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RailsBridge Volunteer Opportunities

lilliealbert edited this page Dec 2, 2014 · 19 revisions

Projects

Communication Projects

Improving Curriculum Feedback Loops

There currently isn't a clear way for a student to give overall feedback about our curriculum. They can include it in the post-workshop survey, if they want, or create an issue on GitHub (which could be intimidating for some). How can we improve this?

Curriculum Use Study & Presentation Update

Some workshops are self-paced with TAs floating around to help people who are stuck; some workshops break into small groups and a teacher walks the students through the curriculum. We don't really know what percentage of workshops are each style. We need to make sure that we're clearly labeling our curricula for all the different ways that people run workshops.

If you're interested in helping with this email board@railsbridge.org.

The RailsBridge Blog

The RailsBridge blog became the Bridge Foundry blog at some point. If RailsBridge wants to have our own blog, we should figure that out!

Some post ideas:

  • Write about your experience as a student, TA, teacher or organizer
  • Interview someone else about their experience (we can give you names!)
  • Share tips for leveling up as a student, teacher, or organizer

We are currently looking for people to be members of the RailsBridge communicatiosn team. If you're interested in doing that, email board@railsbridge.org and we can chat about it!!!

A Road Map for RailsBridge

It would be fantastic to have a topic/skills roadmap for the RoR ecosystem (and the Railsbridge curricula in particular). Ping the mailing list if you’re interested in working on that!

Curriculum Projects

Write a new curriculum

There are a lot of skills that it takes to become an effective developer. Do you want to write a short curriculum on any of these things?

  • Using JavaScript with Rails to make your site snappy
  • Git - more than just git add .
  • the Command Line (beyond cd and ls)
  • Productivity Tools (Get ShiftIt, make your fonts bigger, etc)
  • Active Record

Improve the existing curricula

  • Teach a workshop, and see where the curriculum could be improved, then submit a PR! (Or open an issue with your ideas first, to get feedback and support.)
  • MobileBridge needs help improving their curriculum so less experienced teachers can use it. (It's currently experts-only, to some extent.) You can find them at https://github.com/mobilebridge/.
  • Some folks have discussed merging the Boston RailsBridge repo with the main RailsBridge repo. If you’d like to help with that, ping the Google group.
  • Add more exercises to the Ruby curriculum! [Inspiration here](Ruby Exercise Links)!

Coding Projects

Bridge Troll

Bridge Troll is our workshop and volunteer event registration system. It is well-tested Rails app developed mostly by Travis Grathwell. Travis is always happy to review pull requests!

RailsBridge.org

RailsBridge.org is a Rails app with static pages that hits a couple of API endpoints in Bridge Troll to return workshop/event details. It's development has been mostly dormant since mid-2013, but there are some really fun projects waiting to happen there. (Individual chapter pages, visualizations of RailsBridge's impact?)

Other projects:

  • Bridge Foundry

Roles

There are a lot of projects up there! If you're interested in helping managing one or more, and want to help recruit other people to do projects, too, check out some of these roles that the RailsBridge board is currently looking to invent and fill. Since these roles are not chapter-specific, they can be filled by volunteers from anywhere!

Email board@railsbridge.org if you're interested 💥

Teacher Development Lead

Help teachers level up! Develop a way for teachers to get meaningful feedback, partner with other organizations to share best practices, improve the teacher training (or make a new one?), and more.

Member of the Outreach and Communications Team

We need blog writers, tweet posters, and our PR folks to join the team that is currently working on outreach and communications.

Diversity & Inclusion Manager

The majority of RailsBridge workshops have reached to women, but there are so many other groups that are much more underrepresented in tech, and we want to reach out to them! This person will build relationships with other organizations so we can reach out to other underrepresented populations in effective ways.

Geographic Outreach Coordinator

Help new cities / locations get off the ground with workshops!

In-kind Donation & Partnership Coordinator

Sometimes organizations and companies want to give us stuff, or partner with us in some way. We currently deal with this in a very ad-hoc way, and so some opportunities are left by the wayside. This person would make sure that the partnership was a good fit for us, and if so, shepherd it along.

Conference Outreach Coordinator

Many of our first workshops in a new location happen in conjunction with a conference. This person would proactively reach out to conferences to spread the good word about RailsBridge! They would work with the board to set a reasonable goal for number of new conference-adjacent workshops, and then go for it. (With the support and connections of the board, of course.)

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