Planning Our Summer Sprint

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

As a warm-up for our lab meeting on June 26, we have some more information to share about our two-day sprint in July. Please see our Etherpad for details, including more about sites and projects.

Overview

The goals of this global two-day sprint are to write and build useful things, and to strengthen ties within the open science community by giving people a chance to work together. Work will begin on the morning of Tuesday, July 22 in New Zealand and Australia. As they are starting to wind up for the day, their colleagues in Europe will come online; they'll hand off to people in North and South America, who will in turn hand off to the Western Pacific, and around we'll go again. Groups will keep normal hours—no all-nighters, please—but by the time we wrap up, we'll have been working for 30 hours straight.

What We'll Be Doing

Anything related to teaching and doing open science is welcome to join—the only requirements are that there be something concrete to start with (because experience shows that starting with a blank screen is a good way to spend two days going in circles), and that someone volunteer to coordinate the work. Projects currently on our Etherpad include adding domain-specific capstone examples to Software Carpentry, introducing scientists to testing and code review, building some administrative infrastructure to help coordinate workshops, and more.

Where We'll Be

Mozilla is providing space for the sprint at its offices in Paris, London, New York, Toronto, Vancouver, and San Francisco; other groups are arranging space in Auckland, Melbourne, Edinburgh, Tallahassee (Florida), East Lansing (Michigan), Norman (Oklahoma), and Austin (Texas), and we hope to add more to the list. Each site will connect to the others via video conferencing so that teams can see and hear one another; groups working on specific projects may be co-located, spread across several sites, or some mix of both. Local organizers will arrange network access and coffee, and point people who don't know the area in the right direction for lunch and after-hours meet-ups.

If you'd like to take part, please add yourself to the sprint Etherpad so that we have an idea of numbers at each site. If you'd like your project to be part of the sprint, or be a host site, please update the Etherpad as well, and mail us so that we can help advertise.