Day one of FLOSS Manuals book sprint at Google Summer of Code summit

Four teams at Google launched into endeavors that will lead, less than 72 hours from now, to complete books on four open source projects (KDE, OpenStreetMap, OpenMRS, and Sahana Eden). Most participants were recruited on the basis of a dream and a promise, so going through the first third of our sprint was eye-opening for nearly everybody. Although I had participated in one sprint before on-site and two sprints remotely, I found that the modus operandi has changed so much during the past year of experimentation that I too had a lot to learn.

Sahana team at doc sprint
OpenStreetMap team at doc sprint

Our doc sprint coordinator, Adam Hyde, told each team to spend an hour making an outline. The team to which I was assigned, KDE, took nearly two, and part way through Adam came in to tell us to stop because we had enough topics for three days of work. We then dug in to filling in the outline through a mix of fresh writing and cutting and pasting material from the official KDE docs. The latter required a complete overhaul, and naturally proved often to be more than a year out of date.

KDE team at doc sprint
KDE team at doc sprint

The KDE team’s focus on developer documentation spared them the open-ended discussions over scope that the other teams had to undergo. But at key points during the writing, we still were forced to examine passages that appeared too hurried and unsubstantiated, evidence of gaps in information. At each point we had to determine what the hidden topics were, and then whether to remove all references to them (as we did, for instance, on the topic of getting permission to commit code fixes) or to expand them into new chapters of their own (as we did for internationalization). The latter choice created a dilemma of its own, because none of the team members present had experience with internationalization, so we reached out and tried to contact remote KDE experts who could write the chapter.

The biggest kudos today go to Sahana Eden, I think. I reported yesterday that the team expressed deep difference of opinion about the audience they should address and how they should organize their sprint. Today they made some choices and got a huge amount of documentation down on the screen. Much of it was clearly provisional (they were boo’ed for including so many bulleted lists) but it was evidence of their thinking and a framework for further development.

Early in the day all four teams faced a serious threat to our
productivity when the FLOSS Manuals wiki server froze up. We never figured out the cause of the problem, which had something to do with a lack of network bandwidth. But the latest redesign of FLOSS Manuals featured a federate design to let multiple servers share content. Although the purpose of the design was to free up control over content, in this case it allowed our administrator to restart us all on another server with minimal loss of time.

My own team had a lot of people with serious jet lag, and we had some trouble going from 9:00 in the morning to 9:30 at night. But we created (or untangled, as the case may be) some 60 pages of text. We reorganized the book at least once per hour, a process that the FLOSS Manuals interface makes as easy as drag and drop. A good heuristic was to choose a section title for each group of chapters. If we couldn’t find a good title, we had to break up the group.

The end of the day brought us to the half-way mark for writing. We ares told we need to complete everything at the end of the evening tomorrow and spend the final day rearranging and cleaning up text. More than a race against time, this is proving to be a race against complexity.

Topics for discussion at doc sprint
Topics for discussion at doc sprint

(All my postings from this sprint are listed in a bit.ly bundle.)

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