First day of the 2nd CiviCRM Book Sprint

It's 11pm in beautiful Truckee, CA, and the CiviCRM Book Sprint crew of twelve dedicated souls is still hard at work after a 10am start. We've come from across the US and around the globe to help update and improve the existing book, making it more useful for CiviCRM users, developers, implementers, and administrators. We're being guided through the process by Adam Hyde of FLOSS Manuals, a collection of manuals about free and open source software and the very cool tools that let communities collaborate to create the manuals. Adam has helped us learn the tools and, more importantly, learn the philosophies and processes that drive FLOSS Manuals book sprints. It's been impressive to see an efficient and skillfully structured process come together with true collaboration, open communication, and respect for individual working styles, energy levels, and personal interests and investments. Today's sprint began with discussion of how we want to focus and prioritize our efforts during the sprint and plans for how to tackle the immense amount of new and old content related to CiviCRM. Our efforts have been focused on new documentation of the CiviCase, CiviReports, and CiviEngage, detailed documentation of common user tasks, and developer documentation to help with extending CiviCRM. Over the next three days we'll continue to work on these sections in addition to updating existing content for the newest version of CiviCRM, filling out the Community section of the book, and restructuring the book to improve its flow and ease of use. Though we've kept ourselves very busy, we've also had plenty of time to enjoy each others' company and make connections around our individual work and projects. We've even done things completely unrelated to CiviCRM and technology: playing with Scout the Bernese Mountain Dog and official sprint mascot, enjoying an impromptu acoustic guitar jam session, and indulging in a delicious homecooked meal whipped up by fellow Book and Localization sprinters. I was lucky enough to attend DrupalCon and CiviCon in San Francisco earlier this week and am happy to report that the sense of community that is so vital to open source projects has carried straight through to this sprint. Looking forward to continuing the work tomorrow with such a great group of compatriots!