It's been a tradition for 3 years now that CiviCRM community members and team members convene after CiviCon to take part in code- and book sprints. This year we are staying in beautiful Cawthorpe Hall. A group of developers is here to work on improving the user experience in general and on further development of CiviCase. The other half of the sprintgroup is working on CiviCRM books under the excellent facilitation from Flossmanuals.

Seven of us this morning started discussing what to achieve over the next 6 days. Luckily, some more people will be joining the booksprint tomorrow and over the weekend because we set ourselves ambitious targets to have achieved by next Monday. By then, there will be an updated version of "Understanding CiviCRM: A comprehensive guide". There will also be the first release of a new book for developers of CiviCRM and a second new book describing possible uses of CiviCRM in human rights organisations. 

Still, I am not here to work on the documentation of the latest version of CiviCRM, but to develop a generic user and administrator training, making use of the available knowledge and skills of people on the booksprint. The idea of this generic training is that it can serve as a basis for all CiviCRM training sessions aimed at users and implementors.

During the discussions we had today, we agreed that the training was to be "problem driven". Participants at the beginning of the training define the problems they or their organisations want solved on the basis of implementing (parts of) CiviCRM. During the training, both the participant and the trainer will focus on finding solutions for those particular problems.

Another important point we decided on, as a logical consequence of the previous one, is that participants are the owners of their learning process and the trainer(s) are there to facilitate them in doing so.

However, there are a number of different pieces of functionality in CiviCRM that all should be aware of when implementing or working with CiviCRM. So, the generic training will contain two different sets of sessions: the morning sessions will consist of material that everyone needs n order to be able to work with the tool iand the afternoon sessions will be based on individual work of all participants. There will be regular intervals so that all can report back to the group what they found out to solve their particular problems and support others in working out theirs.

So, having worked out that and the overall rationale, objectives and learning points, it is now basically just a matter of developing the actual material: presentations, pictures to illustrate the whole thing, agenda's, exercises, trainer manual, and so on. That looks like a fair bit of work. Let me stop writing this blog and continue with the training material.