Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Volunteer Teams

Posted on by RGSoC Team

Everything you ever wanted to know about volunteer teams

This year, RGSoC has accepted six volunteer teams in addition to ten sponsored teams. It’s an exciting development, and you may be wondering, what is a volunteer team, and how do I become one?

Volunteer teams, like sponsored teams were hand picked by the selection committee from the pool of applicants. The chosen teams showed enthusiasm and demonstrated that they have a good level of support. We really wanted these teams in the program, but sadly, we couldn’t sponsor them. Instead of leaving them out completely, we took a leap of faith, and asked if they wanted to do it anyway. Lucky for us, six of them said yes!

So what is a volunteer team?

A volunteer team is the same as a sponsored team, with two main differences. First, as the name implies, they do not receive monetary support from RGSoC, so they need to be financially stable enough to support themselves over the summer. Second, because of the financial constraints, volunteer teams are only asked to work part time on their open source project.

Aside from those two points, volunteer teams will participate in the summer of code and have the same experience as sponsored teams. They will:

  • get access to the same support structure and benefits such as conference tickets
  • document their daily work on their team log and send in pictures/tweets
  • give a lightning talk at a conference
  • be assigned a supervisor
  • connect to other students via the RGSoC chat

How do I become a volunteer team?

This year’s applications are closed and teams have been selected, ready to kick off on 1st of July. If you want to be considered as a volunteer team next year, send in an application when applications open and show us what you’re made of!

The team behind the teams

Volunteer teams also have a great support structure behind them. Susanne Dewein, Tam Eastley, and Carsten Zimmermann will all be volunteer team supervisors. You may recognize those names from last year: Susanne and Tam were students with the volunteer team Highway to Rails, and Carsten was their coach. They bring with them this summer a wealth of first hand information about what it’s like to successfully complete a voluntary summer of coding ruby on rails.

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