Sprints
Developer/community events, designed to gather people and work together to improve the ecosystem.
Chatroom
Upcoming Events
Organizing an event
If you are interested in organizing an event in your region, please join the room and talk to us, we might be able to offer some advice, and advertise the event.
General structure
There are no hard rules when it comes to organizing a Sprint. However over the past sprints we have established a loose structure that can act as a template to organize yours. Feel free to deviate off that if you have had different experiences with other community sprints or have other wise reason to do so.
Date
Some of the people you want to invite to your Sprint will have full time jobs so it is a good idea to host the event on the week end. While the main sprint days will be Saturday and Sunday people who have a longer journey will most likely arrive on Friday (~afternoon/evening). Traditionally people like to meet up and go for dinner and/or drinks. If you don’t have access to the venue on Friday that’s fine but you can assist in coordinating what restaurant/bar to go to and when. It’s your city so you know what places to go to and which to avoid.
Venue
Organizing the venue will be your main responsibility. You could ask your employer (which is another reason to do it on the weekend) or local hacker space. Being able to stay late (at least on Saturday) would be nice since »hackers« are usually most active at night. However if external factors prevent that somehow that’s fine as well. We had events in the past where we left for diner and then did not come back to the venue afterwards.
Regarding the venue itself the requirements are pretty low. A large table that can sit everyone, WiFi, and maybe a projector. If you are thinking conference room you are thinking in the right direction. Multiple rooms are nice but not necessary. A couch area or a kitchen or something (Most hacker spaces and offices will have at least one of those anyway) is nice though for people who want to have a longer conversation without disturbing the others.
Food + Drinks
You are in no way responsible to provide and/or pay for food and drinks. However you as the host will be the go to person to ask where one could find a grocery store or what restaurant one could go to. So you might want to prepare an answer for that. Also some restaurants in the area might not be able to handle a 10+ group of people without a reservation on a Saturday evening. If all restaurants in the area are like that you might want to bring this up early on Saturday; negotiate what restaurant to go to and then call the restaurant to make a reservation.
During the event / Projects
Unless you want to host a Sprint that is dedicated to one particular topic (for example MIX :-) ) you don’t have to suggest any topics to work on or prepare anything in that regard. Past sprints have all been BYOP (Bring Your Own Project). See also the Participating section.
Participating
You are also welcome to join if you are looking to participate in one of the currently planned events!
What to expect
Sprints are a great opportunity to get to know the people you are usually working together with online. For people who are not working on XMPP full time they can also be a good opportunity to finally sit down and start working on that one project they always wanted to work on.
Beyond that Sprints are a good opportunity for inter op testing and bug fixing or in general a good opportunity to learn from each other. If you want to implement feature X in your client, another client developer, who already implemented that feature, might be there and can tell you what to look out for when implementing this feature.
Sprints can also be a rare instance where client and server devs are in the same room and a good opportunity to rapid prototype a new feature that has the client and server interacting with each other.
BYOP
In general our Sprints are Bring Your Own Project; Neither the organizers nor other participants will tell you to work on something specific.
Usually the sprint days start and end with a quick round around the table where everyone tells the others what they are planning on working on; And end with everyone telling the others what they achieved. This allows people who are working on similar topics to group together.
Who else is coming?
In the weeks or days leading to the Sprint participants will enter themselves in the wiki page for that particular sprint alongside what projects they are planning on working on. So if your goal is to do inter-op testing with client X, or want to implement a certain feature in your client and know that a specific developer knows a thing or two about that, you can look in the participants section to see if they are coming.
Depending on how well you know that person you want to work with, you might also be able to specifically invite someone to come as well.
I’m not a developer
If you are not a developer you can still contribute to and participate in one of our Sprints for example by improving translations or writing documentation. Unfortunately a lot of the documentation out there - especially in regards to server set up - is mediocre at best and written by people who barley understood what they were doing. Meeting the developers in person and have them sign off on your How-To or give you general pointers on good practices can be very beneficial to the overall quality of the available documentation and can subsequently lower the barrier of entry to XMPP.
Other non-developer tasks that will improve the ecosystem can include creating a curated list of public servers.
In general there are plenty opportunities to participate. Be creative. Bring in your own ideas. When in doubt join our chat at xmpp-sprint@chat.cluxia.eu and ask if anyone is willing to collaborate with you on your idea.