12 meetups later, here’s 10 invaluable lessons we’ve learned on building a tech community.
“For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them, e.g. men become builders by building and lyreplayers by playing the lyre; so too we become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts.” Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics
Slightly over a year ago, when we begun the Nairobi Women in Machine Learning and Data Science community, we knew close to very little on building a tech community and were fuelled by nothing but an almost insatiable desire to grow our skills in Data Science and Machine Learning.
About Nairobi WiMLDS: The Nairobi Women in Machine Learning and Data Science community is a community of women with interests and working in Machine Learning and Data Science. Data Science has been named for several years now one of the top sexiest jobs of the 21st century and when I finally decided to give data science a try, I was beyond clueless on where to start but totally excited by the idea of making sense of out data, uncovering trends and just doing cool stuff. A few months in, my search for a community where I could learn and network with other people in the same space led me to establishing the first African Chapter or the Women in Machine learning and Data Science Meetups.
Having successfully hosted 12 meetups to-date here’s some quick key learnings that I’m always quick to point out especially when asked about my experience in building a tech community.
- Vision: Pink Elephant in the room: Why women?
This is a group for women interested in Machine Learning and Data Science. We meet to socialize, and to discuss machine learning and data science in an informal setting with the purpose of building a community around women in these fields. Despite, having hosted men during almost each of the 12 meetups, our core-vision remains to create a community of Machine Learning and Data Science female experts in Kenya and beyond and all the events we plan in this year will be geared toward this, not being ignorant of the fact that there are skills gaps which we can not fill on our own, but working together even with men as we have in the past to continue to build on the community’s capacity.
2. The Steering team
“If I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants.” — Isaac Newton
Creating a community and ensuring growth and consistency involves a lot of moving parts from planning meetups, to coordinating community activities and building on engagement to fundraising and growing the community.
The #NairobiWiMLDS core steering team brings diverse skillsets and abilities to the table which makes working towards our vision so much fun and easier. Deepali Gholil handles the community’s Growth and Strategic planning. She’s a rockstar at ensuring that we remain true to our core vision by analysing past workshops, to figure out what works and what doesn’t as well as taking the lead in mapping out growth and strategy.
Kathleen Siminyu is the “Dreamer and Doer of Impossibilities”, you don’t believe me, check out her email tagline. It’s funny how we met. I had just started the meetup page, and there was lots of people signing up. I sent a bulk email to everyone who had signed up, asking for help in co-organizing the meetup. There was a bunch of replies, and we agreed to meet at a fast-food joint in Westlands. At the time, we had zero funds, and so I made it clear from the beginning, that everyone would foot their bill at the fast-food joint. Looking back to this day, I am so thankful for brokeness, everyone (only Kathleen did)who stayed, knew what they were getting themselves into. A small start-up-ish situation, with no free t-shirts, flash-disks or stipends to share out. Kathleen was fresh out of campus, but her resilience, brilliant mind and spirit of excellence has kept this ball rolling. She goes out there, and does amazing things, she’s a rockstar at networking and sharing our vision with any and everyone, she’s the ambassador every community needs(and, no you can not poach her).
I hope you get the point. Building a community will require not just diversity in skills and abilities but also a lot of sacrifice as all this is voluntary work.
3. Relationships and Networking
One of the things, i picked up on after the first few meetups was the importance of building relationships. This will in most times mean, personally knowing almost each and every person who attends the meetups or reaches out to us online. Through these relationships we have been able to get speakers for different sessions, ideas on how to better manage the community as well as financial support to some of the meetups.
4. Consistency
“For a community to thrive, members need to gain utility, otherwise it’s not worth their time.”Enrique Allen
5. Partnerships, Synergies and Fundraising
In the past year we have been extremely fortunate and are thankful to have partnered with Google through the Together with Google Developers program in Sub Saharan Africa, Africa’s Talking Ltd, Moringa School, Intel, BRaVe Ventures and NVIDIA AI among others.
At the core of growing any community is finances. At the initial stages of building this community, we attempted to use a “subscription model” to finances running costs. We however learned that this would not be a practical offering especially to the students joining us and had to iterate our planning, to identify ways to support our monthly meetups. Through these partnerships, we have not only been able to afford to host the meetups, but we have also been able to refine our vision as well as work out feasible ways to ensure consistency.
6. Growth Hacking
I remember reading this quote a few months back, “For community to truly, beautifully work, there must be buy-in from every single person involved”. With this in mind, we begun to create buy-in opportunities for members in our community. This was made especially easy to do, as Kathleen had already been running a beginners marathon with close to ten ladies. Through the beginner marathon series, we were able to have two ladies lead a training session to share learned skills at the 2017 Devfest in Nairobi.
7. Reading
I begun working in this community with very little knowledge on building community. I have over time dedicated close to four hours each week to reading literature on building communities and best practices for growth and engagement. Through research on thriving communities I have been able to learn and identify proven science, dozens of real-life examples, practical tips, and trusted community-building methods such as how to build on a lifecycle for tracking the community’s progress and frameworks for managing your community efforts. My top reads this past year include:
- Buzzing Communities: How to Build Bigger, Better, and More Active Online Communities
- Online Community Management for Dummies
- Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning and Identity (Learning in Doing: Social, Cognitive and Computational Perspectives)
- The Art of Community: Building the new age of participation
8. What have been notable highlights, 12 meetups, close to 950 registered members later?
A few weeks back we sat down with Kathleen to plan on the way forward and were in awe at some of the highlights and feedback that we are now receiving from members of the community. Just to mention a few of them,
- Here’s Publications/Write-ups from the community members
-Data Science and Machine Learning- The Nairobi Way by Amina Islam
-Teaching to Learn: A deep Learning case study by Muhia.
-AI systems should be shaped by the people they affect by @kathleen Siminyu
- Being panelists at Tech Events such as the annual African Women in Tech Conference, Deep Learning Indaba, the Universités d’Afrique et de la Diaspora, the AI and Inclusion symposium in Rio de Janeiro, DevFest17 Nairobi, GCP & AI Inaugural meetup in Nairobi among others.
9. No matter what happens, be sure to have fun.
10. “What would you tell someone who’s looking to grow a community?”
“…And, when you want something , all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it…” Paulo Coelho
One thing comes to my mind, each time I have to answer this question. first is Just Do It. If you are thinking about it, just do it. You will never know until you do it. I’m a strong believer in intentional serendipity and are confident that we wouldn’t have gotten this far if we did not take that first leap of faith. We started out on a zero budget. Crossing fingers and hoping that people would believe in us enough to actually show up and to also pay a small fee of Ksh. 500 to cater for snacks and drinks and we have not “walked alone” ever since.
In 2018…
We are extremely excited about the new year and can’t wait to get started with running the scheduled Machine learning and Data Science workshops.
Join us on meetup and slack to keep tabs on exciting opportunities and meetups coming up.
