next steps for ruby gender balance

July 08, 2009

In the past month we took some first steps to inviting women into the SF Ruby community:

1. First Workshop was well attended with tremendous community support
2. Hack session (sponsored by Orange and Sustainable Websites) where many of the workshop attendees continued their learning; and women and men from the community brought their own projects to work on.

Now we need to keep up the momentum and generate a few more peers for the women who are continuing to develop in Ruby. To that end, we have scheduled another workshop, July 31-August 1 with the generous support of Pivotal Labs and EngineYard. In order to make this workshop as successful as the last one, we need your help:

• Please sign up to volunteer on Friday and/or Saturday:
  • if you are a developer who has experience with Ruby on Rails and are willing to answer questions and offer debugging assistance during the workshop
  • if you attended the last workshop, you will learn a lot from being a TA!
  • if you just want to help, we need folks for registration and other logistics
• Sponsors
  • we haven’t yet planned an “after party” but it would be great to do that again
  • do you have some cool stuff you want to bestow upon our attendees, good books? special deals? let’s make these new folks feel welcome
• Locations for follow-up events: do you have space you would be willing to share on a weekend or evening?
  • post-workshop hack session: informal workspace or conference room
  • advanced workshop: two conference rooms would be ideal
  • September workshop: large meeting room with a number of smaller conference rooms

If you want to get involved, please join the google group.
Sponsors please email rubyworkshop _at_ gmail (dot) com.

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