The RailsBridge board has two open seats! We’re looking for experienced RailsBridge volunteers outside of the SF Bay Area to join the board for a two-year term. If you’re interested in joining or want to nominate someone, send us an email at board@railsbridge.org.

We’ve also written a the RailsBridge board charter and published it on our board repo. It’s pretty short, and it covers things like the responsibilities of the board & board members, board communications, and procedures for filling board vacancies.

If you’re considering nominating yourself or someone else to the board, here are the responsibilities of RailsBridge board members:

• Serve on the board for a 2 year term
• Attend monthly board meetings
• Serve on at least one RailsBridge team or committee (i.e. finance, communications, geographic expansion, operations)
• Board members should expect to do 15-20 hours of RailsBridge work per month, depending on the board member’s responsibilities
• Recruit new committee and board members
• Attend two RailsBridge workshops per year

And here are the guidelines for board candidates:

• Nominees should be current or former RailsBridge volunteers.
• Nominees should have at least six months of involvement with RailsBridge.
• Nominees with prior leadership experience within their chapter or in the larger RailsBridge organization will be preferred.

We hope to have the two vacancies filled by the end of April, so send us your nominations!

We’d also love to hear any feedback, questions, or suggestions you have about the board charter — you can get in touch at board@railsbridge.org or open an issue on the board’s GitHub repo.

Over the last five years, RailsBridge has done hundreds of workshops in dozens of cities around the world. We were one of the first organizations tackling the problem of technology diversity, and our workshops have reached thousands of people and made a measurable impact on the diversity of the Ruby and Rails communities.

None of that could have happened without leadership. Yet during this time, we called ourselves a “flat” or “leaderless” organization. And the organization has changed. At that first workshop in 2009, we were just Sarah Mei and Sarah Allen. These days RailsBridge makes a larger impact than ever, thanks to hundreds of volunteer teachers, TAs, developers, and organizers.

As we’ve grown, we’ve started to feel rather keenly the downsides of a “leaderless” organization. The term itself was a disservice to the informal leaders we did have, and since we didn’t have named roles or teams, it was difficult for new volunteers to figure out how to get involved.

Iterate all the things

So in the spirit of iteration, we’re trying something new. We’ve convened a board of directors with a mandate to create just enough structure to help RailsBridge thrive. We can grow more quickly and efficiently, reduce volunteer burnout, and make a bigger impact on the world if we have explicit, navigable power structures that are accountable to the larger RailsBridge community.

Goals

We’ve appointed an interim board — Lillie Chilen, Sarah Mei, and Rachel Myers — who, over the next six months, will build a permanent board that better represents the diversity of RailsBridge geography.

Their specific goals are as follows:

• Define how board members are added, how long they stay, and how they transition off.
• Recruit new board members from chapters outside of San Francisco.
• Establish an annual budget and fundraising plan to support RailsBridge’s expansion and growth.

We have have big plans for what comes after that, but we’ll save that for a future post!

Who are these people?

Lillie Chilen

Lillie Chilen is the chair of the interim board, and has been running various parts of RailsBridge since 2012. She led the effort to take Bridge Troll from the idea of a workshop management app into functional (and awesome) software, rewrote the Organizing Cookbook from a single timeline into a wiki’s worth of advice, worked as SF meta-organizer for about a year, and has led various other RailsBridge projects. She is a software engineer at Omada Health, and credits the RailsBridge community for turning her vague interest in programming into an actual career.

Sarah Mei

Sarah founded RailsBridge in 2009 with Sarah Allen, and after a few years away from day-to-day involvement in RailsBridge, is excited to be back to support the wonderful work RailsBridge volunteers around the world have been doing. She does software consulting with DevMynd Software, and spends most of her time on the floor at client companies, pairing with developers, helping level up their teams. She’s also a director of Ruby Central and is writing a book!

Rachel Myers

Rachel Myers has been running RailsBridge things since 2010, after attending the second RailsBridge workshop and later becoming the very first San Francisco meta-organizer. She’s a frequent conference speaker and RailsBridge evangelist. Rachel is an engineer at GitHub, where she writes Ruby and JavaScript. In her spare time, she loves drinking Scotch, and playing with Legos and taking her cat on walks.

Where’s Sarah Allen?

We’re delighted to report that Sarah Allen, co-founder of RailsBridge with Sarah Mei, is still heavily involved with the organization. Leadership-wise, though, she’s leading the charge over at Bridge Foundry, a non-profit organization we created when we realized that all the things we knew about how to increase diversity were too good to keep just within the Ruby community. Currently, in addition to RailsBridge, Bridge Foundry is working with ClojureBridge and MobileBridge. Check out their awesome work at bridgefoundry.org.

by Beverly Nelson

If you are starting a workshop in an area not known for tech or where workshops are not traditionally held, you might wonder how to go about securing a host for your event.

Insight from previous organizers who’ve been through this exact situation shared these helpful ideas:

Look at local meetups and see where they are hosted, connect with the organizer, find out where people work who attend, ask there for people who want to host/sponsor.

Look at companies who are hiring.

Look at co-working spaces where they have open desks, so having events will help them become more well-known (as opposed to venues that charge for space).

Consider alternate spaces — some libraries or universities like to host community events.” The closest satellite location for the state’s university or community center might be available and eager to provide opportunities for the community. Public school systems often provide space on the weekend while students are out.

If you are still struggling to find a venue, use social media. Tweet or post your request locally

Do you work at or know a company in (your local area) who would like to host a @railsbridge workshop?

One final valuable reminder from Sarah Allen:

The key thing is to build relationships. Work with a company to find a convenient time for them, consider planning an event a few months from now, if that is what works, you can always plan another one sooner if somewhere else opens up.

If you are looking for more help in getting started check out the Cookbook, reach out to the workshop google group to connect with other organizers and volunteers, or email us at hello@railsbridge.org.

RailsBridge was founded by a group of people who were experienced with open source. With intention and thoughtfulness, we applied open source practices to the creation of teaching events. In the past five years, RailsBridge has spread widely across the globe, spawning new workshops in other languages and other locations. We have strong patterns of enabling new leaders to step up and make change. We must be thoughtful on how we support those leaders to create a resilient organization.

The Power of Decentralization

“The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations,” strongly influenced how I thought about the early patterns of the RailsBridge organization. The book highlights the research of Tom Nevins, a cultural anthropologist specializing in Native American tribes of the Southwest. The introduction tells a powerful story about how, in 1519, the powerful centralized Aztec civilization was more easily and quickly conquered by Cortés, than the Apache tribes which withstood the Spanish for hundreds of years — a contrast of centralized vs. decentralized organizations:

A centralized organization is easy to understand. Think of any major company or governmental agency. You have a clear leader who’s in charge, and there’s a specific place where decisions are made (the boardroom, the corporate headquarters, city hall). Nevins calls this organizational type coercive because the leaders call the shots: when a CEO fires you, you’re out. When Cortés ordered his army to march, they marched. The Spanish, Aztecs, and Incas were all centralized, or coercive. Although it sounds like something out of a Russian gulag, a coercive system is not necessarily bad. Whether you’re a Spanish general, an Aztec leader, or a CEO of a Fortune 500 company, you use command-and-control to keep order in your organization, to make it efficient, and to function from day to day. Rules need to be set and enforced, or the system collapses…

Decentralized systems, on the other hand, are a little trickier to understand. In a decentralized organization, there’s no clear leader, no hierarchy, and no headquarters. If and when a leader does emerge, that person has little power over others. The best that person can do to influence people is to lead by example. Nevins calls this an open system, because everyone is entitled to make his or her own decisions. This doesn’t mean that a decentralized system is the same as anarchy. There are rules and norms, but these aren’t enforced by any one person. Rather, the power is distributed among all the people and across geographic regions. (Brafman & Beckstrom, Locations 254-268)

Emerging Leaders

On reflection, I believe the title of the book is misleading. The so-called leaderless organizations actually have very strong leadership; however the leaders are chosen in ways that are independent of a traditional hierarchy, power is distributed, and leadership can emerge from any individual. The book describes many different organizations with non-hierarchical leadership models. The Apache tribe model of leadership is particularly inspiring, leading to resilience in the face of genocidal attackers.

Instead of a chief, the Apaches had a Nant’an—a spiritual and cultural leader. The Nant’an led by example and held no coercive power. Tribe members followed the Nant’an because they wanted to, not because they had to… Coercion is a foreign concept. The Nant’ans were crucial to the well-being of this open system, but decentralization affects more than just leadership. Because there was no capital and no central command post, Apache decisions were made all over the place. A raid on a Spanish settlement, for example, could be conceived in one place, organized in another, and carried out in yet another. You never knew where the Apaches would be coming from. In one sense, there was no place where important decisions were made, and in another sense, decisions were made by everybody everywhere…

Not only did the Apaches survive the Spanish attacks, but amazingly, the attacks served to make them even stronger. When the Spanish attacked them, the Apaches became even more decentralized and even more difficult to conquer. When the Spanish destroyed their villages, the Apaches might have surrendered if the villages had been crucial to their society. But they weren’t. Instead, the Apaches abandoned their old houses and became nomads. (Brafman & Beckstrom, Locations 269-289)

Working with Allies

Another path to a decentralized organization can stem from leveraging an existing network. The book highlights abolitionist, Granville Sharp, who worked with the Quakers to abolish slavery. He did not lead an organization from the top down, but rather activated an existing network from its edges. This is an effective paradigm that is embedded in the RailsBridge model where we ally with corporate and community groups to achieve our goals. However, we must look at his presentation as a cautionary tale. As someone who was for many years an active member of the Society of Friends (aka Quakers), I found it a little disturbing that the authors positioned the Quakers as a “platform” for Sharp’s abolitionist goals, largely ignoring the fact that slavery is inconsistent with the core tenets of the religion and the many activists within the Society of Friends who worked to highlight the hypocrisy and change the dominant paradigm. There is great strength when we tap into a like-minded network. If there exists a group that share values, but has not yet seen the light, then our ideas can spread like wildfire. We must be conscientious in crediting that organization with the creation of that network, the strength of its core values and openness to change.

Eric Ries, who named the entrepreneurial movement “Lean Startup,” is quick to point out that many people were practicing the art for many years. He catalyzed a movement by naming it, creating connections and a space for people to share their success stories and evangelized other people’s success as well as his own. When we tap into companies that seek to create a diverse workplace that is consistent with their own values, we should honor their initiative. Our incredible growth and strength can attributed to the openness and support of the Ruby community, where we had our start, as well as generations of women and people of color who came before us. When new organizations are inspired by our model, get their start at one of our workshops, or leverage our open source software and processes, we cheer them on and tell their stories.

Step Up, Step Back

We should not strive to be a leaderless organization, but rather one where any individual may step up and become a leader without seeking permission or being granted authority. I believe that every person has leadership potential, and every role within our organization, every volunteer task, allows people to practice and demonstrate leadership.

Open source documentation about the structure of the organization is intended to serve as an invitation for anyone to step up. We have such big problems to solve that there is plenty of work to go around. We have infinite possibilities for leadership roles. However, even an open process can appear opaque from the outside — documentation is important, but not sufficient. Each experienced leader must also invite new people to step into a leadership role, then step back into a mentoring role. When the new leader steps up, we have the opportunity to take a rest or step up to a new challenge. We seek to include a persistent, open invitation in documentation and presentations, and augment that message with in person communication.

Internet pioneer and Silicon Valley leader Judy Estrin will be the keynote speaker at an event hosted by Railsbridge, a San Francisco-based non-profit focused on fostering diversity in tech, and Galvanize, a startup ecosystem for digital entrepreneurs. Tickets available:

April 7th, 2104:
    6pm VIP dinner
    7:30 Main Event with Judy Estrin
Galvanize Theater, 543 Howard Street, San Francisco

Estrin has co-founded eight technology companies and served as the CTO of Cisco Systems as well as on the boards of directors of The Walt Disney Company and FedEx Corporation. While at Stanford, she was a member of the research team, led by Vint Cerf, that developed the initial TCP protocols. She was involved in the early standardization efforts of the Ethernet and a key player in developing the commercial local area network and internet markets.

She will share stories from the early days of the Internet, from the invention of TCP/IP in an academic setting, to creating one of the first commercial local area network systems, to building companies that defined the infrastructure for the World Wide Web of today. Estrin will also share some thoughts about the state of innovation and the internet looking forward.

The event will raise funds for RailsBridge, with matching funds to be provided by Vail Resorts. Galvanize CEO, Jim Deters, was selected to participate in the Vail Ski Challenge and selected RailsBridge as its non-profit partner.

Reserve your spot at the SF event now, and you can also support us by voting for our team on the Vail Ski Challenge Facebook app — you can vote every day! Up to 2000 votes increases the donation to RailsBridge at the end of the challenge.

Almost 20 people, mostly women and a few men, crowded into TrueCar‘s conference room. Many thanks to Chris Lichti who responded to a last minute text message and Jeremy who stayed late at the office. Thanks also to Nike for supplying food & drink, Women Who Code who got the word out, connected us to Nike and helped with last minute logistics.

Phoenix Perry from the Code Liberation Foundation taught a hands-on workshop in 2d game programming with Unity. It was great to have an event where experienced programmers could dive in and learn a new environment and programming language — everyone had coded before, but most were new to C#.

At the beginning of her talk, Phoenix reviewed the history of computer programming — from a field that was almost exclusively female to the strange shift to the male-dominated industry we see today. Almost half of gamers are women, and I’m excited about what Code Liberation is doing to bring more women into the exciting world of game development. Normally they teach a series of classes in C++ and open frameworks, and graduates have gone on to develop and publish games.

How did we bring this exciting new movement to San Francisco?

These kinds of simple, yet powerful teaching events do not need months of planning or complex logistics — just like Women Who Code, RailsBridge, ClojureBridge, PyLadies, or any of the other grassroots coding communities, we can make this happen in any major city and in quite a few smaller locales that have a few passionate coders willing to teach. I’m delighted to share the simple and powerful story about how the community came together to support the Code Liberation crew and made this happen.

Late Sunday night, I got a message from an old friend introducing me to Phoenix Perry:

Sarah, Phoenix runs an organization, The Code Liberation Foundation (http://codeliberation.org) to teach women to program games for free… They are in SF this week at the Game Developer Conference and Phoenix is speaking. However, despite the fact that only 4% of game developers are women, they refused their proposal to teach a free workshop for minority voices in games. Persistent, they are still looking for a place where they can run a free workshop. Do you know anyone in SF who might host them?

What kind of person travels across the country to speak at a conference and instead of just going to the parties after a long day at the conference volunteers to teach a group of strangers a new coding skill for free? I do that. So does Desi, Mary, Renee, Sarah and so many other people who have spread RailsBridge far and wide. And here’s someone who wants to come to our town and teach the skills that she knows. How could I say no?

It was heart-warming how the community came together. I decided to reach out to Women Who Code whose thriving community has a lot of experienced developers who write code for all kinds of platforms. Alaina Percival’s quick response was simply to create a meetup event and make me the host so I could fill out the details. There were all sorts of shenanigans in getting the event to happen, as you might expect when you plan an event in 4 days with a loose collection of people communicating via email, twitter, and text messages. With community support, we can be resilient and move fast.

Were you sorry you missed the event? Would you like to see one like it happen again? All the code and teaching materials are on github. I’ll bet Pheonix would be up for a remote teacher training, and we may have some would-be teachers lurking… or could it be you?

We are very excited to announce that Galvanize has picked RailsBridge as their beneficiary for the Vail Ski Challenge. Galvanize, which runs gSchool, has hosted many Colorado workshops and has been very supportive of our efforts there. They are opening offices in San Francisco and New York City, where we have active chapters.

The future of employment is increasingly digital and skills-based. At Galvanize and gSchool we have a created an immersive learning environment for efficiently equipping new workers with relevant and immediately employable software programming skills. We are excited to partner with RailsBridge who share our passion for diversifying the talent base by creating educational programming and a community to support women in the field of software programming.
        — Jim Deters, Galvanize CEO

We believe that Galvanize is very mission aligned, and we are excited to work together to increase diversity in tech, so that people of all backgrounds can feel welcome and comfortable in our industry.

Please support us by voting for our team on the Vail Ski Challenge Facebook page — you can vote every day! Up to 2000 votes increases the donation to RailsBridge at the end of the challenge. There will also be some ski events which will help raise money for RailsBridge. We’ll send out more info as we have it!