Announcing part-time scholarships, project coaches and conference collaboration
One of the goals of RGSoC is to increase the number of diverse contributors in open source projects and make the open source communities more inclusive. To achieve this goal we have been providing paid, 3-month, full-time scholarships to teams of participants to work on open source projects.
Supporting a wide range of applicants
From our experience over the last 5 years, some great applicants are not able to work on the projects full-time because they are in primary caregiver roles, are unable to quit a part-time job on such short notice in order to participate, are students, or have other commitments. For many of these applicants, it’s also not always possible to take part in the program without remuneration. After talking about the goals of our program (creating role models and making the Open Source communities more diverse), we collectively realised that as an organisation, we want to be able to support as many different lifestyles and needs of our applicants as possible. For this reason, we are excited to announce that in 2018, RGSoC will have a limited number of part-time scholarship slots.
With this change we would also like to encourage project mentors/maintainers who may have limited availability during our program period. We’ve extended our project submission deadline to January 28, 2018.
FAQs
To help you get an idea of how this will affect the rest of the program, we’ve collected answers to potential questions here:
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Will you continue to provide full-time scholarships?
Yes, we will have both full-time and part-time scholarship slots in RGSoC 2018.
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Will there be volunteering teams as well?
No, there won’t be any volunteering teams in RGSoC 2018.
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How many part-time scholarship slots will be available?
As this is our first time doing part-time sponsored teams, we want to limit the number of part-time scholarship slots. We plan to offer up to 5 slots this year. As this is something we’re trying for the first time, it will also depend on the type of applications we receive. Let’s see where this takes us for next year!
Other changes
Along with introducing part-time scholarships, we also want to announce that in this edition, project mentors will be able to add project coaches from their open source communities who can help participants with their project work; this can be done directly in their project submission. We’ve also decided to limit the maximum amount of coaches applicants can add to their application to 4.
(If you’re curious about what it means to become a Rails Girls Summer Of Code coach, read here)
Since the beginning of RGSoC, we have been collaborating with conferences to provide diversity tickets to our participants and give them the chance to attend various conferences. We are proud to keep this tradition going: we’ll continue to offer diversity tickets to our participants. On this note: If you’re a conference that supports diversity and are interested in providing diversity tickets to our participants, drop us a line at contact@rgsoc.org.