4 Ways to Find a Team for RGSoC 2016
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!
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 summer-of-code@railsgirls.com.
Good luck!