Ruby for Good 2018
4 days. 9 open source projects. 80 Rubyists.
By: Dom Brassey
Participating in an event like Ruby for Good, especially if you’re new and don’t know where to begin, helps usher you into the world of open source in a friendly, non-threatening way. People are around to help you, you’re part of a team, and you can choose a cause that you believe in so all the time you spend working on a project, you’re actually working toward the greater good. — Ruby for Good Organizer, Teresa Finn
The 5th Annual Ruby for Good event just wrapped. 80 Ruby developers participated in this 4-day “not-a-hackathon” in Washington, D.C. After a welcome from founder Sean Marcia and the team, leaders took the stage to pitch the weekend sprints they planned with nonprofit stakeholders like Namati, PDX Diaper Bank, OpenStreetMap, and more.
Events like Ruby For Good help developers grow as leaders and collaborators, offer non-profits access to technology built to their custom needs, and give sponsors an opportunity to develop deep relationships with tech professionals. A huge thank you to our own Kalimar on the organizing team, and all the individuals who came together to build collaborative and open technology.
Here’s a deeper look at some of the projects we worked on:
Amazon Terrastories
Our friends at the Amazon Conservation Team asked developers to build a geo-storytelling app that features video recordings of the oral histories that these communities share about their territory. The teams built Terrastories as a Dockerized Rails App to help users locate content geographically on an interactive, offline-compatible map.
The Terrastories team took the stage to demo their project:
OpenStreetMap
OpenStreetMap convened a team of volunteers to improve the http://openstreetmap.org website. Led by Chris Flipse and Ben Reynolds, the team refactored routes to make them more resourceful and moved towards a replacement authentication system with the CanCanCan framework.
These improvements to the OpenStreetMap infrastructure will ultimately benefit the hundreds of millions of people who use OpenStreetMap data daily, including NGOs like MSF and the Red Cross, companies like Mapbox, Facebook, and Apple, and governments, educators, researchers, and mapmakers around the globe.
This is only a glimpse at the work accomplished during Ruby for Good 2018. We can’t wait to do it again next year. In the meantime, if you’re working on a project for social good our Community team wants to know about it! Drop us a line so we can connect.
