DC Learn Sprint Recap

This is about a week overdue, and we'll discuss it on our call in a few hours, but I've been meaning to post a quick recap of our first Learn Sprint here in DC last Tuesday.

Lucky for me, Bryan Hirsch was in attendance and offered to facilitate this first one, since he's done it before. For the sake of others preparing for their first sprint, here's how ours went and what worked.

What we did:

• Go around the room and do quick intros: name and involvement with Drupal to date, that kind of thing.
• Give a quick intro to the Learn Drupal initiative and its goals.
• Explain the how-to of the sprint and the goal of this particular sprint.
• Start the breakout by getting the newest people started: ask, "Who does not have Drupal installed locally?" and help gather those people into one area to work together. Then, "Who doesn't have git?" and repeat.
• Set everyone loose.

What worked:

• Start with around-the-room intros. People were still filtering in at that point, and starting with this meant they didn't miss the information about the initiative or goals of the sprint.
• Help get the newest people working together. Starting out by identifying people without Drupal installed gave some direction to people who might otherwise feel overwhelmed and unsure how to begin. This was a great way to get everyone started: as the new folks got together at one table, the more advanced people started self-organizing pretty quickly.
• Having lots of space. We used the training rooms at Phase2, which were set up with three sets of tables arranged in squares. As people finished one lesson, they would pick up and move to another area where people were working together on the next. There was enough room to spread out and allow these groups of people to grow as people moved around.
• Having the space for two hours. Learn Sprints should take about an hour; I scheduled an hour and a half to make sure we had enough time, but people stayed busy for close to two hours.

What could have used improvement:

• About a third of the group was pretty high on the ladder already, and ready to begin working on issues. We may try doing combination learn/issue sprints.
• Keep an eye on the clock. We only had the space for two hours, and realized at one point that we only had ten minutes left. Our wrap-up was hurried and people were packing up their things. Next time, I'll make sure to stop everyone when we've got 15 or 20 minutes to recap and ask for feedback.