The PyData Rome Chapter: Ideas and Commitments
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What is PyData ?
PyData is an educational program of NumFocus, a nonprofit charity promoting open practices in research, data, and scientific computing. It provides a forum for the international community of users and developers of data analysis tools to share ideas and learn from each other. The forum is organized on the Meetup platform and currently, in January 2023, there are 215 groups in 73 countries.
The Rome PyData Chapter
The Rome PyData chapter started in September 2022 and had its first meeting in December 2022 thanks to the support of Binario F, an innovation laboratory managed by Facebook in the center of Rome that provided us with the facility for our meeting. The PyData Rome chapter was started out of a lack of events related to computational science, open source software development, and open data in our city. Our aim is to contribute to change the landscape of the city for what is related to open science and awareness of new technologies and the opportunities they bring.
Changing the landscape
There are many Italian newspaper articles and blog posts that talk about machine learning and artificial intelligence but not many opportunities to learn to become an active user and not just a passive or even unaware consumer of such technologies. We want to fill that gap. Rome has almost 4 million inhabitants, three universities with a total of more than 100k students, and many research institutions. Furthermore, many large private, public and international organizations, that deal with increasing amounts of complex data, have their headquarters here. We need more people able to work on these data sets and more opportunities to learn and share ideas. If we look at other PyData chapters in Europe we see a correlation between the numbers of their members and events that they organize and the country’s leadership in innovation, open science, and technology.
Ambitions
The PyData chapters in London, Berlin, Amsterdam, and Paris are leading the ranking in Europe by their number of members (4k to 11k) and events they have organized in 2022 but others such as Copenhagen and Madrid are performing well too. We think Rome has everything it needs to be in this group and we have committed ourselves to have at least one meeting per month to help our city to move up.
| PyData Meetup | Members | Events (2022) | Attendees |
|---|---|---|---|
| London | 11756 | 5 | 832 |
| Berlin | 7139 | 8 | 817 |
| Amsterdam | 4659 | 6 | 496 |
| Paris | 4109 | 7 | 297 |
| Copenhagen | 2165 | 9 | 499 |
| Madrid | 1092 | 9 | 278 |
| Rome | 52 | 1 | 12 |
Open to contributions
If someone in Rome shares our same ideas and is willing to support our efforts by hosting our meetings or contributing to an event with a proposal, let’s get in contact on our page on Meetup or meet directly in one of our next events!