This weekend I joined the Django worldwide sprint. Here are some random thoughts:

• Open source projects should do this more often. Having such a sprint makes people really contribute instead of just saying “maybe I’ll do it sometime”.
• Work should start at the same time all over the world. This might be inconvenient but it has some advantages. It makes people feel like a team - they know they work together for the same goal. Being in Beijing, we started more than 12 hours before the core team. Actually by the time they started we were already leaving. This made us feel isolated and we also stayed a few hours without connection to the Django servers since they were in maintenance. I don’t think that working a night during a weekend is a show stopper for someone that is interested in contributing to open source.
• People need to set goals. I am sure that the core team or the long time contributors had some goals in mind, but me and our colleagues came just from the desire to help, not really knowing what we will do. Actually I was one of the people that was encouraging others to come even if they don’t know what to do. The problem with this approach is that you start by spending time looking for a something to do. This is not a very pleasing nor easy thing and time passes very fast. Some planning should also go in how the work will be done. If you want to do pair programming, TDD, etc. - know that beforehand.

Bjørn also wrote about this.

posted by Ionuţ Bizău at 2007-12-03 8:16 & filed under Open source, Web, Coding |