NgGirls Colombia
Being part of this fantastic event was an absolute privilege, but what is it exactly? How did this idea start? And how was the process?
Ok, let me tell you about it!
Roots
NgGirls is an international initiative which aims to introduce women to the world of technology and increase the diversity. With events and activities in which the participants build and deploy a web application with Angular. Also offering guidance finding a job in FrontEnd development.
Colombia Chapter
This event had its first edition of NgGirls Colombia on November 11th, 2017, in the Medellín city, this edition had the participation of 20 girls with Juan Herrera, Manuela Castrillón and Laura Ciro as leading organizers.
Workshop 2018
At the beginning of this year, I was interested to learn more about girls communities, so in June I sent an email to info@ng-girls.org, asking for their advice, direction and help me identify the possibilities of bringing NgGirls to Colombia, and I received this response from Robert:
We discussed your idea, and we love it. The ngColombia organizers plan to have the 2nd ngGirls workshop in Medellin.
And I thought “what!!! Ng-Colombia!, the second edition!, I want to help!”. Thanks to a casual conversation with Vanessa Aristizabal, she helped me to be part of the process and I was able to work with this wonderful organizing team (from left to right): Laura Ciro, Juan Herrera, Alejandra Giraldo, Vanessa Aristizabal, and Manuela Castrillón
We had the same vision, to empower women in the world of technology by giving them knowledge and confidence that they can do it 💪, and what’s better than Angular for that!
We wanted to share this experience with the largest number of girls who are enthusiastic about learning as much as possible.
But we needed help. The local communities came to support us, helping us to spread the word about the event:
➢ Angular Medellín
➢ Colombia Dev
➢ MedellinJS
➢ PionerasDev
➢ GDG Medellin
➢ Medellín CSS
Thanks to their help, we achieved a record number of 209 registered women. How incredible was that! This gave us confirmation that in our city many girls want to be more involved in technology and specifically in coding.
After that level of response, we felt great joy, but it also brought a lot of responsibility. The event was on September 1st, 120 women arrived, we wanted to provide a full-day of content starting from 8:00 am to 4:00 pm, with food included of course!
Our goal was to make the girls go through a learning process without frustration and with as much support as possible. We hoped it was an unique experience for all of them, and they feel motivated to join future events.
Thanks to Ng-Colombia/NgGirls and Yuxi Global for being sponsors for this event, they provided the necessary support, so we could give them a comfortable and ample venue, Premium Plaza mall auditorium, with internet, food and gifts.
We also, had a crucial help to make the participants feel like they were not alone in the process: The mentors. We were fortunate to have 21 volunteers, 21 people involved in communities, who donated their time and effort to this cause, and some of them were internationals like:
➢ Bram Borggreve🐝 organizer of Code Your Future Colombia
➢ Sherry List organizer of @ngCopenhagen, @gdgcph & @ngVikingsConf
➢ Katerina Skroumpelou organizer of @AthensAngular
➢ Tatiana Molina Colombian settled in Chile organizer of @Angular Chile
➢ Bartosz Pietrucha founder of Angular Academy.
And of course our local community leaders and active members including:
➢ Ángela María Franco
➢ Angela Ordoñez
➢ Any Ruiz
➢ Camila Gomez
➢ Claudia Davila
➢ Daniel Correa
➢ Elias Quintero
➢ Estefany Aguilar
➢ Frank Betancur
➢ Jorge Vergara
➢ Juliana Gomez
➢ Leonardo Perez
➢ Maria Fernanda Serna
➢ Mateo Castaño
➢ Melina Mejía
➢ Veronica Londoño
With all this support, the organizing team came up with an action plan for the participants, we knew it was not going to be easy, because they all had different backgrounds.
➢ Those who work in programming and know Angular.
➢ Those who know programming and not Angular.
➢ Those who don’t know how to code.
So we created a system of challenges in which the most important thing was not to run or to be the first, the most important part was to learn, to ask your partners next to you if they needed help, if they needed an explanation or support in the process. We wanted participants to become mentors to each other, and only move on to the next challenge only if the rest of the girls were finished. In this way, we encouraged them to work with soft skills, break the ice and meet new people.
We created a space of support, knowledge, and community, all of this was created by a lot of volunteers who made this possible, we were very excited to observe the joy, motivation, and desire of these women.
It was amazing watching how they solved the challenges, how they investigated, asked and helped each other in the more complex exercises.
After that day, we noticed some of them attended meetups in local communities!.
