Virtual Panopoly Sprint on March 7th - Help make Panopoly better!

Hi Everyone!

We're organizing a Panopoly sprint on Saturday, March 7th, from 10am to 4pm CST (UTC-0500).

The sprint will be "officially virtual," meaning anyone can participate over the internet from anywhere in the world. (However, we're also going to have a physical location to meetup for people in Milwaukee, WI, USA - see the meetup event if you're from the area)

A "sprint" is an event where a group of people get together to work on something for a few hours. Sprints aren't limited to technical people or coders - people of all skill sets can contribute. However, as a virtual sprint, it will be a little easier for more advanced people to get involved.

Here is a document describing all the ways you can contribute:

http://bit.ly/panopoly-sprint

Our primary goal for this sprint, is to try to reduce the number of patches in the issue queue. At the moment we have 280 open issues, including 97 bugs. I'd really love to get the open issues down by 20 and the open bugs down by 10. :-)

Anyway, that means we really need help with these things in particular:

• Confirming bugs, ie. trying to reproduce the problem and see if it's a real bug
• Testing patches and seeing if they do what the issue says they do
• Tagging and triaging issues, ie. organizing the issues so they're easier to manage (including converting "Bug reports" to "Support requests" when appropriate)
• Doing code review on patches to make sure they follow best practices (for coders)
• Writing patches to fix confirmed bugs (for coders)

But you're not limited to those things! You can also help by writing documentation, creating Behat tests, finding new bugs in Panopoly, etc.

Read more to learn how to participate and what you'll need!

How to participate

If you want to participate:

1. Sign-up for the event using the form on this page (so we have an idea of who's coming)
2. Join us in IRC on the day of the event, in the #panopoly channel on irc.freenode.net. If you've never used IRC before (it's basically just text-based chat rooms), check out this great documentation about setting up IRC.

Things you will need

Since this is a virtual sprint (rather than an in-person sprint), it'll be a lot harder for us to help you setup your computer to contribute. So, that means you'll have to spend more time in advance getting everything you need setup!

Please see the "Things you will need" section in this document and get ready in advance:

http://bit.ly/panopoly-sprint#heading=h.agwpgbmb0tim

Anyway, hope to (virtually) see you there!