Summary

The CiviCRM book sprint and translation sprint was held in Truckee from Fri April 22nd to Wednesday April 28th. After four long and intense days, the book CiviCRM: A Comprehensive Guide was published and released on the FlossManuals website. The first draft of the book is 305 pages long. The book was a collaboration between 15 people from the CiviCRM community and core team and coordinated by Adam Hyde from FlossManuals.

The book provides a framework to help readers figure out what they could use CiviCRM for, and whether it's a good tool to serve their organization's needs and mission (e.g. is it a good fit for their capabilities and budget). It improves and updates the first version of the book to match the features in CiviCRM v3.2 The book has been expanded to address 2 additional audiences. End-user tasks are covered in new "Every-day Task" chapters under each component. Integrators and developers get an entirely new section on "Extending CiviCRM" which will covers a wide-range of customization and extensibility strategies, and should help promote best-practices in this area. New chapters were written to cover CiviCase (case management), CiviReport, CiviMail and Localization.

Highlights

• Produced a 305 page book for the CiviCRM community which can be read online, downloaded for offline consumption and ordered in a bound printed book format. The new book is clearly segmented by audience which will make it easy to "re-mix" and create targeted editions for specific audiences (e.g. end-user or developer versions).
• Brought together a diverse group of CiviCRM developers, users and integrators. This gave the team an opportunity to look at CiviCRM from a big picture user lens and hence see some of the shortcomings that are now targeted to be addressed in future releases.
• Improved the localization and translation process in CiviCRM. Having a group of international folks: Taiwan, Poland, Belgium, Netherlands, Canada (Quebec) gave the team a deeper appreciation of some of the finer nuances of localization and internationalization. Based on group discussion, new localisation tool for CiviCRM Transifex has been chosen.
• Timing of the sprints allowed book sprint participants to attend multiple events related to CiviCRM and Drupal. In a span of 10 days we had: 1 day of CiviCRM user and developer training (50 people), 3 days of DrupalCon, 1 day of CiviCon (over 70 attendees), 4 days of sprints and 2 travel days to/from Tahoe.
• Having two sprints simultaneously allowed better co-mingling and knowledge sharing between people. Our group dinners were quite productive and the translation folks also wrote Localization and CiviMail chapters in the new book.

Participant Information

Our initial budget was for 10 participants from the community and 8 core team members. Due to the confluence of other events around the book sprint, we recruited 15 participants from the CiviCRM community. All the participants have been active in the CiviCRM community for more than two years.

Book Sprint Participants

• Michael McAndrew - Book Sprint Lead, Third Sector Design, UK
• Alice Aguilar - Progressive Technology Project, US
• Josue Guillen - Progressive Technology Project, US
• Kyle Jaster - rayogram.com, US
• Jack Aponte - PalanteTech.com, US
• Sarah Gladstone - Pogstone.com, US
• Xavier Dutoit - Tech to the People, Belgium
• Dave Greenberg - CiviCRM, US
• Kurund Jalmi - CiviCRM, India
• Mari Tilos - CiviCRM, US
• Adam Hyde - Floss Manuals
• Andy Oram - Remote Book Editor, Boston
• Wes Morgan - Democratic National Committee, US

Translation Sprint Participants

• Erik Brouwer - EE-atWork. The Netherlands
• Mathieu Lutfy - Koumbit, Canada
• Mathieu Petit - Clair - Koumbit, Canada
• Jimmy Huang - Netivism Taiwan
• Goran Gugić - Croatia/Switzerland
• Donald Lobo - CiviCRM, US
• Piotr Szotkowski - CiviCRM, Poland - Translation Sprint Lead
• Michal Mach - CiviCRM, Poland
• Deepak Srivastava - CiviCRM, India
• Yashodha C - CiviCRM, India
• Wes Morgan - Democratic National Committee, US

Financial Details

All amounts in USD.

Other financial contributions

Social Source Foundation covered part of the expenses that were not part of the above budget. Briefly this includes the following items:

• Salaries and travel expenses for CiviCRM team members for the duration of the sprint
• Housing and transportation to/from tahoe and in San Francisco before/after the sprint
• Stipend for CiviCRM team members
• Logistical support and planning

Volunteer hours

We estimate that each of the 15 community participants gave more than 75 hours of their time for the sprint.

Documentation production during the book sprint

Attachments

A PDF copy of the book can be downloaded here

Blog posts and Web links

There was a steady stream of blog post before, during and after the book sprint. You can read them online:

• Collection of blog posts on the book sprint at civicrm.org
• Collection of blog posts on the translation sprint at civicrm.org
• Collection of bluff post on CiviCon
• Blog post recapping the highlight of the 8 days\
• Wiki page linking all CiviCon presentations

Interaction with FLOSS Manuals

The additional funding to get FLOSS Manuals for the book sprint helped a lot. Adam was an excellent facilitator and structured the sprint very well. He also got the most out of the participants in those 4 days. We are also very excited about their new platform, booki since it does address and solve some of the most pressing issues. Specifically:

• Booki allows easy customisation of forks (ie. consultants can make their own version of the book customised for clients or trainers can do the same to create workshop manuals). This was a big hit with the integrators in the sprint
• Booki will allow CiviCRM to publish the book on our own servers using the Booki API. This will give us more control over the user experience, look and feel and feature set. It will also allow us to track statistics in a better manner

Participant Comments

We asked participants to send us some comments on their experience in the booksprint. Here are some quotes

Wes Morgan

Show me a successful open source community that doesn't have a healthy habit of gathering together in small and large numbers in "meat space." They all do it, and it's a big reason why they're as successful as they are.

It reminds us what we're working towards, and why. And most importantly, the weird, funny, awesome people behind the IRC handles.

Here's an example: Finishing the drush installer for CiviCRM would not have happened yesterday if one person from Mumbai, India, one person from Montreal, Canada, and one person from Washington, DC, USA didn't happen to be in the room together. It would have happened, but not in one day.

Jack Aponte

I was excited about the book sprint before I got there, but I think so much more came out of it than I expected:

• Most obviously, we created an awesome resource that will be of tremendous benefit to current CiviCRM users, implementers, and developers.
• A more comprehensive, up-to-date book is a significant selling point for new CiviCRM adopters, as I discovered first hand in a meeting with a prospective client recently.
• The book sprint itself actually taught me TONS about CiviCRM, allowing me to do both the "sales" and implementation portions of my job better. And all this without even reading most of the revised book, which I plan to do soon!
• Finally, the sprint renewed and increased my own interest in and commitment to working with CiviCRM because I got to meet and work with such an amazing group of folks, put faces to names and internet handles, create connections and forge bonds. The was a HUGE community builder which, as Wes noted, is crucial to the success of any open source project.

Jimmy Huang

I think the key of sprint for me, is to help the CiviCRM to become real localized software. Translation is the beginning and very basic, but localize is a big deal for a software. Last few days, I have opportunity that can sit down work with core team guys and discuss with you how this important for a real localized tool. We talk about feature enhance, such as display name format and address format, and the discuss is hard to happen in remote. We talk about process when cooperation in the remote(eg. translation process). It's very important for that we can sit down to see the question. I think it's a start for CiviCRM that can become globally. Globalize for those non-English country.

Pete F from Wikipedia foundation

These blog posts are so cool - it's great to have a sense of the collaborative process!

Michael McAndrew

Participating in the sprints again this year was a great experience.  As well as being a great way to conrtibute back to the CiviCRM community, it was also a great chance to learn more about CiviCRM, and make connections with others in the community.  This add a lot of value to the CiviCRM community in many different ways and I hope we can have more of these soon!

I think that one of the most interesting - and unplanned - consequences of having both sprints together in time and space was that developments that came out of one sprint could be picked up by the other (e.g. renaming of custom data groups to custom data sets in the interface - a significant usability improvement - was discussed at the documentation sprint and then implemented by developers) and the new functionality that emerged from the developer sprint around localisation was fully covered at the documentation sprint.  Next time we sprint, it would be great to think more about this process and work out how we can encourage it to happen even more.

Another highlight was being able to produce comprehensive documentation for CiviCRM version 3.2 a couple of weeks before its scheduled release date, which I have a feeling is a pretty rare occurence in the open source world.

Future Plans

• More code sprints focused on very specific areas. Helps the project move significantly in that area. We plan on doing more sprints around our training camps.
• More book sprints, i.e. more documentation as CiviCRM grows and extends
• Adopt more of the sprint methodology to make significant progress on a certain issue. We used this idea very successfully at a test sprint which we did 6 days after the book and code sprint