On February 26th and 27th, we held a successful workshop at the Microsoft offices in downtown San Francisco, supported by EngineYard, Blazing Cloud, Pivotal Labs and a host of volunteers.  This may be the last workshop led by “the Sarahs” and Ilen, and that is good news.  As we approach the end of our commitment to spend one year teaching at least 200 women Ruby on Rails with the expectation that we would find 10-20 new Rubyists from that group, we find that we have accomplished more than we set out to achieve.  We have taught about 300 women (and some men) Ruby on Rails.  The local SF Ruby meetups routinely have 5-10 women or more.  Sarah Mei recently tallied 18%, reported at SCALE 8x in her talk about moving the needle.

A critical next step is to make the workshops sustainable and we have a plan, at least for this year.  We’re planning to have 3 more workshops in San Francisco, each led by a different team, supported by experienced volunteers.  We have documented the process as part of the RailsBridge Open Workshop project, putting together a set of workshop recipes.  The recipes are still missing a lot of info — we expect to improve the documentation as new leaders learn what we’ve forgotten to write down.  We’ve also heard from people in other cities who would like to create workshops of their own, and maybe create workshops that expand on the curriculum we currently teach or branch out to Javascript or other tech.

If you would like to get involved, join the google group and let us know how you would like to help and also join the mailing list for announcements.