your target? does it stay the same or does it change? maybe you have developed a new internal customers for yourself this also means evolving time goes by, people change maybe the format from the beginnings is not the optimal one anymore so be sensitive to people's feedback and be mindful about your target group we want to attract beginners so our applications must be approachable by the beginners it's good to have a big variety of tasks and roles which scope beyond the core functionality it's also great to leave space for new ideas and here a side note the more flat the structure is, the better our organizers are the attendees and they are coaches and they learn how to teach and we are mixing it up and we believe this is the best way to actually work lastly, just don't be afraid to experiment thank you very much for your attention and this is time for questions yes, we actually have one question in the Q&A section so do participants of PiLadies trainings learn about open source contribution? Kayo Aneshko? yes and no, in a way so of course, if you want to stay with our community you will have to edit our website or will not, you will have to but you can do it we have everything hosted the source code is on GitHub so any additions that are made will go through the open source model the beginners course has had the Git and GitHub sessions lessons in it but it doesn't have anymore we moved towards organizing one day workshops on collaboration so yeah, it's definitely possible and when people come up with the idea how we would like to learn Git we are more than happy to organize such event thank you, Karolina Aneshko, is there anything you would like to add? no, I mean maybe one thing that we believe it's a crucial part to have this in our portfolio of activities but the program for beginners is even without it, really complex so as Karolina mentioned, we put it out and decided to have a whole day workshop focused on this thank you another question to gain the soft skills and management skills is it always through the Python development or is there a place to do it without programming? yeah, that's maybe more for me I'm not a programmer I actually attended the beginners course but I saw it mostly as entering path for me to the pilotless community and I learned some of those things which Karolina mentioned just by organizing and I'm doing also some kind of PR activities for Pilates and I'm calling myself Pilates Ambassador because I'm speaking at conferences and I'm usually the one who's opening the courses at the beginning so yeah, it's really possible without programming I don't call myself a programmer I'm even an organizer I'm a community supporter of the Python program thank you Aneshka now we have another question how can I join the community is this for everyone around the world? yeah, Pilates are the worldwide community and if you want to get involved into Python meetups and Pilates in Czech Republic are quite different because we organize the courses but normally those are meetups for the Python programmers so just Google for Pilates.com or just go directly to Pilates.com and try to find the locations suitable for you and also I'd like to bounce back for a moment to this soft skills and management skills training it's not typical to our community I believe that in any community that doesn't have a strong structure as an organizer and who is the user those skills can be acquired thank you Karolina so as we are slowly approaching the end of our session so do you have anything in the end, any final idea you would like to share? I don't know wish us luck, we would really like to get through the Covid phase and restart once it's over so wish us luck so Anna Ško, Karolina thank you very much, you were great speakers and for those of you who would like to talk to the speakers so you can move to the WorkAdventure platform where you can talk so thank you thank you everyone thank you