WWCode London: how to grow the community

5 min readAug 29, 2022

My name is Irina Kamalova. I’m a Director of Women Who Code London and a Backend Software Engineer at Revolut.

In the last 2-years, I volunteered for Women Who Code London and grew up from volunteer to lead and, in the end, to a Director of community. I organised a team to deliver outstanding projects and show impressive results.

How it started.

The official date I gave my first tech talk in WWCode London is 2021/01/19.

When I joined WWCode London as a volunteer, there were a small number of events to connect women or technical talks, like one event per month. Volunteers put a goal to refresh the community with more activities. I joined with my first tech talk and attracted 76 attendees. I realised a good demand for more speakers, lectures and study materials and started to help the community. All events were happening online during the pandemic.

Actions.

We launched the first Mentorship Programme and received 74 applications for mentees! We organised a track, “Algorithms & Data Structures”, helping learn the basics of CS.

We started a Book Club on career progression and leadership skills.

While volunteering as a leader, I invited several speakers to give tech talks. We analysed the results of Mentorship Programme 1.0 and created better forms to apply for mentors and mentees. I wrote scripts in python to automate sending emails. Then, I found a new volunteer to handle automation and gave ownership to her while I was focusing on inviting speakers, advertising, channels, and boosting the community in general.

When I became a Director, we had already started the Machine Learning track, I added the Object Oriented Programming track, and the number of events grew to 5 per month.

Still, it was hard to attract new volunteers for online events, so I decided to organise a Volunteering Summit as a separate event to call volunteers.

It was a successful event!

New volunteers started contributing to the WWCode Global blog as an outcome of our events, and our community became more recognised.

We launched the 3rd Mentorship Programme and received more than 100 applications from mentees!

I created a space in Notion to keep track of projects with descriptions and to-do lists. I increased the 1–1 syncs with leads and introduced catch-up for our leaders and evangelists.

I created an official agreement for leads and evangelists, and it allows me to give them access to digital assets such as MeetUp.com, LinkedIn, and other social networks.

As a cherry on top, I found a designer who helps us with posters and advertising!

Results.

As a result, we significantly improved activities engagement in our Slack. Now, we have a vibrant space where I see messages every day.

We achieved the goal of refreshing the community!

During my first Mentorship Programme, I was a mentor as well as an organiser, and I helped my mentee to find a new job.

I see we have a huge impact, and all we’re doing is helping women get better jobs.

Several new channels took place:

Rocket launch of Mentorship Programme 3.0! We hit the number of 100+ mentees!
We found almost twice as many mentors with great expertise!
#wwcode_blog there, our volunteers started to create articles for the WWCode global blog.
We’ve launched the very successful OOP programming track (link to channel)
We made several events on ML (link to channel)
ML volunteers started every-Monday news and launched their newsletter!
As leaders became more automotive, they started collaborating with our designer without my involvement, which allowed me to focus on the more general activities!
We’ve launched a GitHub page to contribute to our community’s open-source pages!
We prepared the first workshop for mock interviews helping women to pass a real interview and get a great job!

I see we have a huge impact, and all we’re doing is helping women get better jobs.

One more little but significant achievement for my leader: she has been recognised by Tech Nation and received an endorsement for a Global Talent Visa!

Since joining, the Slack community has grown from 400+ members to 900+.

MeetUp community from 6000+ to 8000+, LinkedIn 300+ to 800+ members!

I promoted 4 active volunteers and 3 evangelists!

Forward plan.

I see our Mentorship Programme as a core project as it helps women successfully find a job in the industry! Our forward plan is to continue improving the quality of our Programme and attract more women in the process. One of the targets is to scale our London network to launch it globally across all WWCode networks!

I have 3 companies who are waiting for WWCode to allow in-person events! When a company like Revolut hosts an event with tech talks from Women in IT, it deserves significant attention!

I see that in one year, we will be able to grow the number of leaders to 15 and promote one more director. I also have in the target list connections to schools and universities, as I believe the culture of women as successful programmers and engineers should be familiar to young people from the earliest age.

And I have one more ambitious goal: to launch the WWCode London conference one day.

Looking forward to continuing to grow the community!