RailsBridge Open Workshop Project Announces Workshops for 2011

Online, January 18, 2011 (Newswire.com) - The RailsBridge Open Workshop project, which teaches web application development to both programmers and non-programmers, is announcing eight more of its popular free workshops for women in 2011.

The project, which has trained almost 600 people, nearly 500 of them women, in five cities in the past year and a half, is gaining speed in 2011. RailsBridge has planned eight workshops so far, mostly in San Francisco, but branching out to the north bay, as well as Chicago and Seattle.

The target audience is anyone who has a laptop computer and is willing to devote a Friday evening and full day on Saturday to learning how to develop a web application using the popular Ruby on Rails framework. Most attendees are programmers who are looking to update their skills -- some are unemployed, some are hoping to leave their current jobs and others just want to keep their skills sharp and understand the latest technology.

Although not exclusively for women, the San Francisco-based volunteers have focused their workshops on outreach to women in order to create gender diversity in the local tech community. Some workshops have been focused on other outreach efforts, including a Boulder, CO workshop in conjunction with the Mountain.rb Conference which raised donations for local charities from participants who were all local web developers.

"Before we started the RailsBridge workshops, we worried about how we would effectively outreach to women," said Sarah Mei, leader of the Open Workshop project. "However, we soon learned that demand is not a problem." The first workshop filled up with a waiting list in less than 24 hours. After a year and a half of training events and almost 500 women trained in developing web applications with Ruby on Rails, demand is just as high as it was in May 2009.

"The workshop project is a key part of the ecosystem that we are working to develop in open source, making it truly open to programmers and non-programmers of any background," said Sarah Allen, president of RailsBridge, the umbrella organization supporting the workshops. The RailsBridge mission, according to Allen, is to bridge the gap from aspiring developer to contributing open source community member through mentoring, teaching and writing.

Sponsors of the workshops have included Heroku, Engine Yard, Pivotal Labs, Scribd, Orange Labs, Microsoft, IGN, Blazing Cloud, SlideShare, VodPod and Balsamiq. Workshops have been organized and promoted with the help of partner organizations DevChix and Women 2.0.

The project is actively seeking donations and sponsors. Individuals can contribute via PayPal at http://railsbridge.org. Those interested in sponsoring, hosting or organizing an event, can contact [email protected].

Workshops Confirmed for 2011
The following workshops have confirmed venues and leaders. Several additional workshops are also in the planning stages:

February 4-5, Twitter, San Francisco, led by Amy Chen
http://www.meetup.com/sfruby/calendar/16004702/
February 4-5, Hashrocket, Chicago, led by Desi McAdam
March 11-12, Enphase Energy, Petaluma,
led by Brenda Strech & Ilen Zazueta-Hall
http://www.meetup.com/sfruby/calendar/16002166/
April 7-8, ModCloth, San Francisco, Megan Guering
April, White Pages, Seattle, Elise Worthy
May 6-7, SoMA Central, San Francisco,
led by Andrea Ängquist and Raphael Lee
July 15-16, Miso, San Francisco, Amy Lightholder, Rachel Myers
August 5-6, Quid, San Francisco, Andrea Angquist, Walter Yu