Through its Ruby Outreach to Women workshops, the San Francisco Ruby community has seen vast success in teaching and retaining a larger and more diverse community of Ruby enthusiasts than ever before. Others have taught similar immersive workshops and tutorials in Python. There is clearly a lot of mostly-untapped enthusiasm outside of traditional FLOSS circles for learning to code (and otherwise contribute to software) within a joyful, involved community.

This poster is meant to provide a place for PyCon participants to discuss their experiences either attending or teaching such events and hammer out what kinds of curricula, format, and follow-up seem to be most effective in converting "noobs" into long-term community participants.

I personally am bringing my experience as a RailsBridge student and more generally as someone who came to coding "later in life" compared to the typical programmer stereotype (meaning, after age 18). I also can discuss my grad school classmates' experience in a voluntary collaborative student-run Python "bootcamp" that took place prior to the start of the semester to help entrants into the program who did not yet have the requisite programming experience. I may also talk about my work with OpenHatch, a website which provides tools for open source community involvement and outreach.

How did you happen to get involved with FLOSS and with coding? Who helped you along the way? And how can we make those paths smooth and easily reachable to others in the future?