After a few months of very diligent work on our Teams App, we’ve made preparing your
application for Rails Girls Summer of Code a whole lot more straightforward. Here’s the low down on applying in 2015!
Check out if you’re eligible
This year, we have made the eligibility criteria for applicants a bit clearer.
As our focus is on providing opportunities for further learning post Rails Girls workshop, we do require that applicants have attended at least a Rails Girls or similar
community-driven workshop.
While no one is discouraged from applying on the basis of gender, preference will be given to applicants who identify or have been socialized as female. To see the full criteria
please take a look at our application guide.
If you’re not sure about any of the eligibility criteria, please contact us.
Another thing to keep in mind is that the program is full-time for three months,
for sponsored teams, so you may have to save any long holidays for post-program ;)
Establish Your Team
Find a Pair
One of the requirements of the Summer of Code is that you are a two-person team.
Establishing a team means not just finding someone else to lodge an application
with, but someone who you will be able to get along with over three months of
intense project work. Establishing a team that will be able to deal with and work
through moments of stress and conflict will be extremely important to the success
of your summer. For more about finding a pair, take a look at our guide
Find a Coach
Teams will also need to have at least one coach who is able to give them active support throughout the summer. While coaches can be approached a number of ways, we have some advice on finding coaches here, and a blog post on ‘Where to Start’.
If you want to provide potential coaches with more information on what you will
need from them over the summer, you can direct them to our guide for coaches.
Finding a coaching company
Finding a coaching company who can offer you a place to work from, and a team of
coaches on hand to support you is a terrific boost to your application. To start
approaching and asking companies for the help over the summer, share with them our
guides for coaching companies.
Select a project
Thanks to the invaluable feedback from last year’s teams, mentors, coaches and
supervisors, we have improved the way students can select a project for their
application.
This year, applicants will be required to select from projects on our approved
list, that can be found in our projects repository.
If you know of an amazing project you want to contribute to that is not yet on our
list, you will need to contact the maintainers to submit the project to us. Check
out our
guide for mentors and submitting projects.
Work on Your Application
We’ve added some fantastic functionality to our application system, which will be
extremely helpful as you complete your application.
You now have the ability to save your application as a draft. It may
not seem like much, but being able to save and go back to your application to add
coaches, coaching companies, and further clarity to your project goals may be the
difference between lodging an awesome or average application.
The deadline for submitting your application is Tuesday 14th April, 2015. So take your time to create the best application you can using our drafting feature, before submitting.
Project Mentors will be required to sign off on your application in the week after submissions close; 15th - 22nd April, 2015.
Assess your coding level
We know that trying to outline your coding level can be pretty subjective. Therefore,
this year’s application form contains ‘skill level
guidelines’ to help guide you in your self-assessment.
While there can still be grey areas in your learning that you will want to tell
us about in your application, these guidelines should provide more clarity
on what we expect your skills to be at each level, instead of just a number on a scale.
This post is just the basics and new stuff about the application process. Get
on over to our Students Section to check out the full
application guide, and
start getting your team and application together!
We love making things easy for our supporters - YOU -, which is why we’ve compiled a list to help you help us make the upcoming RGSoC great! Here are a few ideas to get you started.
Sponsoring
Making it all possible
Just like last year, we have several sponsoring packages for you to choose from: tiny to bombastic, we’ve got it all. Perks for sponsorships include having your swag in the care packages we send to all of our teams, your logo on our presentation slides and website, a mention in our Hall of Fame page, and mentions in our tweets, facebook posts and on the blog. Of course, being an early bird sponsor will qualify for some extra buzz! If you are interested in a sponsoring slot for the Rails Girls Summer of Code 2015, you can find all the detailed information here.
ALL the sponsors! ALL the partners! ALL the swag! (Photo: Wiktoria Dalach)
Supporters
Like sponsors, but different
Outside of the monthly stipend itself, we also try to enable learning for our accepted students during and after the Summer of Code. And what better way to learn than to be part of a study group, to read books on interesting new topics, or to join an online class? In the previous editions of the Rails Girls Summer of Code, we’ve been very lucky to find supporters in the form of conferences, online learning platforms, book publishers, and the like, who offered what they do best: conference tickets, vouchers for free classes, and great free books to keep the learning going. We know that education can come in the most diverse form, and we welcome any offer or support that we feel will help our teams get the best out of their learning experience. Willing to commit to leading a study group for a year? Got a special deal on educational material for our teams? We want it all! Contact us.
Coaching
Coaches are our hidden gems
If your company wants to support us in donating time, this is your way to go! We are eternally grateful to all coaches who are dedicated to the teams during the summer. They are one of the core features a team needs in order to apply and have a successful experience.
Allowing your devs dedicated time to coach a team will support a great cause, let you stay in touch with the Open Source community and help advertise that you are working together with us towards getting more Women in to Software Development. A good example for this are Soundcloud, Absolventa, 6Wunderkinder or Travis CI, who have supported teams as companies and stood by them with all the coach power they could give.
Your devs can work as local or remote coaches, or help out in our helpdesk-channel. We’ll write a blog post about your engagement and give you opportunities to reach out to our students with Job/Internship opportunities.
all the other ways to help
In the past, we have also had people on our core team being supported by their companies not only to coach, but also to work on Rails Girls Summer of Code issues and tasks, such as main coordination, design work and development work on our website or teams app, supervising teams, and so on. This is a great way to support us, because there is always a lot to do for the RGSoC (and a lot of the work can be done remotely).
We need all the support we can get! (Photo: Anika Lindtner)
Hopefully, we have given you a couple of ideas to support us this summer. Contact us if you have more questions.
The Rails Girls Summer of Code crowdfunding campaign
is officially open! And you
thought that christmas only came ONCE a year! ;) We’re opening up our campaign
page to the wider public today, so spread the word and
donate!
No amount is too little!
Over the last two years we’ve learned quite a lot about how to run a global fellowship
program. However, one thing has always been consistent; the generous support (both financial and otherwise) of the programming and technology community.
Whether you have a little, or a whole lot to give, every cent raised makes a huge difference to
creating a bigger and more expansive program in 2015.
Over the last few months we’ve been talking to some of our most ardent supporters
to get on board with some early sponsorship. Many thanks to our earlybird sponsors,
Travis CI, GitHub, SoundCloud, Google Open Source, Basecamp, Turing School of Software and Design, Keen IO,
Site5, and TeaLeaf Academy for supporting us with their sponsorship before we even opened
our crowd funding campaign!
To top it off, a number are even coming back for
their second or third year of sponsorship! Not only do these early bird sponsors ensure that
our crowd funding can really start with a bang, but also to remind us
of the consistent help we’ve had from the tech community in making Rails Girls Summer of
Code a reality.
Want to help out in other ways?
If you are the maintainer of an open source project, please consider submitting it
to our list!
A developer looking for a way to use your coding powers for good? Find out more
about coaching a team?
Is this the superb owl everyone keeps talking about? (Photo: funelf)
It’s only February, but the whole team is already hard at work to make the upcoming Summer of Code the best one yet! In order to do this we need you. Yes, you, awesome-project-maintainer! Last year we had a huge variety of projects our students got to work on such as Bundler, Spree, Species+, and Rubinius; for each project, one or more maintainers were “project mentors”: the go-to people if students had questions that were specifically about the project. We want to make this happen in 2015, too. For this we want you and your project on board!
We’ve made it super-duper easy for you and put together a small and handy guide to submitting your project for the Summer of Code. Here it is! It will hopefully answer most of your questions; and if it doesn’t and you are still confused about something, don’t hesitate to get in touch.
It’s real. We can’t believe it, it’s been such a wonderful journey. These were the last days of the Summer of Code!
The program came to an official end as of the 30th of September, so we took a few days to think about the things we enjoyed most about this year’s proceedings. We asked the people behind RGSoC to take some selfies to share their favorite moment/lesson/thing of their summer or a message for you.
If not me, then who
As awesome as it sounds, RGSoC is not just willed into existence by the magical powers that be. It’s achieved through the hard work and dedication of organisers, supervisors, coaches, mentors and helpdeskers. It’s achieved through the incredible financial support of sponsors and the wider community and last, but not least, the Travis Foundation.
So, scratch that. There was a whole lot of magic happening. Everyone involved spread their unique mix of fairy dust on whatever they took on, from blog posts, to tweeting, to finding sponsors, and gathering conference tickets, to answering queries on the helpdesk in the middle of the night.
It’s this spirit of working together as a community that reminds us why we make RGSoC happen. All of you are the magical spark who made this fairy tale come true again.
Emma Watson made a very eloquent and timely observation in her speech for the launch of the ally-campaign, #HeforShe, a few weeks ago; “If not me, then who? If not now, then when?”
To everyone who said “It’s going to be me.” - to supporting RGSoC, to supporting more women and more diversity in Open Source - you deserve no less than a standing ovation. You are our heroes and heroines, and have made it clear the sort of place you want the Open Source community to be.
32 new beginnings
With the help of the wonderful community we raised $95 k, and with that money we were able to provide sponsorship to 10 teams - that’s 20 participants. We also had 6 amazing volunteer teams this year, wich brings us to 32 students in total. 32 stories to tell, 32 new beginnings.
The teams worked on projects such as Rubinius, Spree, Bundler, Diaspora*, BrowserSpree CMS, Speakerinnen, Species+, created a tool for documentation testing or started a migraine tracker - to only name a few. Meet the teams here: https://teams.railsgirlssummerofcode.org/teams.
Something to remember the summer
To fight any post-summer-of-code-blues, we began to creating a mixtape dedicated to this year’s RGSoC, and we want your song to be on it! Which song made your summer? Just tweet to us with the link to the song on SoundCloud and we will make it a part of the mixtape.
