BoF: Bringing More Women into Tech - One Summer at a Time [RGSoC]

Bringing more women into tech - one summer at a time [RGSoC]This year Rails Girls Summer of Code [RGSoC], a program aimed to bring more women into coding marked its 5th edition. The basic idea behind …

Bringing more women into tech - one summer at a time [RGSoC]This year Rails Girls Summer of Code [RGSoC], a program aimed to bring more women into coding marked its 5th edition. The basic idea behind the program is to provide a paid open source internship to teams of two students during the months of northern summer (July to September). The focus of the program is not on producing highly sophisticated code, but rather on learning transferable skills while working on an open source project.During these 5 years, more than 800 teams applied to the program and we were able to sponsor 185 students from all over the world of different age and origin, with different backgrounds and skills. In this talk, we would like to look back at our journey by talking about how the program started, what kind of issues we faced during our journey, what lessons we learned solving the problems we came across and how are we trying to promote diversity in open source. We will also talk about why it is necessary to have programs like this and how these open source mentoring programs helps women achieve their dreams.