Last few weeks before closing the RGSoC 2016 fundraising campaign
Our thank_you board is almost complete! (Image: Ana Sofia Pinho)
As we are a few days away from announcing the selected teams, we can’t help wondering how this new batch of students will change the world around them. Meanwhile, July is almost around the corner. This means that our fundraising campaign for RGSoC 2016 will be closing in a few weeks, and all the money we receive after that will be used for RGSoC 2017. So if you still want to help us out getting another extra team this year, you can contribute here.
Having gone through all the 90+ applications we had this year, we are utterly impressed with all of their incredible stories and how they have been overcoming so many personal and professional obstacles in order to be able to learn programming. On top of this, many of them have created and/or helped out on their local communities doing things like organising events and helping children and women take their first steps in coding. So yeah, in the end, after reading these applications we just wanted to fund everyone because we realised that this scholarship would be just that “little” push they need to change their lives! :D
Money talks and donations are always a sensitive topic, but it is a topic that we need to come back to, as we can proudly say our program is entirely funded by people just like you and companies just like yours who want our tech community to be more inclusive and diverse. We really couldn’t be more grateful for that and the students feel the same way.
Our students understand how important this opportunity is for them and the impact they have on other people’s lives. Pursuing a career as a developer will inspire other women to follow their steps or at least give them permission to dream about it; unfortunately, many women don’t even consider a career in tech because they never think it could be a viable possibility for them. When they see individuals they can relate to, people from all sorts of places, social backgrounds and ethnicities, their perception changes and beautiful things happen.
Some of our students (left to right): Carla and Anja (Team Inchworms); Resla and Esther (Team Techylite); Maren and Julia (Team Delta Quadrant)
Every time you or your company donate, we can proudly say you are helping people like Carla and Anja, two students from Berlin who have participated in the first edition and since then, have started working as developers for Travis CI. Anja even co-founded an Open Source project with another group of amazing women. The name of that project is Speakerinnen and it’s a platform where women speakers from all over the world can create their profiles, making it easier for conference organisers to have more diverse panels and lineups. But their story doesn’t end here!
In 2015 Speakerinnen was submitted as a project for RGSoC. Resla and Esther from Nairobi, Kenya, were the selected students to work on that project during the summer. And they didn’t stop there either: they are active members in their community and give talks at several events, like the 2nd Annual African Women in Tech Conference.
And then there are record-breaker teams, like Team Delta Quadrant, who spent the Summer of Code not only contributing with 1.850 lines of code to Diaspora, but also speaking at eight events and helping out in seven workshops as coaches. Way to go Maren and Julia!
So, as you can see, they really don’t take participating in RGSoC lightly! We actually could spend days telling all the amazing stories (over 100 stories!!!), but we need to stop somewhere — at least for this post! However, we don’t want to ruin the surprise, but there might be some news about this topic very soon… ;)
The question of each RGSoC is still the same: how many lives are we going to change this summer?
Mia is trying to help with the RGSoC board! from Rails Girls Summer of Code on Vimeo.
If you believe we can make tech more inclusive faster, help us fund as many teams as possible! Really, help us out here because Mia is not helping! So far we have managed to sponsor more than 11 teams (oops, should we have revealed this?), but we would love to have another extra team this year! Let’s #DiversifyTech!