Hi, everybody -- I just wanted to offer a huge, heartfelt THANKS for this summer. 🙌 ⚡️ ⚡️

We knew something special was happening when, in January/February, we started getting more new contributors than we even knew how to respond to. If you can imagine, we weren't sure if we should keep going, because we worried we wouldn't be able to keep up the pace. We ALSO thought seriously about reducing our participation in GSoC this year, because it might disrupt the community-building process that had gained some momentum. When we got SO MANY good proposals, we worried we'd have to disappoint a lot of people!

But while we couldn't accept all of them, we ultimately decided that our community was demonstrating not only good initial welcoming of contributors, but an impressive growth of emerging leadership among contributors -- people taking on bigger, more complex projects, and also welcoming in others in turn, which helped relieve our worries about being able to support newcomers.

It was only going to get better! As we accepted 9 students (almost double our previous max of 5!), we found that we didn't stop welcoming in new people, as we'd feared. In fact, our outreach grew, as you all built skills to bring others into your work, support them, and build a bigger community.

We tried lots of new things -- like our Weekly Check-ins and CodeClimate -- and the future looks bright with LOTS of enthusiasm for Code-In in a few months: https://github.com/publiclab/plots2/issues/3168

🎉 🎉

Beyond thanking and congratulating you all, I wanted to note that while I'm sure folks will need time as school starts up again, you're all welcome here in whatever capacity and time you can bring. As you all know, Rails Girls Summer of Code is ongoing and will run through the end of September!

You've all helped to make this such an amazing community to be a part of. Our project has grown enormously, and we hope you'll continue to be a part of it.

THANKS!!!

Project report-ins

Plus these three:

https://github.com/MargaretAN9/Peggy

https://gist.github.com/namangupta01/491dc35f7ffaa794e86d38afac838869

https://gist.github.com/sagarpreet-chadha/209ad37ca653d5bf3137bb146f8eff45