How can we improve frontend sprints at Drupal events?

At DrupalCamp Ghent, we held a very small frontend BOF, with myself, Laurii, Emma.maria, and guest frontender Xano.

It quickly became a retrospective on the Friday sprints that took place at DrupalCon Amsterdam. The collective thoughts were not positive. It felt like we fell way short of our goals and potential for the Friday sprint. Drupalcon Friday sprints are about introducing people to sprinting and it feels like we failed badly at that.

Here were some of the problems:

• Newbies did not get enough help
• The few people helping the newbies did not get enough support
• The sprint leads were absent

There was a general feeling of frustration on some tables. Of course we had some people working very hard to help others and they did a good job. The frontend community has grown a lot in the past few years AND/OR become more active. We need to become more organised to cope with the new contributors that we see in sprints.

During the BOF, we came up with a few ideas of things that we can do to improve. Xano was on hand to feed in his experiences from mentoring and sprinting.

Scheduled frontend mentors

• We've been fairly relaxed on the frontend sprint, with experienced contributors being pulled into the mentor role helping newbies.
• This isn't great, because sometimes they don't get work on patches as they expect to, or they ignore newbies for a while so they can knuckle on hard patches. In this situation
• If we implement a mentor Scheduling, do this for one or two hour shifts
• Everyone who is in the mentoring role wears a mentoring t-shirt so they are visible and approachable.
• If you aren't mentoring, take off your shirt so you won't be bothered.
• The mentoring team already use something similar for the booth - https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AqpfQiiJgt4GdExLMDY4Sk9VcFk...

Dedicated sprint leads

• The two sprint leads (Lewis & John) were distracted and absent for most of the sprint. As initiative leads/maintainers, they were involved in high level discussion and unblocking other initiative leads/maintainer.
• Initiative leads are different to sprint leads, they lead development and have a deep knowledge of the issue queue.
• Sprint leads are different, they are facilitators they are hosts and responsible for the event. They sort out mess and sort out coffee and make sure it is a comfortable environment for sprinters.
• They should co-ordinate mentors, to make sure they know what they are doing and they are happy.
• Make sure there are mentors are greeting people as they come in to the frontend sprint area
• Maybe this role can have a different name? Sprint host? Sprint producer? Lead mentor?
• Sprint leads are producers/facilitators; this means they do not necessarily have to have intimate knowledge of the sprint topic(s).

I think, due to our other responsibilities, John and myself are not suitable for the "sprint lead" role. I'm stepping down from this role at future sprint events and I recommend that John does the same. We need find one or two people who can take on the responsibilities outlined above.

Pre-sprint: Issue triage team

It's recommended that we go over the front issue queue before a sprint so we know all the actionable issues are clearly actionable and the mentors are aware they exist.
Initiative leads and mentors need to do this together to make sure the mentors know what the priorities are (focus tag?)