Refugees On Rails Cologne

Give refugees - and your old laptop - a brighter future! -- here in Cologne

View project on GitHub

What?

Our first two events were weekend workshops teaching refugees from the Cologne area web development (with the framework Ruby on Rails) using laptops donated by the community. We are now trying to turn it into a regular event.

For the refugees this is on the one hand an opportunity to use the time that they have to learn a new skill and on the other hand a chance to get introduced to the local tech community.

For the organizers, coaches and the local tech community it is a way to help refugees by doing what we like and what we are good at. It enables close contact with our new fellow citizen. And it might help to bring new talent to our industry.

When?

We now plan to meet every other week on Thursday nights. The next meeting will be on

Thursday March 3, 19:00

Where?

Our meetings take place in the Cowoco coworking space in the south of Cologne

Coworking Cologne
An der Bottmühle 5
50678 Köln

More information: http://coworkingcologne.de/space/

Participants

Interested refugees from the Cologne region.

You should have decent English/German skills. Everything else (laptops, location, drinks, etc.) will be provided by us.

To participate, please fill out our short application form, get in touch via Slack or our Google group.

We still have a handfull of open spots, so apply now and spread the word.

Agenda

We don’t have any particular lesson prepared for you, but you can just continue working one of the tutorials from the workshops or we can help you find something new. So far we have worked with the following tutorials:

Track 1: HTML for beginners

  • Understand how web pages work
  • Build your first web page (for example a personal portfolio page)
  • Apply custom styling with CSS
  • Create interactive websites with JavaScript
  • You do not need any previous programming experience for this
  • This is the tutorial that we will use: http://code.makery.ch/library/html-css/

Track 2: Advanced web development (with Ruby on Rails)

  • Our coaches can teach you based on your individual interests and skill levels
  • If you are new to Rails you can start with the very nice RailsGirls App Tutorial: http://guides.railsgirls.com/app
  • If you want to learn something specific please try to contact us in advance
  • Having some basic programming experience is recommend

Coaches

Volunteer coaches from the communtiy

If you would consider coaching at the event please leave a comment on the GitHub issue, join our Slack chat channel and come to one of our orga-meetings

Who are we?

We are a group of volunteers from the Cologne tech community who would like to use their skill to help refugees here in Cologne

  • Jakob Hilden
  • Denise Schynol
  • Christian Vervoorts
  • Tatjana Lajendäcker
  • Tim Fischbach
  • and more

How can I help?

There are many ways to help:

  • Help us reach the right participants in the refugee community
  • You (or your company) could donate some not too old laptops
  • We are looking for coaches/mentors for our workshop(s)
  • There are many other areas that need organizing help (editing, design, PR, logistics, anything)
  • Come to our weekly orga-meeting

Laptop Donations

Do you or your company have any old laptops that are not really used for anything anymore? You can give your laptops a new life and make a real change for on of our refugee participants.

We currently are still in need of 10 more laptops in order to provide for all the participants.

Here are the infos on how the donation works:

  • We will securely wipe all the data on your laptop(s) for you using military-grade software, so you don’t have to worry about that.
  • Laptops can be dropped of during business hours at the even location (address see above)
  • For the laptops to be useful for programming they need to meet the basic requirements of at least a 2 core CPU and 2 GB of RAM.
  • The laptops remain property of Refugeesonrails, but can be taken home by the participants.

What are the plans for the future?

We would like to offer regular (e.g. biweekly) informal meetings where participants can go, get access to computers, and have professional volunteer coaches that they can turn to for help.

If you have other ideas what you and the Cologne tech community could do for refugees, please let us know. Our initiative is very open to new directions in the future.

Code of Conduct

Be nice and fantastic to each other. More infos here: Berlin Code of Conduct

Contact

You can contact us by writing an email to refugeesonrails@gmail.com, via Slack or in our Google group