Workshop Recipes¶

If you know Rails and have the interest and energy to make it happen, you can create a workshop near where you live. If you have money (or access to a sponsor) and want to make something happen, you can make it so. It could be as small as 15 people in a conference room and still have a significant positive impact not only for the attendees, but also for the community where you live and the wider open source community.

The key ingredients to a workshop are:

• a lead organizer or team
• an ecosystem (or plan to create one)

If you have the above and ideally one or more of the following, then RailsBridge can help connect you to fill out what is needed:

• a teacher (or two)
• a pool of local experts to draw upon (meetup, user group, local companies/consultants that use Rails)
• location
• sponsor(s)
• childcare

The ratio of students to experts is very important. It works best when this is 2:1. In San Francisco, we typically have 50 students and 25 teachers and TAs. If you are short of experts, I would set a max class size of 12-25 (depending on how much teaching experience the teacher has) and make sure there is at least one expert for every 6 students.

The Workshop project can provide:

• curriculum
• day of event: schedule and logistics
• sample budgets
• tips for creating online sign-ups
• how to reach out to potential attendees
• timeline of what you need to do to plan the event