[FM Discuss] Quick impressions following CiviCRM book sprint

[David Farning]

On Sun, May 10, 2009 at 6:27 PM, Andy Oram <andyo at oreilly.com> wrote:
> A few even quicker impressions.
>
> First, Adam, I'm sorry I increased the stress level at the sprint, and
> that you had to deal with it as the on-site leader. I certainly pulled
> back as soon as someone complained.
>
> I thought I claimed the mantel of an aggressive editor, not a
> provocative one--but that adjective serves just as well. I'll be doing
> it next week as you suggest, when the CiviCRM team is ready for more
> comments. (They always agreed with you that the comments were good,
> but just not always well-timed.)
>
> I agree with Adam and David that a complex narrative can't be achieved
> on a sprint, and is hard to do on a team even if there's a lot of
> time. The kind of in-and-out, case-study-marbled book conceived by the
> CiviCRM folks is like a Mahler symphony, and a sprint is a jazz combo.
> But someday we try doing fancy book structures over longer periods of
> time.

The Jazz combo is a very apt description.

> Regarding the outline: I think it's fine to call it brainstorming
> instead. The outline worked particularly well on the Command-Line FSF
> sprint. I wrote it in about an hour (other people then suggested
> changes), and the final book came out looking a lot like it. But this
> was because the command-line is such a familiar subject. It has been
> covered before in a dozen books. Our treatment had some creative
> aspects (I take some credit for them), but it wasn't an exploration of
> totally virgin ground like the CiviCRM project.
>
> You have to hand it to the CiviCRM volunteers to conceive of such an
> audacious and subtle project.
>
> We should look for some middle ground, though, between handing
> sprinters a canned outline and waiting for them to assemble before
> doing an outline (Index). I'm worried that next time it will take much
> more than 3 hours. What if you have one or two sprinters who don't fit
> into the consensus, perhaps because they're inexperienced in the
> topic, inexperienced in reasonable expectations for a book, or just
> ornery?

Welcome to the world of open source.  I believe you once described
yourself as 'in it but not of it.'  Now you are of it.

This part is much more of an art then a science.  Two key points are:
1. Keep your horses pulling.  It seems that at any given time there
are two or three amazingly productive people.  Those people change,
sometimes daily, some times by topic.  But you want to keep them fed,
watered and having fun.

The biggest mistake made at the OLPC/Sugar sprint was that Anne
(because see was coordinator) was a gopher rather than a writer.
Knowing what I know now, I intend to go down to Austin a day or so
early to make sure things are set up,  get a local cell phone, and
rent a car so that we can keep Anne, Janet, and Walter writing.  (and
who ever else wants to join)

2. Eliminate distractions.  This can often be the most challenging
part of a community project.  To a large extent, you can can depend on
a project's internal culture to handle dissension.

In an community project anyone can contribute whatever they want:)
The consensus kicks in about what will be committed as part of the
final product.  If an individual strongly disagrees with the
consensus, they are more then welcome to fork the project.

david

> The idea of discussing particular paragraphs sounds great to me, even
> though it smacks of undergrad George Eliot classes. It depends on the
> leader knowing what he or she wants to convey and using the paragraphs
> effectively as lessons.
>
> Andy
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