9 Years of PyLadies: Lessons Learned and What Comes Next
9 years ago an initial group of 7 women met at PyCon USA 2011 began the world of what we know today as PyLadies. Since 2011, PyLadies has grown to 100+ chapters worldwide and the growth doesn’t seem to be stopping anytime soon! What has made PyLadies so successful in the past - its decentralization and high degree of chapter autonomy - has presented PyLadies with unseen new challenges in 2020 such as burnout, resource stagnation, and ultimately not allowed PyLadies to respond to the global community of 2020.
Join three regional PyLadies organizers as they present what PyLadies has in store for the future including a global vision for community engagement and open source projects open to all.
About Elaine Wong
When she wasn't helping out for PyCon Canada, Elaine works as a Switcher/Director for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation/Radio-Canada. She is also active as a global organizer of PyLadies and organizes a conference about all things data.
About Lorena Mesa
Political scientist turned coder, Lorena Mesa is a data engineer on GitHub’s software intelligence systems team, Director on the Python Software Foundation, and PyLadies Chicago co-organizer. Lorena’s time at Obama for America and her subsequent graduate research required her to learn how to transform messy, incomplete data into intelligible analysis on topics like predicting Latinx voter behavior. It’s this unique background in research and applied mathematics that drove Lorena to pursue a career in engineering and data science. One part activist, one part Star Wars fanatic, and another part Trekkie, Lorena abides by the motto to “live long and prosper”.
About Mariatta Wijaya
Mariatta is a Python Core Developer, a Software Engineer at Zapier, the Vancouver PyLadies co-organizer, and one of the founding members of the PyCascades conference. She moved to Canada almost two decades ago, and now lives in Vancouver with her husband and two children. In her free time, she contributes to open source, builds GitHub bots, and fixes typos.