One, two, three, four, five and onto the sixth edition of RGSoC! It seems like it was yesterday when a cool bunch of people in Berlin decided to get together and launch the first edition of our summer of code.
Since then and in #5YearsOfRGSoC with your help we have:
Trained 185 participants — that’s 68 sponsored teams and 28 volunteering teams
Reached people from 55 locations out of 29 countries
Contributed to 67 Open Source Projects
Raised over 500.000 USD with the help of 115 sponsors and hundreds of individual donors
Participated in 63 conferences
Received a Ruby Hero Award
We couldn’t be happier about what we have accomplished together and we’re extremely grateful to everyone who has been part of our collective journey — yes, you too!
The best part of RGSoC… Is you!
RGSoC moments that we are thankful for (gif by Ana Sofia Pinho)
We’re happiest when a former participant sends us an email saying they got their dream job as a software developer. Or when one of our participants creates their own Open Source project. Or when someone decided to face their imposter syndrome and tried programming for the first time. Or when we inspire people to be Diversity and Inclusion advocates. Or when we have the incredible opportunity to meet in person the mentor with whom we’ve been talking over video calls during the summer.
These are the things, big and tiny, that make everything magical and fulfilling. The things that make us feel even more #ThankfulForRGSoC.
When we started RGSoC all those years ago, all we wanted to do was to give something to the OSS and tech communities, and still we ended up receiving way more. We know you can relate to this, right? :)
Let’s make RGSoC 2018 happen!
Sponsor RGSoC 2018's Teams ans share with us why you are #ThankfulForRGSoC (gif by Ana Sofia Pinho)
We’re here to stay and to keep creating real change, by welcoming and training women and non-binary individuals to code and advocate for a diverse and inclusive Open Source community.
Please, join us once again and let’s keep diversifying tech together!
RGSoC 2018 Applications are open! (illustration by Rebecca Conrad and gif by Ana Sofia Pinho)
Yes, RGSoC applications for 2018 are officially open! If you want to jumpstart your career as a software developer, or transition to a different language or framework, RGSoC is for you. From July 1st to September 30th, you’ll be working on an Open Source Project with the help of the project maintainer (referred to as mentor), coaches and supervisors. During this time and in order to help you focus on coding and learning, you’ll receive a full-time scholarship.
What follows is an overview of what you need to apply, but make sure you also read our guides carefully, as more detailed information can be found there!
Additional support for your application
In order to make this process easier for you, during the month of February we’ll be publishing videos and organizing twitter chats to explain a bit more about the application process and reply to your frequently asked questions.
We will be sharing all this information on social media, so we advise you to follow us on Twitter and Facebook!
Who can apply?
We welcome all people with non-binary gender identities or who identify as women (transgender or cisgender).
RGSoC participants need to be available to work full-time for 3 months (from July 1st to September 30th). Additionally, this year we’ve introduced a few slots for part-time teams.
It’s really important for us that the participants have been learning to code continuously for one year and are involved in the community (through meetups, workshops or conferences).
Participants should also be proficient in English so that they can be better accompanied by everyone in the team.
Find a teammate
In order for you to apply, you need to do so with another person — as a team. Your teammate should be living in the same location or area so that you can meet up every day to work. Please make sure that the person you are working with is a person you get along with, because you’ll be working together on a daily basis during the program.
Want to find a teammate, but don’t know where to start? Check this “Finding your team” guide.
Find coaches
Coaches are software developers that will work with you on a regular basis — 4 to 8 hours a week. Finding coaches, though sometimes difficult, is one of the most important tasks you’ll have in preparation for your application, as they’ll be your main support and will guide you throughout the program. You need to have a minimum of two and a maximum of four coaches.
Coaches can be remote, however we strongly advise that you try to find local coaches before looking for remote coaches.
Tips on how to find coaches are in this guide; if you want to send information to a potential coach, you can direct them to our guide for coaches.
Find a coaching company / workspace
We recommend you find a good place to work with your team, and coaching companies can be a great asset for your RGSoC journey. In case you’re trying to reach out to a specific company, we have gathered the necessary information on — yes, you guessed it — our coaching company guide.
If you’re not able to find a coaching company, coworking spaces and universities can be a good option too.
Choose a project
Now that you’ve gathered your team, it’s time to pick a primary and a secondary project. The secondary project will count as backup in case your primary project is not available or chosen by another selected team.
Start by taking a look at our list of Open Source projects in our RGSoC teams app. Please talk with your coaches about which projects to choose, and consider the level of difficulty of the tasks you’ll be working on, how familiar you are with the project, and the knowledge you and your coaches have of the languages and frameworks used.
Apply
It’s time to apply! All the applications are processed through RGSoC’s Teams App and you need to login using GitHub. You can find more detailed information about filling out the form in our Application Guide.
We advise you to start filling the application form early on — it can be saved as a draft, so you can always come back to it later. Remember that the application process closes on February 28th at 17:00 UTC, so all applications received after that time won’t be considered.
We wish you the best of luck with your application!
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:
Will you continue to provide full-time scholarships?
Yes, we will have both full-time and part-time scholarship slots in RGSoC 2018.
Will there be volunteering teams as well?
No, there won’t be any volunteering teams in RGSoC 2018.
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!
Part time paid scholarships (gif by Ana Sofia Pinho)
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.
According to their website, dotconferences started with a simple idea, “What if we organized a developer conference with the format and the quality standards of TED?”
And indeed, they did ! Attending dotjs and dotcss conference and also giving a lightning talk there was a very enriching experience for me. Anagha, unfortunately, couldn’t attend due to some personal issues.
When I left India, I did not expect to be giving a presentation and the overflow lightning talks was a pleasant opportunity. It was my first talk ever and I hope I did a good job :)
dotCSS Conference
dotconferences (Image: Flickr account of dotconference)
I had with me a small notebook to jot down important points about the talks during the two days. It helped me to be more attentive and now I have a set of mini projects to work on.
The general attitude in the conference was very upbeat and friendly. The extremely wonderful organizers made it so easy for all of us to interact. There were many talks including one on Compilers in styling Web UI. The talk started with the basics like the main uses of compilers and went on to include more complex stuff. I enjoyed the talk by one of the speakers on how we can use CSS to make a search engine. He started by explaining the limitations of CSS and how they can be overcome to do way more than just styling. Definitely, something I’ll do when I get a chance! There was a talk titled Schrodinger’s Website which was basically on the Adobe portfolio and the challenges faced while implementing it. The title was interesting, the talk even more so.
The event included a section on lightning talks. My favourite was one where the speaker demonstrated the making of a “Christmas ball” using HTML, CSS and math.
Another talk that was particularly interesting was on Media queries- Level4. It started with describing the features of the previous levels followed by the future, media queries 4 and 5.
dotJS Conference
dotJS (Image: Amrita's phone)
dotJS was way bigger than dotCSS in the sense that there were more people and a lot more companies had their stalls in the venue. I spent some time going around to the companies stall and finding out about what they do. Lighthouse had also put up a stall and I had a fun time analyzing the performance of a small static website that I had put up around a year back. The analysis was on the basis of how progressive the app was, on how the app performed and its accessibility.
There were talks on State management in GraphQL, on Server Side Rendering and on module bundlers. There was even a talk on being evil with JS, which I really enjoyed :) During the talk, the speaker live coded three pop-ups chase each other across the screen!
My favourite by far was by Marcy Sutton, an accessibility advocate. Her talk was on Enabling Users in Client-Rendered Applications.She talked very passionately about how developers generally don’t consider differently abled users while designing an app. The talk was on diagnosing accessibility issues in an app and also elaborated on different tools.
Amrita's presentation (Image: Flickr account of dotconferences)
My presentation was a part of the overflow lightning talks. I started off by explaining about RGSoC, about how it works.I talked about the issues we, as a team, solved and the features implemented. The slot as only for about 4 minutes so I had to squeeze everything in. I am hoping that I could get my point across!
Amrita's presentation (Image: Amrita's phone)
I think the array of talks, the food, the venue and the awesome organizers made the conferences a success. A big thank you to all of the organizers who made me feel really welcome :) Thank You RGSoC and thank you dotConferences !
For the past five years, every (Northern Hemisphere) summer, RGSoC has been offering the opportunity for all women and non-binary people from all over the world to work on an Open Source project. This wouldn’t be possible without the help and love of our wonderful community.
Our 20 teams — the lives we touched on the 2017 edition of RGSoC (Image: Inês Coelho)
Our sponsors and donors
Our program is based on a crowdfunding and sponsorship campaign, whose money is used to finance our teams. This year we were able to financially support 16 out of our 20 participating teams of two!
We can’t thank enough all the companies that sponsored RGSoC: we wouldn’t be here without you! A special thank you goes to our amazing partners, Travis CI and GitHub, our platinum sponsor Nokia and our gold sponsors, Google Open Source and Malwarebytes.
We are also extremely grateful to the 161 individuals who donated to our campaign. You are the best!
And, of course, a huge thank you to all the conferences that welcomed our participants and donated tickets to our teams — you are awesome!
Our supporting elements
Participating teams are supported throughout the summer by dedicated volunteers.
There are no words to express our gratitude towards them all: the mentors who guided the work of our teams, the coaches that offered their time and expertise to help our teams, the coaching companies who hosted our teams during the summer, the supervisors who made sure that everything was running smoothly, the trust committee who offered a safe haven to whoever needed it.
You are the people who made RGSoC a reality! Thank you.
Our organizers
Under the hood of RGSoC, there is a melting pot of people from different countries, cultures, backgrounds, beliefs and religions, united with the same purpose: to diversify tech! All year round, these volunteers are here preparing, planning, developing and working on the backend of RGSoC.
A huge shout-out to our 2017 team: Ana Sofia, Anika, Anna, Carsten, Inês, Laura, Lucas, Maria, Max, Ramon, Ulrike and Vaishali!
Your love and dedication are what makes RGSoC possible year after year.
Thank you all!
From the bottom of our hearts: thank you! ♡
(click on the image for a surprise!)
Shout-out to everyone that made RGSoC 2017 possible (Image: Inês Coelho)
