Everything you ever wanted to know about volunteer teams
This year, RGSoC has accepted six volunteer teams in addition to ten sponsored teams. It’s an exciting development, and you may be wondering, what is a volunteer team, and how do I become one?
Volunteer teams, like sponsored teams were hand picked by the selection committee from the pool of applicants. The chosen teams showed enthusiasm and demonstrated that they have a good level of support. We really wanted these teams in the program, but sadly, we couldn’t sponsor them. Instead of leaving them out completely, we took a leap of faith, and asked if they wanted to do it anyway. Lucky for us, six of them said yes!
So what is a volunteer team?
A volunteer team is the same as a sponsored team, with two main differences. First, as the name implies, they do not receive monetary support from RGSoC, so they need to be financially stable enough to support themselves over the summer. Second, because of the financial constraints, volunteer teams are only asked to work part time on their open source project.
Aside from those two points, volunteer teams will participate in the summer of code and have the same experience as sponsored teams. They will:
get access to the same support structure and benefits such as conference tickets
document their daily work on their team log and send in pictures/tweets
give a lightning talk at a conference
be assigned a supervisor
connect to other students via the RGSoC chat
How do I become a volunteer team?
This year’s applications are closed and teams have been selected, ready to kick off on 1st of July. If you want to be considered as a volunteer team next year, send in an application when applications open and show us what you’re made of!
The team behind the teams
Volunteer teams also have a great support structure behind them. Susanne Dewein, Tam Eastley, and Carsten Zimmermann will all be volunteer team supervisors. You may recognize those names from last year: Susanne and Tam were students with the volunteer team Highway to Rails, and Carsten was their coach. They bring with them this summer a wealth of first hand information about what it’s like to successfully complete a voluntary summer of coding ruby on rails.
It’s time to celebrate! After a great spurt in the campaign and with the
incredible support of our students we’re happy to announce: We are able to fund
10 sponsored teams, and there will be 6 volunteering teams, 32 students in
total \o/.
You have met the
first seven teams
a while back. Please say hi to the remaining 3 sponsored teams, and the 6
volunteering teams of this year’s Rails Girls Summer of Code. We’re stoked to
see that much enthusiasm!
Sponsored Teams
Akanksha Agrawal and Sana Khan from Pune, India will work on a memory
visualization tool for Rubinius, which will help to get insights to memroy
usage and find memory leaks. They will be supported by their coaches
Prathamesh Sonpatki,
Vipul A M, and
Nishant Modak from Pune,
as well as their mentor Dirkjan Bussink
based in Netherlands, and long time core contributor to Rubinius.
Kai Baraka and Valerie Sparks from Atlanta, USA will work on various
improvements to Bundler at the AT&T Foundry and Hypepotamus offices, supported
by their team of coaches Dion Salvage, Shawn Johnson. Roger Mahler and Andre
Arko will be their mentors. See here for the detailed
project proposal
Britney Wright and Jamela Black from Washington D.C., USA will work on
BrowserCMS and a BrowserCMS integration with
Spree. They will be supported by their coaches
Patrick Peak and
Tatiana Bodnya at the BrowserMedia offices,
also connecting them to the Spree team which both are located in Washington, D.C.
Volunteering Teams
Rocio Paez and Evette Kotze, from Lima, Peru will work on a personal migraine
research and diary tool which will help to collect statistics and insights
about the process of migraines. They will be supported by their coaches
Gustavo Beathyate from Lima, and
Francesco Rodriguez from Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Abril Vela and Colleen Masterson from Chicago will work on an LTI (Learning
tool) that integrates with online learning management systems based on
standards. The goal is to build a tool to help children practice reading
skills, with a focus on helping children with dyslexia become more proficient
at reading.
Liz Abinante from
Girl Develop It Chicago
will be their main coach, and
Paul Hinze will provide additional support.
Katharina Zwick and Brigitte Markmann from Berlin, Germany, will be working on a
RapitFTR
Rails backend for an upcoming rollout to Democratic
Republic of the Congo and Syria in November.
Klaus Fleerkötter
from ThoughtWorks and
Erik Michaels-Ober
from Soundcloud will be their main coaches.
They will be hosted at the SoundCloud office with access to a pool of
additional support coaches such as
Duana Stanley (who coached a
successful team last year)
and others.
Sri Prasanna
will act as their mentor, supported by Stuart Campo coordinating the project on
UNICEF’s side.
Akshata Mohan and Aayish Shetty from Bangalore, India will be working on
our Rails Girls Summer of Code
Teams application,
putting it into an even better shape for students to connect, form teams
and apply for next year’s Summer of Code.
Monika Mahanthappa,
Pavan Sudarshan as well as
Thomas Andrew Elam will be their coaches,
and our very own
Sebastian Gräßl
will act as their mentor.
We’d like to thank everyone who send in an application, the quality of
submissions was exceptionally high this year. The selection team had a tough 3
days deciding which teams will spend their summer coding on a number of
outstanding Open Source projects. Without further ado, we’d like you to meet
the teams:
Utah Kate Newman and Lyz Ellis from Seattle, USA, will code on
Diaspora*, at their Coaching Company
NIRD.
Renee Hendricksen (RailsBridge)
will be their primary coach, and Rails Girls veteran
Kerri Miller
will help out. Fun fact:
Lisa Passing and
Carolina,
took part as a volunteering team in Rails Girls Summer of Code 2013, and will
now be their mentors. Find the project proposal
here.
Paola Garcia and Melissa Torregrosa from Barranquilla, Colombia will be
improving accessibility in Rails by adding
ARIA support.
Laura Garcia Casadiego,
Rails Girls Summer of Code 2013 alumni and a Computer Science student, and
Roberto Miranda Altamar,
lead Ruby on Rails developer and coach of the “New Rosies”
team last year, just like
Guillermo Iguaran
from the Rails Core team, will assist them.
Cathy Nangini and Qian Zhou from Helsinki, Finland will work on a port of
Liquid Feedback to Grape/Ember. Check out the proposal
here.
They will be supported by their coaches
Miika Pihjala and
Mukesh Thakur
at their Coaching Company, FlowDock.
Oliver Barnes
from São Paulo will act as their mentor.
Marija Radevska and Magdalena Gulicoska from Skopje, Macedonia will be
working on
SeeMeSpeak,
an application that helps you learn sign language, supported by the entire
Macedonian Ruby User Group (no kidding!).
Dalibor Nasevic will act as both their
lead coach and mentor. Check out the project propsal
here.
We’re looking forward to what will be another fantastic summer no doubt!
Please support us!
We aim to support 3 more teams, and we have a huge number of additional,
amazing applications to pick from.
Please help us reach this goal and come on board as a
sponsor,
open a giv.ie campaign,
and ask everyone you know to
donate
to Rails Girls Summer of Code!
Also please check out our sponsors
who help make this happen.
After 60 hours of rating over 100 applications for Rails Girls Summer of Code,
we now are proud to say: we’ve made the first step. We have selected the first
7 teams and will notify them throughout the day via email.
Because this is the second edition of RGSoC and our future students had so much more time to prepare, this year’s average of applications was even richer, more complex and an even higher
standard than last year. So many amazing applications but also, so hard to pick only very few of them.
We still have 3 spots for teams left, which could be accepted, provided that we
are still able to fund the budget.
We are currently at USD 74 K, that means we need only USD 16 K to fund
those last seats. Please help us take on 3 more wonderful teams, and make
their dream of a Summer of Code come true.
Let’s help fund them and start
another summer with 10 awesome teams!
We have raised an amazing amount so far but we have so many great applications and every donation counts! We wanted a way to help raise money to get the last 3 teams (or more!) sponsored, so we created http://givie.io.
It’s a pretty simple concept: you create a campaign, decide on a fun pledge you would be willing to do
if you get enough backers, and BAM! Start spreading the word amongst your friends, family colleagues, anyone really and let them know why this is important. Givie redirects your supporters to the RailsGirls Summer of Code site, and after they have donated, the number of backers on your campaign gets updated.
The idea for Givie came from Duana’s personal campaign last year when she promised to go one month without
coffee if she could get 20 people to donate to RailsGirls Summer of Code. For someone whose twitter name
is @starkcoffee, this was something people were curious to see.
We created Givie so that we we can scale this idea!
Duana sent this tweet out a few weeks ago, and fellow Australians-in-Berlin Marc and Sara answered the call:
Please check it out, create campaigns, and help us fund more women for Summer of Code 2014!
