Collective focus/foci for the sprint
Sorry for the use of the latin plural in the issue title - I couldn't resist :)
I want to explore the idea of having one or slightly more than one focus/foci for the sprint after the community summit.
Here's some background on why:
In recent years, sprints have been very self organising, with all attendees deciding what to focus on more or less individually, or in small groups, in days and weeks before the event. This is great, and I always have a great time but there is another approach, which we have taken successfully in the past, which is to have more or less a single focus for the sprint. This is what allowed us to write 70% of the user guide back in 2009 and come back and write the remaining 30% a year later. We wouldn't have been able to achieve such a feat without a collective focus.
I think it might be worth reviving/reinventing/iterating on this approach again and here is a suggestion for a way to do so:
- appoint a working group (2 core team and 2 community members)
- ask everyone to submit big ideas for things that we could tackle at a sprint
- have the working group decide (with community input) on one or slightly more than one focus/foci for the sprint and appoint team leads for each
- have these team leads do a bit of prep
- run the sprint based on these big ideas
A couple more lessons from history. I remember a sprint in Tahoe (2012 maybe?) where the focus was testing since we were just coming up to a big release (back when we used to do 1 or 2 releases a year). Although there was a nice feeling of achievement as we cranked through tests, I seem to remember a bit of resentment that we were being 'forced' to do drudge work when we could have been collaborating around something a bit more inspirational. The lessons for me from this were:
- choose inspirational tasks that are suitable for collaboration, appeal to different skill sets, and that lots of people want to get involved in
- don't make it compulsory - encourage people to work on whatever we have chosen as the focus, but leave space for them to work on other stuff if that is important to them
- break up the sprint with other things (presentations, short workshops, visions, etc.) that make people happy.
Here are some a few random (possibly good, possibly very bad) ideas from me to give you an idea about the kind of things we could tackle:
- User centred design for CiviCRM
- Big improvements to the financial layer / rewrite of CiviContribute
- Move everything over to Gitlab