I gave a talk with Asheesh Laroia at PyCon 2012 called Diversity in practice: How the Boston Python user group grew to 1700 people and over 15% women.

The video can be viewed online at http://pyvideo.org/video/719/diversity-in-practice-how-the-boston-python-user. Thank you to the PyCon organizers for orchestrating the lightning-fast turnaround time on subtitling and publishing the talk videos.

The slides are available here.

The talk was very well-received, with a great Q&A and many follow-up contacts from folks interested in running outreach events in their communities. Praise from Glyph, a long-time supporter who is leaving Boston soon for San Francisco, was particularly touching. We benefited tremendously from our practice run with the Boston Python user group.

Abstract:

How do you bring more women into programming communities with long-term, measurable results? In this talk we’ll analyze our successful effort, the Boston Python Workshop, which brought over 200 women into Boston’s Python community this year. We’ll talk about lessons learned running the workshop, the dramatic effect it has had on the local user group, and how to run a workshop in your city.