Our thank_you board is almost complete! (Image: Ana Sofia Pinho)
As we are a few days away from announcing the selected teams, we can’t help wondering how this new batch of students will change the world around them. Meanwhile, July is almost around the corner. This means that our fundraising campaign for RGSoC 2016 will be closing in a few weeks, and all the money we receive after that will be used for RGSoC 2017. So if you still want to help us out getting another extra team this year, you can contribute here.
Having gone through all the 90+ applications we had this year, we are utterly impressed with all of their incredible stories and how they have been overcoming so many personal and professional obstacles in order to be able to learn programming. On top of this, many of them have created and/or helped out on their local communities doing things like organising events and helping children and women take their first steps in coding. So yeah, in the end, after reading these applications we just wanted to fund everyone because we realised that this scholarship would be just that “little” push they need to change their lives! :D
Money talks and donations are always a sensitive topic, but it is a topic that we need to come back to, as we can proudly say our program is entirely funded by people just like you and companies just like yours who want our tech community to be more inclusive and diverse. We really couldn’t be more grateful for that and the students feel the same way.
Our students understand how important this opportunity is for them and the impact they have on other people’s lives. Pursuing a career as a developer will inspire other women to follow their steps or at least give them permission to dream about it; unfortunately, many women don’t even consider a career in tech because they never think it could be a viable possibility for them. When they see individuals they can relate to, people from all sorts of places, social backgrounds and ethnicities, their perception changes and beautiful things happen.
Some of our students (left to right): Carla and Anja (Team Inchworms); Resla and Esther (Team Techylite); Maren and Julia (Team Delta Quadrant)
Every time you or your company donate, we can proudly say you are helping people like Carla and Anja, two students from Berlin who have participated in the first edition and since then, have started working as developers for Travis CI. Anja even co-founded an Open Source project with another group of amazing women. The name of that project is Speakerinnen and it’s a platform where women speakers from all over the world can create their profiles, making it easier for conference organisers to have more diverse panels and lineups. But their story doesn’t end here!
In 2015 Speakerinnen was submitted as a project for RGSoC. Resla and Esther from Nairobi, Kenya, were the selected students to work on that project during the summer. And they didn’t stop there either: they are active members in their community and give talks at several events, like the 2nd Annual African Women in Tech Conference.
And then there are record-breaker teams, like Team Delta Quadrant, who spent the Summer of Code not only contributing with 1.850 lines of code to Diaspora, but also speaking at eight events and helping out in seven workshops as coaches. Way to go Maren and Julia!
So, as you can see, they really don’t take participating in RGSoC lightly! We actually could spend days telling all the amazing stories (over 100 stories!!!), but we need to stop somewhere — at least for this post! However, we don’t want to ruin the surprise, but there might be some news about this topic very soon… ;)
The question of each RGSoC is still the same: how many lives are we going to change this summer?
If you believe we can make tech more inclusive faster, help us fund as many teams as possible! Really, help us out here because Mia is not helping! So far we have managed to sponsor more than 11 teams (oops, should we have revealed this?), but we would love to have another extra team this year! Let’s #DiversifyTech!
A few weeks ago, we (Laura, Sara, Anika) flew to Kansas City, where we were presented with a Ruby Hero Award for the work on Rails Girls Summer of Code on the stage of RailsConf. The introduction by Olivier Lacan that led up to the award announcements also included a slide with a multitude of faces: all of the Ruby Heroes from 2008 until today. It felt like an honour and a privilege to be now among them and to have Rails Girls Summer of Code recognised for its work in improving the Ruby community, but one thought crossed our minds right away: Is it appropriate for a couple of people to receive an award for a whole organisation?
RGSoC in a nutshell
We’re in our fourth year now, and as a community initiative, RGSoC has been organised by lots of people. All in all, every year we have over 100 volunteers working on the program: This includes organisers and developers, project mentors and coaches, who all work tirelessly in their free time to make our community a better place; some of them year after year. This initiative works because of the people — and only because of them.
What are the Ruby Heroes Awards?
“The Ruby Heroes Awards recognise the everyday heroes of the Ruby community” — this is the tagline you can find on the Ruby Heroes website. The award is an attempt to highlight people who have supported the community in one way or the other — in some case, unsung heroes who’d otherwise have their work go unnoticed.
Every member of the Ruby community is welcome to nominate their own Ruby Hero; the people with the highest amount of nominations end up on a shortlist, from which a jury of previous Ruby Heroes will pick the finalists. As with every award, this one comes with a great deal of criticism: Why is ABC on the list? Why isn’t XYZ on the list? Isn’t Ruby Heroes just a popularity contest?
While this blog post isn’t the right place to discuss the issues of how Ruby Heroes are nominated and selected, one thing we have to point out is that the jury selects people, not organisations. In our case, this means some of the individuals behind RGSoC were singled out to receive this award.
Everyone at RGSoC is a Ruby Hero
Standing on the stage of RailsConf, together with 6 other amazing people from the Ruby community — who have worked hard to make Ruby great, accessible, inviting, and inclusive — was incredible, and we are thankful to have had this opportunity. It made us proud of what we’ve achieved and of the lives we changed. It was a tangible proof for us that Rails Girls Summer of Code has an impact on the community. This happiness at the news was also tinged with a bit of sadness, because singling out individuals for their achievements within our organisation doesn’t reflect the spirit of RGSoC. Everyone who ever worked on Rails Girls Summer of Code is a Ruby Hero. If you’ve ever coached or supervised a team, organised, donated or sponsored this initiative: this award belongs to you.
Special thanks
As no award is complete without the special thanks section, we’d like to name a few people who have impacted RGSoC a great deal and without whom the program would not be in its fourth year.
Some of our amazing volunteers and Ruby Heroes! (Image: Ana Sofia Pinho)
Our organisers, past and present: Floor, Katrin, Carsten, Ramón, Ana, Maria, Sven, Lucas, Tam, Markus, Benedict, Lisa, Max, Emi, Vaishali, Andy, Robin, Natalie;
Duana and Erik for always believing in the program and supporting it from the first minute, and Erik for drawing attention to RGSoC for the RubyHeroes award;
Piotr and Tomasz for coaching every year and for this:
#donatebecause (Photo: Piotr and Tomasz)
Adam, Alex, Alexandra, Lieke, Vyki, Cathy, JZ, Kasia, Magda, Qian, Laura W., Charlotte, Verena, Claudi, Rebecca, Fanny, Arne, John, Uta, Jen, Anne, Terence, Susanne, Björn and so, so many more.
Thank you — this is for you!
Your Ruby Hero Award (Image: Anika Lindtner/Laura Gaetano)
RGSoC 2016 thank_you board (Photo: Ana Sofia Pinho)
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.
Assembling the RGSoC 2016 thank_you board square by square (Photo: Ana Sofia Pinho)
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.
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.
We finally recovered enough from the applications closing last Sunday to write about it. Just like last year, the last few hours before the 17:59 UTC deadline were intense and we sat in front of our screens until the very end to reply to all the support emails and questions coming in.
This year, we received 92 applications — which is almost double the amount from last year. This is truly amazing! In the very last 24 hours of the application period, the number of submitted applications quadrupled, with the last application submitted a mere 32 seconds before deadline closed. That’s what we call LIVING ON THE EDGE!
Because of how we’ve set up our selection process, we will not be able to share information about the location of the different applications just yet; this said, we’ve tried really hard to reach out to several new initiatives worldwide, including a lot of different programming language communities, in the hopes that we could have applicants from different backgrounds, locations, and languages. One thing’s for sure: the next few months are going to be legendary!
And in case you’re wondering just how many support requests we had to answer over the course of the application period, worry no more, we’ve counted them all! Altogether, we’ve received 62 emails, 8 Facebook messages, and 96 requests via our special “application-support” slack channel. On top of that, 78 message threads, mostly by teams looking for coaches, were posted to our Google group community list.
Stats are nice, you say, but: what’s next?
We’re slowly getting started with the selection process, which will consist of 3 different phases; after which, the selection committee will get together to make the final decision. By end of May, we’re hoping to send out the application letters. We know it feels like a long wait, but it will be absolutely worth it! In the meanwhile, why not spread the word about our campaign?
The more funds we have, the more teams we will be able to support this summer <3
If you’ve applied, I’d also like to take a minute to THANK YOU for being excited about this program, for having read the requirements and worked incredibly hard to fulfil those requirements, for having searched for and found a team to work with and for spreading the word. You’ve already made the first step — always remember that.
As you may have heard, applications to RGSoC 2016 opened some time ago. So far all we can say is that we are extremely happy with all the support and applications to our program — this just inspires us to make this year even better than the last one!
Knowing how hard it can be to find a teammate or a coach, we thought about sharing with you some tips and best practices on how to do this.
If you don’t know anyone in your own community, you have four ways to find a teammate or a coach: Getting in touch with local Rails Girls Chapters or other similar initiatives, sending an email to our Rails Girls Summer of Code Google Group, tweeting or going to our Teams App.
Getting in Touch with Local Programming Initiatives
One of the most effective ways to find a teammate or a coach in your city is to get in touch with a Rails Girls chapter, a study group or other initiatives like Black Girls Code or PHP Women.
Before reaching out to them, please take a look at the projects you want to apply to and the programming languages of the project. This way, you will narrow the initiatives by programming language and you can focus on finding someone who has some knowledge in that language.
Rails Girls Summer of Code Google Group
At the moment there are almost 400 people in this Google Group, so you never know: Someone there might know a person that could be interested to pair with you or be a coach for your team.
When you submit a new topic, please say what you are looking for and don’t forget to mention the city in the subject line! It will make it easier for people to find you.
Oh, and when you find a teammate or a coach, please mark your conversation as “resolved”, so that we know you’ve successfully found what you were looking for. Thank you!
Twitter
A good way to reach to the community is through twitter. You have 140 characters so use them carefully: always mention what you are looking for and identify the city where you are going to be working in the summer.
One of the most common mistakes we see is when people tweet asking for a teammate or a coach but they don’t mention the city. This makes it difficult for someone to find out about the place and because of that, they can’t help you by retweeting or getting in touch with you.
Another important thing is to mention us @RailsGirlsSoC on the tweet, so that we can get a notification and retweet you. In case you have some space, use the hashtags #rgsoc or #rgsoc2016 to make it easier for people to find your tweets.
Rails Girls Summer of Code Teams App
When you sign up to the RGSoC Teams App, on the top right corner you will find our a link to our Community. There are over 800 people there and even though it is not a seamless process (please bear with us, we are working on it!), here you can filter people by their roles or interests. This means you can look for students who want to find a team or a developer who wants to help out as a coach. Then, you can sort the info by country or city.
We hope this helps! Once again, it is never too much to remind about our Guides, like the Application Guide or Finding a Team Guide. If you need extra help reach out to us on facebook, twitter or send us an email at contact@rgsoc.org.
Our thank_you board is almost complete! (Image: Ana Sofia Pinho)
Some of our students (left to right): Carla and Anja (Team Inchworms); Resla and Esther (Team Techylite); Maren and Julia (Team Delta Quadrant)
