DSF travel grants available for PyCon Namibia 2018

About PyCon Namibia PyCon Namibia held its first edition in 2015. The conference has been held annually since then, and has been at the heart of a new open-source software movement in Namibia. In particular, through PyNam, the Namibian Python Society, Python has become the focus of self-organised community volunteering activity in schools and universities. In the last two years, assisted greatly by Helen Sherwood-Taylor, Django Girls has become an important part of the event too.

PyCons in Africa The conference has also been the direct prompt for further new PyCons across Africa; Zimbabwe in 2016, Nigeria in 2017 and a planned PyCon Ghana next year. In each case, PyCon attendees from another country have returned home to set up their own events. An important aspect of these events is the opportunity to establish relationships with the international community. Numerous people have travelled from other corners of the world to meet African programmers in their own countries, and many have returned multiple times.

Be a Pythonista, not a tourist There is enormous value in this exchange, which gives Python/Django programmers from beyond Africa a unique opportunity to encounter African programmers in their own country, and to visit not as passing tourists but as Pythonistas and Djangonauts who will form long-term relationships with their African counterparts. This helps ensure that the international Python community meaningfully includes its members, wherever in the world they may be, and represents a chance like no other to understand them and what Python might mean in Africa. There is probably no better way to understand what Python might mean in Namibia, for example, than having lunch with a group of Namibian high-school pupils and hearing about their ideas and plans for programming. This exchange enriches not only the PyCon itself, but also the lives of the Pythonistas that it embraces, from both countries, and the communities they are a part of.