Thank you for letting us #DiversifyTech
This is our fourth year organising RGSoC and each year that goes by we feel extremely thankful for the support of the community: Each student who applies, each coach who gives us their time and knowledge to train our teams, each organizer helping to make the program a reality, each of you who retweets us or contributes to our scholarships with donations, each company that supports us and each project maintainer who submits their project to RGSoC. This program was created by each and everyone of you, and it’s going strong because of the community that backs us every summer.
Our community is the foundation of RGSoC and because of that, for the summer of 2016 we wanted to do something other than thank you: we wanted to show you the impact your contributions have to our program, and consequently to all the people who, in some way or another, have been part of RGSoC.
We built a board where we recreated the programming community, with its diversity percentages: roughly 80% men (in blue) and 20% women* (in red and yellow). The grey squares represent all the people outside the tech community who have no idea they have coding superpowers. Or they do, but they don’t have the means to pursue a career in tech (yet!).
We believe that a community changes when its individuals become agents of that change. And this is now when the fun begins! Bit by bit, or shall we say, square by square, the tech community transformed and started to be more diverse. This is where you enter: you are the person who makes all of this possible! You are the foundation of the program and of that change!
We have put the name of each person and company who contributed to RGSoC on a square and gave it a coordinate on the board. This is your place in our hearts! <3 Individual donors will have a square on the board and companies, depending on the type of sponsorship package, will get a specific number of squares. Each time someone donates, a grey square is converted into a colorful one. We took a picture of each time we put a square on the board and made a stop motion video for you.
Thank you! \o/ Let's #diversifytech! from Rails Girls Summer of Code on Vimeo.
Together we are creating an environment where women* feel more welcome. We are training more developers and helping them jumpstart their career. We are making Open Source a better place for everyone. We are creating the role models of the future. We are redefining the Tech community. We are helping to make our communities more inclusive and empower individuals to contribute to Open Source with their amazing potential. We are making Tech more diverse!
You make RGSoC possible and we don’t take this for granted! Thank you!
With your support we have already put 445 squares in our board and funded 11 teams. This is amazing! Let’s complete this board and fund even more teams! Let’s #DiversifyTech!
* With “women”, we mean all people with non-binary gender identities or who identify as women.