Thank you to Anna Ossowski, the first runner of the Your Django Story series, for her help in putting together this section of the wiki.
First of all, thanks for helping out with Django Story, our blog series that features a woman Django developer each week! It's important to give the women who take our workshops and go through our tutorial online examples of good women role models from all over the world.
We hope these instructions will help you run the Django Story.
- You will send emails from [email protected], and the Support Team will give you access to that email account.
- You'll have access to our Twitter and Facebook accounts, so that you can schedule some social media posts to promote this week's story.
- You'll have access to the Django Girls Tumblr account, so you can post the blog posts each week.
- The Django Story should be posted each week on Monday. It's okay to miss a week here and there, but in general, we aim to post a story each week.
- You'll be given access to a spreadsheet with the contact information of women you could interview.
- Here's a link to some sample HTML for publishing the blog post.
This is the fun part! There are several ways to find women to interview for the Django Girls blog.
- Use the interview list. This list is your best friend, and you should aim to keep it up to date as much as possible. The color-coding system is this:
- White: The person hasn't been emailed yet.
- Faded writing: The person has been contacted, but declined and does not want to be contacted again.
- Yellow: The person has been emailed, but has not yet responded. Feel free to follow up on some "yellow" women. Sometimes our emails get lost in spam filters, or people forget.
- Blue: The person was contacted and agreed to be interviewed, but couldn't do it at that time. Definitely follow up with these!
- Orange: The person responded and submitted their interview. You don't need to contact them again!
- When someone agrees to be interviewed, ask them if they know of other women Django developers who you could contact!
- Look for Django Girls workshop organizers and coaches! The organizers and coaches come from all over the world and have a wide variety of experiences. Check out the upcoming events from time to time and reach out to some of the organizers and coaches on Twitter or through email.
- If you attend a conference, or see some people you follow on Twitter tweeting about one, take a look at the schedule. Maybe there's a Django developer presenting that we haven't featured yet.
- Solicit recommendations! Occasionally tweet out a request for more recommendations, be sure to publicize that people can email [email protected] with new suggestions, etc.
Some things to keep in mind: Some people will respond right away, some people may take longer to respond and complete the interview, some people won’t respond at all (even if you remind them). This is totally normal. Please don’t get discouraged if some people are not interested in doing an interview or you never hear from them. Sometimes people will decline to do an interview because they think they don’t know enough Django, their story is not interesting, etc. In those cases, we highly recommend trying to encourage them. Tell them that they do great work, and that we need more women role models, and you'd love to hear their story. Sometimes that helps, and sometimes they might still decline. Respect their decision if they decline again, and don't push them.
The best way to get in touch with potential interviewees is to email them! When you contact them, mention in your email who you are, what Django Girls and Django Story are (unless you know they are familiar with both), and how you know about them. You can also link to the Google document with the interview questions, ask them to submit a picture of themselves if they are comfortable having their picture published on the blog, and ask them to provide short bio.
Please also ask them if they know any other women who work with Django who might be interested in being featured, and add those names to our interview list so we can keep the interview series going for a long time!
Hi Patricia!
I hope you’re well! We met briefly at the sprints at PyCon. Carol Willing introduced me to you.
I wanted to ask you if you’d be interested in doing an interview for the "Your Django Story" interview series on the Django Girls blog. If you haven’t heard about it yet, please check it out here blog.djangogirls.org. I would love to feature you!
If you’re interested, please fill out our interview questions here: [LINK TO GOOGLE DOC]
It would also be great if you could send me a picture of you (only if you feel comfortable having your picture published on the blog of course) and a short bio (2-3 sentences are totally fine). Please let me know if you have questions or need help. I’m always happy to help :)
Thank you and all the best,
Anna
We ask a set of standard questions for the Django Story interviews, and they are stored in this Google doc. It's helpful to create a new Google doc for each woman you contact called "Django Story [HER NAME]," so they can edit the document to answer the questions themselves. You can just make the document editable by anyone with the link, and then they can include the responses at their leisure.
The questions are:
- How did your story with code start?
- What did you do before becoming a programmer?
- What do you love the most about coding?
- Why Django?
- What cool projects are you working on at the moment/planning on working on in the near future?
- What are you the most proud of?
- What are you curious about?
- What do you like doing in your free time? What’s your hobby?
- Do you have any advice/tips for programming beginners?
For women who've attended, coached at, or organized a Django Girls workshop, we also add this question:
- How did attending a Django Girls workshop influence your life/career? What did you get out of attending a Django Girls workshop?
When you receive the completed interview questions, picture, and bio, you can create the interview post in Tumblr right away and save it as a draft. Correct any grammar or spelling mistakes, but other than that, you don't need to edit their responses. Please also make sure to thank the interviewee, let them know when you will publish their interview, and ask them for their Twitter handle so you can mention them in your tweet about the interview, which will also inform them that their interview is live.
You will also add the introduction (“This is a post in our Your Django Story interview series….”) to each of the posts. After the introduction comes the bio, then their photo (you can upload the picture in Tumblr), then the interview questions and answers, and a short thank you to the interviewee.
You'll also add a footer that contains your own name, photo, and link to your Twitter handle so we know who to thank for conducting this interview!
Link to sample HTML for formatting the into, questions, and footer.
A new Django Story should go live each Monday.
Tumblr requires that you be an "owner" of the blog in order to schedule posts correctly. At this time, the Django Story volunteer won't be made an owner of the blog, so when you have a post to schedule, please email the Support Team with the name of the interviewee and the date you'd like the post to go up, and they will schedule it for you. Please give them a couple days of lead time for this!
If you need to get a story out at the last minute, you can always publish the post yourself manually. You just can't schedule it in advance. (We don't know why Tumblr's settings are the way they are. We're hoping to streamline this process in the future!)
After posting the new interview, please promote the interview in the following places:
- Submit a link to the PyLadies Reddit subreddit
- Announce the new interview through the Django Girls Facebook page
- Tweet from the Django Girls Twitter account. Don’t forget to mention the interviewee's Twitter handle in your tweet!
You can scroll through old Django Story Facebook and Twitter posts to get an idea of what the posts should look like. You can include a quote from the interview, or mention the open source or community projects the interviewee is involved in.