Coaching Company Guide

Summer of Code teams need a place to work - and having the exposure to a productive work environment and ready access to coaches is extremely valuable. Companies that provide this work environment to our teams are called Coaching Companies.

What does a Coaching Company do?

  • A coaching company provides a home for a team for three months including:
    • a dedicated space in an office from July - September
    • available coaches for questions and support
    • an inclusive culture and safe space
Coaching Company SoundCloud (Image: Team RapidFTR)

You share your office space two new and motivated developers - as well as introduce them to your working culture and support them throughout their journey. The teams are required to have at least two dedicated local coaches.

Furthermore it is totally up to you, how else you would like to involve the team. Maybe they will have daily stand-ups with the coaches, you can invite them to lunch and meetups or workshops. The teams will additionally have access to our #helpdesk Slack channel where they can get help from a team of remote coaches who are available for all teams of RGSoC.

Any company with a respectful and inclusive culture, desk space, good internet, and a team of developers can make a good Coaching Company. Some selected companies who have been Coaching Companies in the past years are: Absolventa, Travis CI, SoundCloud, NIRD, GitHub, 6Wunderkinder.

Why should we become a Coaching Company?

Coaching Company NIRD (Image: Team Exercistas)

There are tons of good reasons to be a coaching company; giving back to the developer community, a more diverse Open Source contributor network, and more. However, one of the best parts of being a Coaching Company is the huge amount of organic publicity your company receives.

Coaching Companies get a lot of love from the community. Tweets, blog posts, personal recommendations from participants, mentions at conferences, events and many more.

Being a Coaching Company has a very direct effect on the lives and projects of participants, and makes your company an extremely attractive one to potential hires, conference organisers, tech bloggers, journalists and media outlets.

Here are some selected blog posts from 2013 to help illustrate what it means to support a team:

Where are Coaching Companies located?

Planet Earth.

Rails Girls Summer of Code is an international initiative, and our participants work on their projects all over the world.

We highly encourage companies from all over the world to get involved. We are aiming at having participants from a greater variety of countries in 2016. There is probably a team that could do with your support — wherever you are located.

Locations of Teams in 2015

How to become a Coaching Company

To become a coaching company:

1) Register yourself and your coaches on our Teams App.

Students who are looking for a Coaching Company can find you there.

2) Look for a team in your city.

This might require reaching out to your local Rails Girls chapter (or Pyladies, WomenWhoCode, BlackGirlsCode, PHPwomen, etc.) and to development communities such as your local user groups to let them know that you’re willing to host a team.

3) Send an email to our community mailing list.

Include the info that you are offering your space and coaches. You can spread the word by mentioning us on Twitter (@RailsGirlsSoC); we’ll retweet and help you connect to students.

4) Write a blog post.

Get the word out about you wanting to become a coaching company: talk about your dev team, the work environment, and your motivations for wanting to host a RGSoC team. We’re happy to share your post on our social networks, and help you find a team for 2016!

An example on how to become a Coaching Company

Absolventa, a Berlin-based company which hosted a team during RGSoC 2013, wants to participate this year again. Here are the steps they took to promote themselves to the students.

They tweeted about their intentions, including information about where they are located and which languages they can coach in:

They also wrote a more detailed blog post including the following details:

  • What Rails Girls Summer of Code is

  • Why their company wants to host a team

  • What they can offer to students (a desk, a team of coaches, an inclusive, safe space to work in)

  • How applicants can contact them

Read their full blog post: Let’s work together during RGSoC 2016

What if our team is not chosen?

The teams have to apply for Rails Girls Summer of Code and usually we can only fund a small number of teams, but get a lot more applications.

If your team is not chosen (neither as a sponsored nor a volunteer team), you are still free to do your own summer of code together with two very passionate women working on a chosen OSS project. We encourage you to take the team on as interns or offer similar positions during the summer.

We have more questions!

If we didn’t cover your question here, then drop us a line! We’d be happy to talk about what you have to offer as a coaching company.