Rails Girls Summer of Code teams announced
We are both very much thrilled and equally humbled about how Rails Girls Summer of Code over the last few weeks has grown into a huge program that is very likely to make a real difference.
This community just rocks!
We are proud to say that we have received 80 applications from over 140 students from all over the world. Among them some are outstandingly well prepared, some come with an amazing support network from coaches and local communities, some include outright moving personal stories.
We have reviewed all of these applications and they have been rated by a committee of 9 members. This was quite some work, but we are very happy to say that we have finalized this process yesterday. So we can now announce our first group of participants.
Congratulations for being accepted into Rails Girls Summer of Code go out to the following teams!
- Carla (Australia) and Anja (Germany) to work on: Sinatra and Farm Subsidy Open Government Data
- Cecilia (Argentinia) and Mayn (Norway) to work on: Open Source Job Board
- Jen and Joyce (both USA) to work on: Bundler
- Laura and Adriana (both Colombia) to work on: Rails (Conductor)
- Magdalena (Poland) to work on: impress.js
- Maja and Nina (both Slovenia) to work on: Spree
- Nicole (Germany) and Laura (USA) to work on: RailsApps and Rubinius
- Saskhi and Pallavi (both India) to work on: Diaspora
- Wiktoria and Alicja (both Poland) to work on: Species+
(ordered alphabetically, not by ranking)
If you have applied and your team is not on this list - don’t worry. That does not mean your summer can’t be a Summer of Code! Here’s what you can do.
About the selection process
We have tried very hard to make the selection process as fair and objective as possible. We also want to be transparent about this, so here’s how it worked:
Applications were rated by the criteria given on the students page. Ratings were given by 9 members of the committee individually and collected in a simple Rails app. This allowed us to compare ratings based on various measures of central tendency (fancy term from statistics for different ways to calculate averages, means etc.).
Even though ratings were given individually, for each application individual ratings were pretty close most of the time. In the few cases where they differed more we’ve had a short discussion, looking out for potential misunderstandings or missing information, and gave the opportunity to amend ratings if applicable.
After completing this process the top rated group was already very obvious. For the remaining few slots we have looked out for applications that added extra diversity to the list, especially in respect that haven’t been caught by the rating system well. E.g. we added one application for the fact that it was the only well rated one for a pure Javascript project, and we have added one team that could afford coming on board for a reduced stipend easily.
From what we know this process was similar to how many conferences select speakers: identifying a pre-ranking based on a system that tries to ensure objectivity as much as possible. Then balancing the end result with regards to criteria that could not be captured by the system easily.
Sponsors for last-minute seats
The sheer number of fantastic applications that we have received has blown us away, and we were sad about every single application that didn’t make it in.
We are still actively looking for sponsors so we can hopefully add at least a few extra last-minute seats.
Head over to our campaign page to donate!
If you have contacts to companies that might be interested in supporting this short term, please send us an introduction to summer-of-code@railsgirls.com.
Let’s kick this off!
We are very excited about this first, huge step.
None of this would have been possible without the amazing community we’re all part of. Thank you so much!
Expect more updates on the next steps soon, and get ready to kick off on 1st July :)
We can’t wait for this!
Thank you so much for your wonderful applications!