Summary

The CiviCRM book sprint was held in Truckee from Sunday May 3rd to Friday May 8th. After five long and intense days, the book Understanding CiviCRM was published and released on the FlossManuals.net website. The final book was a bit more than 280 pages, the longest book produced by a book sprint. The book was a collaboration between 10 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 complements the existing procedurally-oriented documentation wiki - offering a rich set of case studies and examples to help new users get the "big picture" and discover new ways to use the software. Although most of the chapters are specifically about implementing CiviCRM, there are also several chapters that contain a set of basic information about general concepts related to using IT tools in non-profit organisation, so we think it might be a valuable source of information in a much broader scope.

Highlights

• Produced a 282 page book for the CiviCRM community which can be read online, downloaded for offline consumption and ordered in a bound printed book format.
• 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.
• Timing of the book sprint allowed book sprint participants to attend multiple events related to CiviCRM and Non-profits.

Participant Information

Our initial budget was for 7-8 participants. Due to the confluence of other events around the book sprint, we recruited 10 participants from the CiviCRM community. All the participants have been active in the CiviCRM community for more than two years.

Community Participants

• Eileen McNaughton - Fuzion, New Zealand
• Peter Davis - Fuzion, New Zealand
• Brian Shaughnessy - Lighthouse Consulting and Design, New York
• Tony Guzman - Dharmatech, Utah
• Michael McAndrew - Third Sector Design, London, UK
• Cynthia Tarascio - American Friends Service Commitee, Pennsylvania

CiviCRM Team Participants

• David Greenberg - California
• Mari Tilos - California
• Yashodha Chaku - India
• Michal Mach - Poland

FlossManuals Participants

• Adam Hyde - Book sprint coordinator, FlossManuals.net, Germany
• Andy Oram - Remote editor, New York. Andy is an editor for technical publisher and information provider Reilly Media, specializing currently in open source technologies and software engineering.

Evaluation of Book Sprint Approach

Based on feedback from participants, this section summarizes of what worked well and what were some drawbacks of the book sprint approach.

Pros:

• You get a book at the end of 5 days and the quality/content is quite high.
• Book content reflects the broad range of perspectives, constituencies and subject matter expertise of the participants. This is a significant benefit as compared to a single-author approach.
• The sprint model provides a good team bonding exercise, and a great way for the core team and the community to interact in a focused setting.
• You see and hear about the limitations of the software while writing / planning the book.
• Getting the community involved, which indirectly encourages them step up in other areas of CiviCRM is a huge benefit.

Cons:

• Some folks felt that there was a fair amount of duplicated and wasted work (that did not make it to the book), which could have been prevented with better planning upfront. Adam's view was less planning is better, and deciding things during the sprint is a better model.
• The tools are a bit primitive and could use a major upgrade. Some folks lost 2-3 hours work during the course of the sprint. (Upgrades to the tools are in the works according to Adam.)

Overall we think the pros significantly outweigh the cons, and we would definitely want to do a few more books this way.

Financial Details

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 for David Greenberg, Yashodha Chaku and Michal Mach for the duration of the sprint
• Stipend for Yashodha Chaku and Michal Mach for the duration of the sprint
• International airfare for Yashodha Chaku and Michal Mach
• Logistical support and planning

Volunteer hours

We estimate that each of the 6 community participants gave at least 100 hours of their time for the book sprint. There was a lot of time spent upfront with regard to planning and organizing the booksprint conducted on a mailing list. There were also two planning conference calls.

In addition many other CiviCRM users and implementers participated in early discussions around content.

Documentation production during the book sprint

Attachments

A PDF copy of the book is attached 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:

• Understanding CiviCRM
• Collection of blog posts on the booksprint at civicrm.org
• Tony Guzman's diary on the book sprint
• Peter Davis's take on the book sprint

Other events around the Book Sprint

We held the book sprint the week after Penguin Day and NTEN NTC. We were a sponsor of Penguin Day and had multiple sessions at that event. We had a CiviCRM affinity group meeting during the first day of NTEN and attendees represented CiviCRM at many other sessions.  This was followed by a CiviCRM user meeting and a developer camp. Both these events were well attended and will help with the growth and adoption of CiviCRM. The timing of the above events enabled 10 (out of 12) book sprint participants to participate in these events and hence get more involved with the CiviCRM community and the larger non-profit community. Blog posts on these events are online:

• NTEN Blog Post from Judy Hallman
• Developer Camp Report
• Jim Taylor's take on the Developer Camp
• Michelle Murrain's description of developer camp

Future Plans

The book is a living document, and we plan on updating and revising it on a periodic basis. Michael McAndrew and Mari Tilos have stepped up and volunteered to be maintainers of the book. The book will have to be revised on every CiviCRM release, and will need a second edition 12-18 months from now.

Future Books

Due to constraints on time and length of book, the team had to omit quite a few important concepts within CiviCRM. This includes the components CiviPledge, CiviGrant and CiviCase. The book also did not get into advanced concepts like permissioning, customizing templates, Drupal hooks and extending CiviCRM programatically. We envision a few more books in the future including:

• Understanding CiviCRM: An Advanced Guide
• CiviCRM Cookbook: Recipes for Extending and Customizing CiviCRM