My first Sprint - an Experience Report

Being new to the Civi community, I have been asked several times how my first sprint was. Well, read for yourself: After two days of a great admin training, where I learned so much about the core functions of CiviCRM, it was also exciting to hear about new extensions and developments at the CiviCamp.

With my head full of new input, I then joined the other participants on Friday evening, the 1^st December 2023 on the journey by bus to the Sprint location. Arriving in the middle of the night in a misty and spooky Ashbourne and making our way over icy slippery slopes to the nice and cosy old buildings of Somersal Cottages, was the first part of the adventure.

What was my expectation of the sprint? A bunch of people sitting highly concentrated over their laptops. Which was exactly the case - WHEN the internet worked. The first couple of days that was not always the case, also due to weather conditions. Seeing people trying to melt snow with my hairdryer* out of the internet box was an amusing image. Once the Sprint-heroes got a Starlink box the internet was great.

Everybody was really nice and very welcoming. I felt immediately part of the CiviCRM community and could get rid of the many questions I had about CiviCRM and related technologies. It was very nice spending time with people who have such a great knowledge and were so dedicated to developing the functions and extensions of CiviCRM further and making the documentation a more user-friendly experience. Many projects were going on, such as the developer training and groups working on CiviCRM Standalone, on making the front-end code more structured so that client-specific themes can be easier applied or on improving the UI of the SearchKit tool. Joining discussions of the documentation group was interesting in getting to know the challenges of making old and new functions not only known to the public but also understood in detail.

My personal focus was the new project #CiviClick of the German CiviCRM association Software für Engagierte (SfE): Detlev (director of SfE) and I (project manager of #CiviClick) were happy to present our aims on creating automated OneClick-Demos and One-Click-Installations in order to make CiviCRM more accessible by simplifying the trying out of functions for potential future users and the installation process of CiviCRM. Hearing from the community about similar approaches and opinions on building a modern and easy architecture was very helpful for our goal of creating a product which can be used by as many global users and CiviPartners as possible.

A big part of the fun experience at the Sprint was also the common cooking sessions, enjoying dinners together (especially Craig’s Christmas dinner and the sticky toffee pudding night), learning table tennis-techniques, going for refreshing walks in the countryside or playing UNO. Considering the mountains of snacks and chips left and the many tasks in the pipeline, the sprint could have continued for another week or two…

Thanks a lot to everybody who made it such a great experience. I am looking forward to the next event!

*the-hairdryer-that-saved-the-internet-for-one-day-until-a-day-later-the-fibre-cable-gave-up;-)

Photos by Rich and Andy