Como organizar eventos Rails Girls

Traduzido por Maujor, site do Maujor

Organizando seu primeiro evento Rails Girls

Nosso objetivo é fornecer ferramentas para que mulheres estudem e entendam a tecnologia Rails. Os eventos Rails Girls foram criados com a finalidade de proporcionar uma ótima primeira experiência de construir a Internet.

Rails Girls foi criado na cidade de Helsinki no final do ano 2010. A intenção inicial foi a de criar um único evento local, e nós jamais imaginamos que a ideia atingisse a proporção atual com a proliferação de vários eventos pelo mundo inteiro. Estes tutoriais foram criados para ajudá-lo a iniciar seus estudos de Rails.

Se você pretende organizar um evento, comece preenchendo e enviando o formulário existe em http://railsgirls.com/inyourcity e nós enviaremos para você instruções sobre a organização do evento.

Uma listagem dos próximos eventos programados pode ser vista em www.railsgirls.com.

Você está convidado a participar do Slack de disssão dos organizadores.

Básico

Os eventos Rails Girls não têm fins lucrativos. Nós não cobramos ingresso dos participantes e nem remuneramos os coaches e palestrantes. Não existe qualquer restrição relativa a requisitos básicos e conhecimentos, bem como não há limitações quanto a idade dos participantes. Tudo o que é necessário para participar limita-se a um laptop e uma boa dose de curiosidade.

Nos dois dias dedicados ao evento, os participantes serão separados em pequenos grupos de estudos que assistirão mini palestras sobre programação, design e web. Não serão realizados painéis de discussão e nem exaustivas palestras - o ambiente de estudos deverá ser informal e os métodos de estudo do tipo “mãos na massa”. Quanto menos abstrações e mais participação nas tarefas do evento tanto melhor.

Filosofia Rails Girls

Código de conduta

Eventos Rails Girls são realizados em um ambiente inclusivo, amigável e seguro. Nos eventos a tolerância para assédio ou bullying é zero. Você pode criar um código de conduta para seu evento. A seguir uma lista de links com exemplos de alguns códigos de conduta:

Exemplo de programa para o evento

Todo evento Rails Girls começa com a festa de instalação onde configurações de instalação são pré-instaladas no computador das meninas. Consulte o tutorial guides.railsgirls.com/install para instruções de instalação. Na festa de instalação poderão ser previstas minipalestras, mas o foco principal é oferecer um vinho espumante, deixar tudo configurado para o dia seguinte e promover a integração entre as participantes. O horário para realização do evento é flexível - você conhece sua audiência e saberá escolher o horário que seja mais conveniente. Nós já realizamos eventos em finais de semana e também durante a semana. Pode ser que a realização do evento em duas tardes-noites (dàs 16:00h às 22:00h) seja a melhor solução para o seu evento.

Objetivos do workshop:

Sexta-feira: Instalação

19:00 - 21:00 Instalações e conhecendo uns aos outros Dica: Tenha uma mesa com coaches onde computadores problemáticos poderão ir.

Algumas instalações irão falhar: esteja preparado para deixar mulheres em pares, não passe muito tempo se preocupando com isso.

Decode o local com balões e posters. Coloque uma playlist divertida para o final da tarde.

Venha com atividades para quebrar o gelo: pergunte as meninas para escrever porque elas estão participando do evento em post-its ou para desenharem e escreverem sua aplicação dos sonhos.

Lembre-se de fazer um FridayHug!

21 -> Coach dinner Go through the application with the coaches during dinner.

Saturday: Workshop

09:00 - 10:00 Registration and coffee
Hint Reserve enough time for people to mingle and to solve any problems there might be with installations. Give out workbooks, collect acronyms for the Bento exercise.

10:00 - 10:10 Welcoming words
Hint Mention sponsors, show what we’ll build, tell what programming is.

10:30 - 11:00 UX workshop

11:00 - 11:30 Introduction to programming
Hint Ask one of the coaches to do this. Explain why learning Ruby basics is important even though they’ll be using Rails.

Themes to cover:

Show & tell with tryruby.org, first three-four exercises all together.

11:30 - 13:00 Workshop time Going (slowly!) through the curriculum at guides.railsgirls.com/app. Stop to explain what you’re doing and what the different concepts mean.

Try to aim for simple explanations even with the cost of accuracy. You don’t need to talk about all underlying concepts. Just try to answer questions when they arise, or move on if they’re too hard or out of scope. You are not here to teach perfect coding skills but to show how to get stuff done. One has to learn how to build web apps before learning how to do it well.

Concepts to cover:

Tips: Coaches are people too. They are doing this for the first time too. Teaching might be hard and intimidating, so remember to be available to help coaches or groups with difficult situations or just provide support and encouragement.

13:00 - 14:00 Lunch

14:00 - 14:30 Bentobox exercise Putting technical jargon into a context with a conceptual model called Bentobox.

Two exercises: 1) Going through the 10 technical concepts with the physical Bentobox boards. 2) Going through the words the women have themselves submitted with the coaches.

14:30 - 18:00 Workshop time.

Time to continue working on the applications. Monitor the situation: when it seems like people have a hard time concentrating, have the coaches or other speakers give quick lightning talks.

Example topics for lighting talks:

Once everyone has finished their app, there is time to extend the application by modifying the CSS, implementing commenting systems etc. Allow enough time for experimentation.

19:00 After party
Hint: Invite everyone, also the local developers, boys, those who weren’t accepted, to join!

Fork this project on GitHub, add yourself, and send us a pull request.

Materials

Promotion of Rails Girls

Every Rails Girls workshop will get a custom website at railsgirls.com/city where the information is collected and then stored. For past cities, see railsgirls.com/events

You can also set up your own Facebook and Twitter page (remember to add links to your workshop’s page!) or whatever service is popular in your community. Promoting the event through social media can go a long way these days, but make sure you have somebody to take care of the chosen channels. Some tips:

While the event is underway, remember to take pictures, collect tweets and ask questions of the participants. You’ll be thankful for all of that for your next event. We love to write blog posts about the speaker and participant experiences. A list of the coaches is also required.

Website

E-mail contact(a)railsgirls.com and ask to be included in the repo. Look for readme.txt for further instructions! Before making a site you should have at least two coaches and one sponsor onboard.

How to find local developers?

How to find participants?

How to get press?

One of the big aims of Rails Girls is to make it more mainstream for women to build the web. That’s why we like to engage the local press and highlight the participants and their enthusiasm. We’d be happy to help prepare a press-release for the media. Check out railsgirls.com/press for more. If you’re working with a big company as a sponsor, their PR department might be able to help you spread the message about the workshop.

Send the press release to local blogs, find contact at various media outlets. The more doors you knock on, the greater you chance of getting through. Make a list of journalists and bloggers you contact, mark those that respond to your emails, so they can be the first ones to receive your next press release. You can also write a press release after the event that includes photos and statements from satisfied participants.

Sponsorships

Rails Girls talks to a demographic that might be hard to reach other ways: women who have an interest in technology, who are possible users, employees or partners of the sponsoring company.

We are looking for sponsors who are active participants in the local technology scene, whether it’s a startup or a big corporation, a non-profit or a government organization.

Also non-traditional technology companies can be approached: kids stores, universities, women’s magazines, beverage brands etc. They all should however have some affiliation or interest in technology.

Rails Girls should always be kept non-profit: if there’s money left, it should be used to support the future activities of the attendees. Don’t forget that you don’t need that much funding and even a two-person startup could be very willing to chip in.

Example letter for sponsors

Dear xxx,

We are organizing a Rails Girls programming workshop in (insert city) on (insert dates).

Rails Girls is a two-day non-profit event for women of all ages to give them a great first experience in software craftsmanship. We aim to give the tools to understand technology along with the community and inspiration to get started.

Rails Girls is not just about programming, it’s about building things. During the workshop, we’ll build an application and also have inspiring lightning talks and exercises.

For a closer look, please see www.railsgirls.com for past events and coverage.Here’s also a short video on the Berlin event held in April 2012: http://vimeo.com/40852182

We are now looking for sponsors to help us realize this all. We’d love to have your support!

Yours, name

How much does it cost?

The costs below are estimated for 30 participants, 10 coaches - but they may vary a lot. It’s easiest to try to get a local sponsor to pay the bills directly or partner with someone who has a set account to handle money. These calculations are done in Finland, in €, where food & alcohol is very expensive, but spaces are often free. All in all you should be able to organise an event easily for a little over a thousand euros.

What do sponsors get?

Don’t give out the participant info, but sponsors are free to hang out at the event and be sure to include a short message to the sponsor in a thank-you note. Sponsor swag may be included in the goodie bag to an extent, but it should be something tasteful, not trashy and/or related to women.

FAQ

Who can organise a Rails Girls workshop?

Anyone. What we look for is a group of people dedicated in making this a stellar first experience in the world of web making for women. What we hope to see is some (not all) of the following:

Start by filling out http://railsgirls.com/inyourcity and someone from our team will be in contact

Where can I find all the materials for posters, nametags, sample presentations and such?

Check out below, and let us know if something is missing!

What kind of venue is needed?

We recommend choosing a venue with a built-in infrastructure for around 30-50 persons. For a programming event, this means:

Ask where local developer meetings are usually hosted. Often co-working spaces are also willing to negotiate deals to gain some visibility among new people.

What is expected from the coaches?

Rails Girls events are organized around small groups, maximum of 4-5 persons per one coach. If possible, try to have groups of 3 women for each coach. For instance, if you’re doing an event for 30 women, aim for having 10 coaches (a few more for backup don’t hurt). We know this isn’t always possible, but do try not to have groups of more than 5 women, so the coach can still answer all questions in the group.

The coaches don’t need to be hardcore experts on Rails - basic knowledge and willingness to explain trumps expertise. So, if your local Rails community isn’t very strong, do expand your search. You can have a mix of Rails experts and people with web development expertise in other frameworks. We are looking for people who like answering questions and can keep an upbeat and positive atmosphere through a period of 8 hours!

You can get to know the curriculum by checking out guides.railsgirls.com/app. There is also always a pre-event coach dinner where we’ll go through some pedagogical suggestions and check everyone knows what is happening. Avoid jargon, tie examples to what your doing, encourage asking questions. The installation instructions can be found at guides.railsgirls.com/install. We also understand that coaches are human and that for most of the people this is the first time teaching something. Worry not - the women have always been really happy with whatever they learn and just the chance to ask questions is enough.

We hope the coaches are ok with having their name and twitter-id/github/some mean of contact on railsgirls.com so the women always have a local face to answer their questions.

In addition, we encourage coaches to come up with additional exercises for the group. After completing the ideation app many women will want to try tweaking the look & feel of the site, implementing commenting, Facebook sharing, pushing the app to Heroku, etc.

How to find coaches?

Ask around, ask sponsors (tech companies), ask anyone to help you out. Once you do get some coaches on board, they can help you out with their own contacts. Influential bloggers or Twitter users in your local dev community can help you out by broadcasting a call for coaches. Hint: You can also thank coaches for their help by providing a spot at the workshop for their girlfriends ;)

Sample letter for potential coaches

“Dear community member,

We wish to invite you to take part in the Rails Girls event on (insert date). The event is aimed for women of all ages with no previous programming experience, but a lot of passion to building things. Rails Girls is an international non-profit, volunteer-based workshop. We’ve had events in Shanghai, Berlin, Helsinki, and Singapore. We expect to receive around a 100 applications.

In addition to giving a safe and fun first experience to coding for the women we want to engage them with local developers, open source, and the startup scene. We’ve attached some information on what coaching requires in practice. In addition, we have room for small lightning talks on technical subjects. If you have something you’d like to speak about, let us know.

For more information about the non-profit event, check railsgirls.com or guides.railsgirls.com

(You can also include the chapter “What is expected from the coaches” to the mail)”

What materials do I get?

Each Rails Girls event gets a specific webpage.

In addition we’ll help you out with the goodie bags, poster templates, workbooks and other swag like stickers, reflectors and so forward. All of the materials can be found on this site. You can also ask the sponsors to include some sponsor materials if they wish. We are always looking for creative outlets for the Rails Girls brand, if you have ideas, let us know!

So far we’ve had

Also, check out:

How do I choose attendees?

In the form we ask only two questions: do you have any previous background in coding and why would you be a good participant for Rails Girls

Rails Girls is intended for anyone and we want to keep it flexible enough for learners any age. However, make clear to the attendees what to expect: Rails Girls won’t make anyone into a coder, so people looking for i.e career change will be disappointed. On the other hand we like people with very diverse backgrounds and loads of enthusiasm.

After selecting participants we generally split them into three groups:

  1. people with no previous programming experience
  2. people with some front-end experience (HTML, CSS, Javascript) and
  3. people with a little experience in programming or a background in computer sciences. You can use the different name-tags for each group if you want to (rubies, foxes, octocats, rails..)
Sample letter of acceptance

Title: Rails Girls workshop - welcome!

Dear attendee,

Congratulations! We’re happy to invite you to join in on the Rails Girls workshop in (insert city). We hope that this workshop will provide you a great first experience on building web apps.

What happens next?

(Insert date for installation fest) starts at (insert time) with an installation fest - so please bring your laptop with you! You should also try to pre-install Rails with instructions from http://guides.railsgirls.com/install/

We will hold the event in (insert address)

On (insert date) we’ll dive into development. We’ll work in small groups with four to six person teams. Your team members will have about the same experience level as you. We’ll be all developing a simple listing application. We’ll wrap the day around (insert time). There’s also going to be an evening party.

We have a lot of people wanting to get to the class, so if you can’t make it this time, let us know as soon as possible!

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact me. We’ll also be updating the website at (insert address)!

Best,

(Signature)

Sample letter of not being accepted

Title: Rails Girls - not accepted this time

Dear applicant,

Unfortunately we couldn’t fit you in the workshop this time. To be able to give personal guidance to each participant, we could only take a fraction of the applicants. This time we prioritized women with no previous programming experience.

However, you’re warmly welcome to the official afterparty. (Insert details).

We’ll also be most likely organizing more events in your city. Follow twitter.com/railsgirls or facebook.com/railsgirls for more information.

There’s always cancellations and we fill all available places, so we might still be taking in a couple of people!

Best,

(Signature)

Sample thank you letter for participants

Dear Rails Girls,

Thank you for taking part in the Rails Girls event. We truly felt lucky to have such a talented & enthusiastic crowd of people with us and hope many of you will continue working with Rails in the future - you have the tools, now build something cool!

(Say a few words about the sponsors and coaches - thank you for the community)

Three things we want to share: in Workshop Materials (Almost all) materials can be found in the guides section at http://guides.railsgirls.com. You can find presentations, materials and instructions from the workshop. If you took pictures or blogged about the event - let us know! We’ll be publishing regularly on blog.railsgirls.com

Make Rails Girls better - give us feedback! We want to hear from you! Give us feedback about the workshop or how we can make the event better – it’s really quick, and it’ll help us improve our workshop at railsgirls.com/feedback

Keep on coding! We realize there was quite a lot of stuff in todays lecture and for most of you it all felt a little overwhelming. We strongly recommend trying out Rails for Zombies exercise at http://www.codeschool.com/ latest by next weekend, it’ll refreshen all you’ve learned so far and teach you some more.

Two things to keep you going:

There was a LOT of interest in doing follow-up events. If you have ideas for this or want to volunteer for the organizing team, let us know and sign up for the group e-mailing list at http://groups.google.com/group/rails-girls-team!

And that’s all for now, Your Rails Girls team

What happens after the event?

Inviting real developers to coach is Rails Girls sessions not only gives the participants a chance for hands-on education, but also makes the barrier to enter the technology world lower. How to keep the women coding?

Checklist

This is a small checklist for your event. Rails Girls can be thrown together in a matter of weeks, but to truly have time to make a good event, prepare at least two months. Not all of these steps are of course mandatory and they are here just to help you remember.

Before the event:

During the event

After the event