Planning RailsBridge workshops should be visible and transparent. Visibility makes it easier for us to help each other and show new organizers how we work. To jump in, check out the list of workshops currently being planned.
When organizing, remember the mission of RailsBridge is to diversify and improve the software development community. We ask that:
- Your workshop reach out to a group of people that are underrepresented in the community. That might be women, people of color, non-native English speakers, LGBQA communities, or other marginalized groups.
- Your workshop is free for students to attend. We want to remove as many barriers to entry as possible.
This repo is the place to come if you want to propose a workshop, organize a workshop, or sponsor a workshop by offering space or 💰.
If you want to teach at or attend a workshop, RSVP for a workshop near you on BridgeTroll! If you want to work on the RailsBridge curricula, you want railsbridge/docs.
Here are some specific ways you can help out:
If you want to kick off a workshop, start by creating an issue. Create one issue for each workshop. It's awesome if the title includes a date, and location, as far as you know. (And you can always edit the issue.)
Mention your collaborators if you know who they will be, make todo lists for everything that needs to be done, and add some labels. Check out the first one as an example, and feel free to copy this gist as a template when creating a new issue. 
Then have a conversation to hammer out the details of the workshop in the comments section. (Make sure to not say confidential things, like people's phone numbers. The whole point of this is that everyone can see how we're organizing workshops.)
Optionally, you can also ask anyone on the @railsbridge/organizers team to add you to the team. (That will allow you add and remove issue labels, plus it's a cool group of people to be on a team with.)
If you're on the @railsbridge/organizers team, you only need the username and this link to add someone to the team. It's that easy! 🌴
If you'd like to organize a workshop, you can filter the workshops being planned to only those that need organizers. If there's a workshop in your area, chime in on a workshop thread and offer to help out!
There are sometimes workshops that have organizers, but the organizers would love help, so feel free to browse through all the issues. If you see something that's not progressing, leave a comment, letting the organizers know you're available to pitch in. (Also, browsing the issues is a great way to get a feel for the work that goes into a workshop.)
We have very thorough documentation in our Workshop Cookbook. Check it out!
If you're an SF metaorganizer, this private list of organizers may be useful to you. 🐎
Most RailsBridge workshops take place in offices of companies that support what we're doing. To offer your space, filter the workshops to those that need a venue! If you find a workshop you want to host, chime in with a note on the issue, and let the organizers know the location and capacity of your office, along with anything else you think will be relevant for the organizers.
A sample message might be:
Hi, I work at Sprokets Incoporated, and we'd love to host this workshop!
We're located at 123 4th Street. We have an open area for lunch; that space holds about 50 people. And we have 8 mid-size conference rooms that together can hold about 45 people. So 45 is probably the max for our space. Each conference room has monitors and whiteboards.
We'll be able to sponsor the event up to $1,000. And a person from the company can commit to being there through the entire workshop.
I talked with our facilities manager, and everyone on the RSVP list can skip signing with security when they come in. Let me know if it's a deal; I'm super excited to make this happen!
If your company doesn't have space to host a workshop, you can still sponsor! Filter the workshops by those that need a venue and sponsor or those that only need a sponsor and chime in to offer support.
An sample message might be:
Hi, I work at Sprokets Incoporated, and we're really excited to help RailsBridge. We can sponsor this workshop, up to $1,500!
Two of our engineers are waiting to RSVP as teachers, and our Lead Recruiter asked to also volunteer, maybe with signing people in and to answer anyone's questions about Sprokets. Cheers!
If you don't see an issue that fits what you're looking for, you can email hello@railsbridge.org and someone will help you out! 😉
All these cool pictures (like 
, 💅, 🐀, and 👾 ) are the Emoji font. To insert emoji into your comments, type the name of the emoji, surrounded by colons. :dolphin: will become 🐬 when the markdown is rendered. Check out the Emoji Cheat Sheet for the names of all the Emoji!
If you've turned off your GitHub notifications, you won't be notified when people mention you or respond to you on issues. If you hate getting email, you can always check your notifications page. Check your notification settings here.
The notifications you get via your email may look similar to the emails from the organizers mailing list. The important difference is that when you respond to a notification email, your response becomes a comment on that issue. Just something to be aware of and not to be bitten by. 🐺