We’re building an open source web app with Ruby on Rails to track all the donor programs in the country for health. To know where the money goes and what difference it made.  To increase transparency and accountability. To know more and make better decisions. And once it’s ready, it can spread all over Africa.

We’re building it with local software developers. We’re working together to learn and teach how to solve problems like this, so Rwandans can better solve their own problems. We want sustainable solutions for the long term.

We need you. We need your passion and creativity to solve these hard problems together.

Let us know if you’re interested in helping out and sharing your passion at bit.ly/RwandaOnRails . Your time and creativity can make a lasting difference. After you fill out this form we will contact / follow up with you soon!

We’re doing this as a part of the Health Systems 20/20 USAID project.

The website you’re on now held the materials for the first training we did on Ruby on Rails in Rwanda. We couldn’t have done it without the enthusiastic support of USAID, the Rwandan Ministry of Health, 3 great volunteers and 15 equally awesome local developers. You can learn more about them on the About Us webpage. We’ll be coming up with a site for the whole project soon – let us know if you want to help with that too.

You can learn more about Rwanda at the CIA World Factbook.

Thanks!

• trainers engaged & committed
• made things better each day (retrospectives)
• Listened to students, meeting trainee needs
• to the point training
• managed to introduce new language in 2 weeks
• liked meeting trainers/making friends
• surprised how much learned in 2 weeks
• work that we did
• liked how trainers taught & were serious & committed
• liked how subjects important to trainees were covered
• liked how trainers were so present to trainees 1 on 1
• liked the practice and exercises
• methodology was very good
• liked how much we covered
• wants to get all materials (http://www.rwandaonrails.com)

What could go better in a future workshop

• Better Air Conditioning
• Wanted more planning for events
• Outside Kigali
• no work commitments
• more time than 2 weeks/1 month so have time to practice (++++++++++++++)
• spend time outside classroom together
• wants more about plugins (export, logging, reporting)
• what can trainees do to continue learning
• wants to cover all topics in more detail
• didn’t have time for managers training
• more agile
• need to cover other topics like OOP
• went too fast on last day
• switched too much theory & practice
• wanted more slides
• wanted more basics on syntax before exercises
• wants links and recommendations for future readings
• wants to keep in touch (emails and skype)
• make sure promises are fulfilled (money and other stuff)

• Exercise
• Respected time
• Interesting topics
• Liked last 8 days
• Good progress

What to work on tomorrow

• Topic: Deploy App
• Topic: Security
• Topic: Plugins (i.e. pagination)
• Poor planning for beer
• Topic: Dynamic table reporting
• Topic: Exporting data
• Topic: Reading and Writing files
• Topic: Regex
• Topic: JQuery
• Topic: SMS
• Topic: Web Services

• Continue learning more deep concepts
• Continue exercises

Things to work on

• Recaps in the morning
• More Primus
• How these concepts work in a production application & hosting
• More new topics

layout and partials :

http://guides.rubyonrails.org/layouts_and_rendering.html

• Dynamic find_by Methods
• Fun with Find Conditions
• All About Layouts
• Layouts and content_for
• Seed data

On Wednesday night the Serena Hotel staged a special dance performance for the Canadian Governor General Michaelle Jean and we had front row seats.