Today we’re officially opening the applications for Rails Girls Summer of Code 2016! Our brilliant Rebecca Conrad crafted this step-by-step illustration about how to apply in 5 steps.
First things first: Who can apply?
Our aim is to create opportunities for new coders on further learning. For this reason, we are looking for applicants who attended at least one Rails Girls or a comparable community-built workshop like Black Girls Code, PyLadies or similar initiatives — and continued learning after that.
While no one is discouraged from applying on the basis of gender, preference will be given to female and genderfluid applicants.
One of the most important things: you have to be able to spend 3 months (July to September 2016) working full-time on your project, so you’re not able to go on holiday during this period.
In short: if you identify as female, participated in a coding workshop, kept learning, and don’t have any (other) plans from July to September 2016, you’re very welcome to apply!
Second: Find a Pair
One of the requirements of the Summer of Code is that you are a two-person team, living in the same city and being able to meet up every day. It’s not possible to apply alone.
If you don’t have a teammate yet, be sure to find one before submitting your application. Understand that it’s important that you’re able work together very closely during the three months of the program. Setting up a team means not just finding someone else to lodge an application with, but someone who you will need to get along with in this period of intense project work.
You don’t know how to find a pair? Read more in our guide.
Third: Find coaches
We require you to have at least two local coaches. Coaches are developers who are able to give you guidance during the summer: they sit down with you, guide you through relevant coding steps and fine-tune with you at regular intervals (4 to 8 hours a week).
We’ve put together some advice on finding coaches here.
If you know someone who’d like to be your coach, you can direct them to our guide for coaches.
Fourth: Find a coaching company / workspace
A coaching company provides your team a place to work from during the summer. They’ll provide you with office space and a team of coaches. It is a bonus on your application if you can find a place where you’ll be working together with your teammate and your coaches.
If you found a teammate, coaches and a place to work, there’s only one thing left to do: choosing a project.
A good place to start is to have a look here at our list of Open Source projects approved for RGSoC 2016. Be sure to ask your coaches for their input on which project they feel would be most suitable for you and for them to help you with.
If you want to work on a project that’s not on the list, the maintainers need to submit their project to us first. You can find more information on becoming a Project Mentor and submitting a project in our guide for Mentors.
Apply
Can you check off all of these steps? Yay! Then you’re ready to submit your application — you will have time until April 10th, 17:59:00 UTC. But before you do, we recommend you to head over to our Students Section and to check out the full application guide. Good luck applying — we’re looking forward to reading your application!
If you’ve read the Application Guide, you can create your team and application in our Teams App.
Good news for all project maintainers: We are re-opening up our project submissions for one extra special week. This gives you more time to submit your Open Source project still for RGSoC 2016!
As you may have noticed, we have closed our project submissions in February. Since then, we have been receiving messages from people who really wanted to submit their projects as well, but for many reasons, they missed the deadline. After a careful reflection, we decided to give everyone an extra week to submit their OSS projects.
So, mark down in your calendar:
The extra week of project submission starts today, 14th March, and ends Sunday, 20th March at 17:59:59 UTC.
These Open Source Projects are the basis of our program. From this list, the applicants choose projects they want to work on during the summer and apply for those. The selected teams will then work full-time on them for three months with the help of coaches and the project maintainers. This will allow the students to grow as developers and, at the same time, bring more developers into Open Source Software.
In order to submit your Open Source projects, find out what makes a good project, what programming languages we accept (spoiler: all of them!) and how much time you need to be a mentor - please read our Guide.
What better day to think about getting more women into Open Source than today - on International Women’s Day!
While we are working towards equality all year round, today is an especially good day to shed some light on how you and your company can support us in this mission:
Getting more women into Open Source - one summer at a time.
Our 2015 teams from all over the world!
Sponsoring
Fund our mission
To make RGSoC possible, we need sponsors! This program with all that it entails can only happen with the help of amazing people donating small or large donations. We are so happy to have amazing companies already on board again for this year like Github, Travis CI, Google Open Source, Gitlab, Basecamp and many more. We already have already 8 teams funded, and only 4 to go. Help us fund those last teams!
Here you can find our Sponsorshop packages with all perks a company’s heart can imagine - we even single handedly pack and send out our lovely care packages to students with your merchandise.
Coaching Companies
Get involved locally
Every team needs a place to work and coaches to apply for Rails Girls Summer of Code - If your company wants to support us in hosting and coaching a local team, this is your way to go! We are eternally grateful to all companies who are dedicated to the teams during the summer.
Allowing your devs dedicated time to coach a team will support a great cause, let you stay in touch with the Open Source community and help advertise that you are working together with us towards getting more Women in to OSS. A good example for this are Soundcloud, Absolventa, 6Wunderkinder or Travis CI, who have supported teams as companies and stood by them with all the coach power they could give.
Your devs can also help out in our remote #helpdesk Slack channel during the summer, where students can ask for help if their coaches are not available or are stuck as well. If you are interested in that, you should register in our Teams-App as well and tick the “Interested in helping out as helpdesk coach” box. We’ll write a grateful blog post about your involvmeent and will mention you in our tweets and Facebookpostings with lots of love.
We hope you’ll join us in one way or another on our journey to bring more women into the OSS world. Contact us if you have more questions.
Help us make Rails Girls Summer of Code 2016 happen: Donate now!!
The days are getting longer, the sun is a little more visible in the winter sky, and with spring nearing, we’re glad to announce there’s an even better reason to rejoice: Our crowdfunding campaign is open!
A little earlier every year
Since its inception in 2013, our program has grown from a grassroots movement to a program involving all in all over 700 people — with a bigger impact on the Open Source community every year. In 2015 we broke all our records and could fund not 10, but 16 teams! We’ve even managed to open the campaign a little earlier every year, giving more sponsors the opportunity to support us from the very beginning.
Our early birds
In the last few weeks, we’ve been reaching out to some of our most faithful supporters; the early donations of these 19 (!!!) sponsors and partners, and their support, have helped to get this campaign started with a bang.
We’re amazed — sparkles-in-our-eyes, jaw-dropping kind of amazed — to see how much of our goal we’ve already reached. Six teams are already funded — let’s keep this momentum going!
donatebecause
Last year, with the hashtag #donatebecause, we encouraged our community to donate for our last stretch goal, towards funding extra teams. This year, we’re asking you from the beginning to donate, because:
We know you can help us make a difference. Even the smallest amount helps!
We can’t wait to meet all of the teams we will be able to fund this year, and we’re always so incredibly happy about every little donation that comes in. No amount is too small, and your money will go towards a great initiative to help awesome women learn and code during the summer.
So, what are you waiting for? Donate to our crowdfunding campaign today, and help us make a difference in our Open Source Community! <3
Rails Girls Summer of Code 2016 is coming closer and we are looking for you to join our orga team. We are a group of people who are working behind the curtains to make RGSoC happen again and can use every helping :raised_hand: We are looking for people who either
like doing PR stuff (#allthesocialmediathings) or
like getting in touch with the community and students or
have ideas on how to improve our website or
can help out on the development of our teams appor
can help out with design / illustrations or
organize events or
help packing up care packages or
help us get in contact with other initiatives or
help with guiding students through the application process or
help with the teams selection or
can post hedgehog gifs in the random channel
If you like doing at least one of these things, we already love you and would be super happy to have you on board and build an amazing RGSoC 2016 together with you. It’s going to be a wonderful adventure!
We have a global organizers call on Wednesday evenings (6 pm CET) that you can join if you want to know more or set up a separate chat with us. So drop us an email, tweet at us or hop into Slack and ping @alicetragedy or me @anikalindtner. We can’t wait to meet you.
