I have a habit of setting myself ambitious if slightly wacky goals: riding the London to Brighton bike ride, building an ASCII art photobooth, pursuing a career in dev rel etc and my latest is no exception. One of my aims for 2026 was to give back to the Python community and to that end I’m helping to organise meetups for PyData London, running socials at this year's PyData London conference (literally organising a piss up in a brewery) but I wanted to do more.

PyData, for those who are unaware, is the educational/community arm of NUMFocus, an organisation that supports many open-source scientific and data science Python projects like Scipy and Pandas. PyData has groups all over the world hosting regular meetups on a variety of topics.

As I covered in my blog post on the topic I’ve long been equally inspired and frustrated by the map of PyData Meetups: frustrated by its inaccuracies (and, as I’ll dig into, incompleteness), and inspired to visit some of those groups. After a few months of careful preparation, tentatively reaching out to other PyData organisers across the UK, and ultimately making my own map(s) of PyData groups I was ready to begin my journey.

The Tour de PyData

So here’s the plan: I’m going to try and speak at as many PyData Meetups across the UK and Ireland as possible this year. My plan for this little adventure is both to see some places I’ve never visited before (after two years in dev rel I’ve been to Charlotte airport more than I’ve been to Scotland) and to help promote something really cool: across the UK and Ireland are more PyData groups than anywhere else in the world.

I’ll be documenting my journey here and doing my best to showcase the depth and breadth of the wonderful PyData community.

What better time to call attention to our awesome community than in 2026 with community budgets tightening across the board and volunteers needed more than ever?

Above is yet another map I cooked up, this one listing all the PyData groups I’m scheduled to speak at and charting my progress. To make this challenge even close to possible I’m limiting the list of groups I plan to speak at to groups that are regularly hosting events, bringing the total number of groups down from 21 to 15. A huge thank you to all the PyData organisers who have invited me to speak at their groups already!

Another Problem With The Meetup Map

When I last spoke about this project I outlined four major issues I had with the official PyData group map on Meetup: it’s impossible to see how many meetups are in the same city, several groups are in the wrong location, it’s unclear if groups are still active, and every group is shown dozen of miles north of its actual location. After the talk Stelios Christodoulou raised an issue on my GitHub repo for the project that would expose a fifth, even more significant, problem. Stelios pointed out I was missing PyData Edinburgh from my map. Initially I kicked myself, wondering what I’d missed in my webscraping code that had caused me to miss a group as large as Edinburgh, before realising this was in fact a symptom of a wider problem: not every PyData group is included in the official map!

I was able to write a hacky script to run through every major city on Earth looking for PyData groups and turned up some interesting results:

7 PyData groups are missing from the official map: Tokyo, Abu Dhabi, Vilnius, Krakow, Poznan, Basel, Lausanne, and of course, Edinburgh. Why are these groups missing from the official map? It’s unclear but all of these groups have been inactive for a while, which might explain why. My search also turned up some interesting former PyData groups like Software Talks Lancaster, which still have “PyData” group URLs but seem to have moved onto new topics.

Grand Depart

I’m set to get started on my Tour de PyData later this week: starting off with the wonderful PyData Manchester, the UK’s second largest PyData group, and PyData Hull, the newest. Of course the obvious question is what do I plan on speaking about 15 times? The PyData mapping project! A little meta though it may be this project is a great fit for PyData events, as it features: data engineering, web scraping, geoencoding, and of course Python. Now, with my map of PyData groups more complete than ever, I’m excited to share it with the community.

I’m really looking forward to spending some time with the PyData community this year, and hopefully to help encourage some folks to support their local PyData group. Groups always need support in the form of speakers, organisers, venues, sponsors, and in general just people to show up and build the community.

Are you up for the challenge of speaking at every PyData Group in the UK and Ireland in a year? Feel free to fork my map and create your own if you like.

 I’ll be updating on the progress of my journey here, watch this space and see you at a local PyData soon!