Eleven brains are better than one

Lunch time of day two stands out as a high point of the book sprint. We'd spent the first day working relatively independently - brain-dumping the chapters about areas of CiviCRM that we knew the best and by Tuesday, it was clear the chapters making up our introductory section needed a re-think. Trying to get co-herence on five chapters written by five people sounded pretty daunting at the time, and I wasn't sure how we were going to get there. But after 15 minutes or so of intense talking over what we'd written, our experiences, and what we were trying to acheive, the answer came down from the ether. We realised we could split the section nicely down the lines of 'before you chose CiviCRM' and 'after you choose CiviCRM'. Armed with this, restructuring was a relative breeze. These 'meetings' happened again and again during the sprint, and although the the outcomes might sound obvious in retrospect, I'm sure they wouldn't have been as easily come by (if they were come by at all) if we weren't able to talk face to face, cut up sheets of paper, dive in and out of conversations, and bounce ideas off the people next to us. The technology played a huge part of course, as did the fantastic food, and the great mix of people, but there is no substitute for the book sprint model of actually being there. A bit of perspective: there are a couple of chapters and sections that need a bit of TLC, a couple of recognised holes (don't mention CiviCase or ACL - not yet at least) but its not an exaggeration to say that the book has pretty comprehensive coverage of CiviCRM. Yesterday a few people on the book sprint team met with Adam to debrief, talk about what we learnt, and what is next. You can help out by telling us what parts are useful, what you like, what works and what doesn't, how we could re-organise to make it more useful, and anything else that comes to mind. There's a new book board on the forum where you can quickly and easily do that - let us know what you think!