[FM Discuss] Firefox mini-sprint

[adam]

hey

this is great! good timing too for the ff update as i have been asked
recently if its a good time to do translations of it...

i remember once (in the amsterdam summit) we discussed having a
round-the-world floss day on every first monday. it didnt fly but maybe
this 1 day local mini-sprint format could work on an ad-hoc local
basis?...

what im trying to get at, with this encouragement for the minisprint and
for the work you and Anne did at the Texas Linux Conf - is that FM needs
to find ways to scale. If we want to keep improving docs, maintaining
them and generating new ones then the community needs to expand and to
generate more internal collaboration.

in the last months there seems to be the beginning of a new energy in FM
that makes me believe we are starting to cross a new threshold in this
direction. until now mostly manuals have been generated by individuals
or specific groups and the contributions have come from that finite set
of individuals. however I am seeing that there is now slightly more
collaborative work being done where community members are stepping in to
help others even though they might not have previously been involved
with the manual being worked on...this is real 'open collaboration'

this is pretty cool and i hope the upward trend of this kind of
collaboration continues to grow. one way to encourage this is to keep
growing the community and fuel them with this kind of culture. the
minisprint and work you have done at the TLC seems to be doing just
that...I hope more people will follow your examples and organise events
to get more people involved who are interested in contributing to the
large amount of content we already have...

:)

adam


\On Wed, 2010-04-14 at 13:17 -0500, Janet Swisher wrote:
> In connection with the Texas Linux Fest, I organized a mini-sprint to
> update the Firefox book to version 3.6.
> 
> The idea of doing a mini-sprint after TXLF came from Joe 'Zonker'
> Brockmeier, who gave the opening keynote. He's a technology journalist
> and until recently was a community manager for openSUSE. I picked the
> Firefox update as a smallish chunk of work that could potentially be
> done in a day.
> 
> I announced the sprint here, on my blog, on the TXLF mailing list, and
> on the Mozilla Support Contributors Forum
> <http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/forum/3/645246?>. Zonker mentioned
> it during his keynote, and I had mini-flyers at the FM table with the
> details. I had no idea who would show up besides Zonker and me.
> 
> We had two additional people come to the coffeehouse to help with the
> sprint, and two remote contributors. I got email from one person who
> looked for us at the coffeehouse and didn't see us :-( and there was
> one person who came to hang out and sprint on a different project (I
> had extended that invitation in the TXLF announcements).
> 
> I didn't have much time to prepare for the sprint, since I was also
> preparing for my talks (besides the one with Anne, I gave one with
> David Cramer on collaborating with non-programmers). So my first task
> during the sprint was to go through the list of new features in
> Firefox 3.6 and identify where that info needed to be added to the FM
> manual. I found about 15 tasks, which I listed in a chapter called
> "ScratchNotes" <http://en.flossmanuals.net/bin/view/Firefox/Introduction?topic=ScratchNotes>.
> About one third of those have been done.
> 
> So, we have some more work to do before the Firefox manual is up to
> date. If you're interested, please take a look at the ScratchNotes
> page, pick something to update, and then mark it done when you're
> done.
> 
> I think the sprint worked out reasonably well, given that it was
> organized at pretty much the last minute (e.g., after out-of-towners
> had made their travel plans). With more advance notice, we might have
> gotten more people. But at least a few people got a chance to try out
> our tools and process.
> 
> Cheers,
> Janet
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