What to expect
Rails Girls Summer of Code is about supporting students on their way into the Open Source community. Below you’ll find all the information you will need during the summer. These suggestions and best practices garnered from former years will help you set up a good working environment and prepare you for a successful and fulfilling project.
Your Support Network
The most important element of the community is the support people give each other. RGSoC provides a comprehensive support network that will help you and your team in all project-related aspects.
Coaches and Mentor
The core team will be you and your teammate along with your coaches and the mentor of your Open Source project.
The coaches will work side-by-side with you during the program, explaining coding steps, teaching you troubleshooting skills and generally supporting you in your day-to-day programming work. During application time, coaches may assist you in finding a suitable project and project issues that fit your skill level.
The project mentor is like a product owner of the Open Source project you’ll work on. They have an insight into what issues need to be worked on and — at the same time — guide you in finding the right issues for you.
Communication should always take place as a team so everyone is clear on what is happening. You should set up schedules for coaching times and calls with your mentor at the very beginning of the program.
Supervisor
Each team will have a supervisor who keeps an eye on the general well-being of project progress and will assist you in the non-coding aspects of Rails Girls Summer of Code. As such, the supervisor will keep in constant contact with you and will be the go-to person whenever you have a question or problem your coaches or mentor can’t solve.
At the beginning of the program, agree on a day and time for the weekly calls with your supervisor.
Helpdesk
Sometimes your coaches won’t be available. What do you do when that one code snippet just won’t work? For these cases, we provide a Helpdesk chat where developers can help you with your issue.
As soon as we have set up the Helpdesk channel, we will add all the students.
All-Teams Communication
As Rails Girls Summer of Code is a community event, we also want to connect students so you can share your experiences. We’ll set up a structures for you and will share details closer to the beginning of RGSoC.
Trust Committee
We are committed to providing a friendly, safe and welcoming environment for all, regardless of gender, sexual orientation, ability, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and religion (or lack thereof).
We work by a Code of Conduct and will have a Trust Committee that consists of both people external to the project and those involved with organizing it. You can contact the person you feel most comfortable reaching out.
Orga Team
And if all else fails, we are always here to support you. Send us an email at contact@rgsoc.org and we’ll do our best to figure out the rest together.
Please use all the channels available and ask all the questions you have.
Project and Team Setup
Most of the aspects mentioned here need to be done at the beginning of the program. Follow these steps and you’ll have a great setup for all the activities.
RGSoC-Orga Slack Team
All RGSoC participants will be invited to our RGsoC-Orga Slack team channel. We set up several channels with different purposes so that you won’t miss any important information. You can also talk with each other via private message.
We recommend you encourage your supervisor to also set up a channel for the team members so that you can talk with each other on a daily (workday) basis.
You may use email or any other apps to communicate, but we strongly advise you not to lose track of the RGSoC-Orga Slack channels, where most of the communication (with the organizers and other students, coaches, mentors and supervisors) will be conducted.
Daily Log
The daily log is a short list of things you do each day — a summary in the form of bullet points is perfectly fine. To enter these, login into the Teams App and go to Status Updates on the top of the page.
This is great for self-reflection, will keep your team in the loop, plus it will get you familiar with good team practice and with the high level of transparency that is typical for Open Source development.
We recommend to either combine the daily log with a morning standup meeting or fill in the log at the end of the day.
Time Management
Set up a shared calendar for you and your teammate. Plan regular, dedicated times for checking on your schedules. Once a week is minimum. Besides recurring events such as communication to your mentor and supervisor, there will be social events (see below) that shouldn’t get lost.
Below is a sample schedule for one week. This example serves as a guide to give you an impression on how to organize your project.
Please make sure you have a Twitter account. It can be either your personal one or a team account which you and your teammate set up for the program. Besides, it’s a great place to get news and updates from the RGSoC world.
Don’t forget to follow RGSoC on Twitter and Facebook and use the #RGSoC hashtag.
Optional: Your Own Team Blog
If you are already an active Blogger, why not set up a dedicated RGSoC team blog? Or maybe you want to start for the program. We actively encourage this, but stress that a blog is not mandatory.
A blog can be a great place for a more general recap of your project work, reflections about your learning time and experiences, or reports on events you took part in.
Social Events
Rails Girls Summer of Code is a community-based program.
While we naturally want you to focus on your coding, we need your help to spread the word. Tell people about what you’re doing and what the program is all about. As a result, you’ll be giving back to the community right away. By raising awareness of the program, you’ll help us reach out to more supporters and contributors in future years, meaning more opportunities for more people.
Posts for the RGSoC Blog
We ask you as a team to write two posts for the RGSoC blog. The first will be an introduction at the beginning of July.
The second post is due at the end of September. This will be a summary of your project experience. You can create whatever type of post you like with text, images, video, etc.
Community Events
During Rails Girls Summer of Code you will work hard and learn new stuff every day. To make this an even more complete experience for you, we’d like you to join your local developer community and, if possible, even attend a great conference.
In the past we collaborated with conferences all over the world, offering you a chance to attend for free. While recognising the excellent opportunity for networking and development this offers, we’ve decided not to run this part of the program in 2020.
However, you may be able to source tickets to conferences via our friends at Diversity Tickets.