Welcoming Everyone: Five Years of Inclusion and Outreach Programmes at PyCon Australia by Christopher Neugebauer
- How to bring more people to community run events
- Talk is not about diversity in tech
- Talk is about “Outreach and Inclusion in Events”
- Outreach = getting them in , Inclusion = making them feel welcome
- About funding programmes for events
- FOSS happens over the Internet , face-to-face is less common than in other areas/communities
- Events are where you can see the community
- BUT: Going to a conference costs money – travel, rego, parking, leave from job
- Events have equality of access problem
- Inequity of access is a problem with diversity
- Solution: Run outreach programmes
- Money can reduce the barriers, just spending money can help solve the problem
- Pycon Australia has had outreach for last 5 years
- FOSS vs other outreach programmes
- Events have easy goals, define ppl/numbers to target, exact things to spend on, time period defined
- Similar every year, similar result each year
- Long-term results are ill-defined
- Engagement is hard to track
- Pycon Australia
- Fairly independent of Python software foundation
- Biggest Pycon within 9 hours of flying
- Pycon US – 2500 attendees, $200k on financial attendance
- Pycon Aus 2015 – 450 attendees , 5-8% of budget on funding
- 2011
- Harassment and Codes of Conduct were a big thing
- Gender diversity policy, code of conduct, 20% speaks were women, First Gender diversity grants
- 2 Grants, – 1 ticket and 1 Ticket + $500 funded out of general conf budget
- 7 strong applicants at time when numbers were looking low (later picked up)
- Sponsor found and funded all 7 applicants
- 2012
- 1st of 2 years running conf in Hobart
- Moving from Sydney is hard. Australia big and people have to fly between cities (especially to Hobart)
- Hobart long way away for many people and small number of locals
- Sponsor increased funding to $700, funded 10 people for $500 + ticket
- Previous grant recipient from 2011 was speaking in 2012
- 2013
- Finding more speakers from more places
- Outreach and Speaker support run out of the same budget, cap removed on grants so International travel possible.
- Anyone could apply removed purely on gender limit. So other people who needed funding could apply. Eg Students, teachers, geographic minorities
- $12,500 allocated
- As more signups and more money came in more could go to the assistance budget
- If remove gender targeting then then what happens to diversity
- Got groups like GeekGirlDinners to target people that needed grants rather than directly chasing people to apply.
- Over half aid budget going to women
- Teachers good force multiplies
- 2014
- Lost previous diversity Sponsor
- Previously $5k from Sponsor + $7k from general fund.
- Pycon US – Everybody pays to attend ( See Essay by Jesse Noller – Everybody Pays )
- Most speakers have FOSS-friendly employers or can claim money
- Argument: Some confs make everybody pay no matter their ability.
- Told speakers that by default they would be charged, but by charge they weive it by just asking. Also said where the money was going and prioritised speakers to assistance. Also all organisers paid
- Extra money from about $7000
- Simplified structure of grants, less paperwork, just gave people a budget. Worked well since many people went with good deals.
- Caters better for diverse needs
- Also had Education Miniconf, covered under teacher traning budget. Offered to underwrite costs of substitute teachers for schools since that is not covered by normal school professional-dev budget
- Results
- Every time at least one funding recipient has spoken at next conference
- Many fundees come back when get professional jobs
- Evangelize to the friends
- Discovery
- expanding fund gets people you might not expect
- Diverse people have diverse needs
- Avoid making people do paperwork, just give them money
- Sponsors can make boot-strapping starting a programme easier
- Don’t expect 100% success
- Budget liberally, disburse conservatively
- Watch out for immigration scams
- Decline requests compassionately
- Questions
- Weekend hard for Childcare – Not heavily targeted
- Targeting Speakers for funding rather than giving all of them means it gets to go a lot further. Better Bang for buck
Sentrifarm – open hardware telemetry system for Australian farming conditions by Andrew McDonnell
- Great time to be a maker, everybody is able to make something
- Neighbour had problem with having to measure grass fire danger in each paddock before going out with machinery during summer
- Needs Wind Speed, temperature, humidity
- Sentrifarm
- Low power, solar
- distributed
- Works in area with slow internet, sim card expense adds up however
- Easy to use for farmer, access via their farm.
- Data should not be owned by cloud provider
- Hackerday Prize
- Build “something that matters”
- Prizes just for participating
- Document progress, produce a video
- Our Goals
- Cheap and Cheerful
- Aussie “bush mechanic” ehtos
- Enjoy the adventure
- Used stuff from 24+ other opensource projects
- Prototyping
- Tried out various micro-controllers an other equipment
- Most you could only buy for a few dollars
- Tools – Bus Pirate
- Radio links
- ISM-band radio module “Lora” technology
- SPI interface, well documented SX1276
- $20 for the module
- Propriety radio protocol, long rang low power, but open interface on top of it
- Eagle used (alt is KiCAD) to design circuit
- Build own shields to plug sensors and various controllers into
- playformio.org – run one command, creates a arduino project and builds with one command for multiple micro-controllers
- MQTT-SN – communications protocol for low-bw links.
- Breakdown of his stack, see his slides for details
- Backend Software
- Ubuntu
- Docker
- Carbon + Whisper + Graphite, Grafana
- “Great time to be a hacker, using who knows how many lines of code and only had to write 7 to get it to work together”
- Grafana hard to setup but found a nice docker container
- Data kept separately from the container
- Goal to get power down
- Used 3D-printer to create some parts from mounting bits.
- OpenSCAD – Language to design the parts
- Range of Lori of 5km un-evalated , 9km up a tower with sinple home-built antenna
- Won a top-100 prize at Hackaday of a t-shirt
- You can do it
- Document
- Focus on one part at a time
- Have fun
- http://hackaday.io/project/4758
- Questions
- Ask home survives weather? – Not a lot of experience yet, some options
- Home likely others to use? – Maybe but main gaol was to building it
