1. CityGroups - All Day Sprint in Boston

    This is my comment to our All-Day Sprint in Boston:

    Original Thread

    _______________

    Here is an update on what happened at the Sprint, as well as some of the other stuff that has happened since September 6.

    We had great people there

    I just want to thank everyone for coming. We had about 15 people, which I heard is a very good turnout for a Drupal sprint in Boston. We had technical folks & non-technical community organizers there, and I want to thank everyone for being part of one of the very first community sprints to launch a Drupal product for a city.

    Facilitated Group Projects

    What was really great about the sprint we had was that we did this activity, facilitated by Ben Sheldon, (with post-it notes) where people figured out what they wanted to work on - by talking. This is very different from what happens at regular code sprints, where you show up and rifle through the issue queue.  

    I’ve tried similarly in a remote situation by having short Skype calls with potential volunteers, which worked well.

    PHOTOS

    Projects people started

    We had a list of potential features to give an idea of what is possible - and I was completely impressed by the range & diversity of technical & non-technical projects that everyone was interested in doing. These were all very fun tasks - like practicing cloning a git repository, RDF integration, researching node.js to see how it fits with Drupal, documenting a data standard, figuring out what kind of datasets were already available in Boston, shape based geographic search, launching the project, user profiles, defining the geographic region, performance testing, thinking about the code sprint development sandbox experience, figuring out community site administration & more.

    Of course, this was a sprint from 11-6pm, with about half that time talking & getting up to speed on the project. This is often that case with sprints, where you think you can get further in one day than you really can. But it is important to understand that the nature of the in-person collaborations are valuable & long-term. It’s not just the code.

    I would be curious to hear other people’s impressions of how having a facilitated experience changed the nature of participation in the code sprint. From my perspective - it was deeply interesting because, true to my own Drupal is Legos and I want all the Legos tendencies, I had previously thought of lots of potential features… so it was fun to do this with everyone, and see which Legos they wanted to play with. The ideas that everyone had filled in the full spectrum of what needed to get done in order to launch CityGroups for Boston - and we did make a lot of progress that week in terms of covering technical, non-technical and ‘local stakeholder’ outreach.

    Documentation

    Boston CityGroups Documentation

    The sprint pointed out major holes in documentation, configuration & UX

    Technically, bringing the Drupal product to a sprint improved it by leaps and bounds - much more than waiting a year and then releasing the product, only to learn that your moderators have needs and you need to build more stuff. The product is still beta & as such as weird behaviors (and I opened up the development process very early for exactly this reason. Please see webchick’s famous post arguing against perfection & embracing the chaos ;) - and then also see Calagator’s social development blog. The CityGroups blog is here.

    In Drupal at least, uncovering the bugs & developing solid user experiences are very important - so I would really recommend this process for anyone who has a Drupal product that is meant to be used by communities & citizens. I feel like an old-fashioned open source advocate saying this, but I really believe it. :)

    It was also really interesting to see what happens when you bring a Drupal product to a Code Sprint - I noticed that all of the sudden, 15 developers need Google API keys, and of course if there’s no instance to work on, then most people will work in Google Docs or in the Github wiki. Because of the sprint, I added a better dashboard - which has links to the site configurations that are necessary. For anyone who has installed Open Public, you can see that they did a really great job with the dashboard & site setup, so now it’s much easier to tailor the Drupal instance for a city or special project.

    NEXT

    Remote Sprints = good idea

    Maybe what we can do is to plan a series of remote sprints, in conjunction with some in-person sprints in cities that are committed to making this project happen. I can imagine that if we were to incorporate a remote sprint, that it would be handy to see if we can use Google Hangout or Skype so that participants can see the people who are there. Otherwise, we can do emails/IRC chats with potential participants ahead of time, and then do a checkin call on the day of the sprint, and then just stay chatting on IRC while people tackle projects.

    With respect to that, I am planning to have a sprint in the Bay Area in early October. Then it would be great to do another one that is purely remote and see how that goes as well. We could do the remote one in early October as well.

    Youth Summit

    After the sprint, we met with a community leader who is organizing a youth summit in Boston, in October. He had the very great idea, for Boston, of the first groups that we focus on could be groups for youth - for example to have something that could help youth who are doing projects in their communities. 

    Recommend 10 / Recommend 50

    Here is an idea for cities where people want CityGroups, but we can’t immediately find any particular projects or key stakeholders: 

    We could do a campaign to ask people to recommend 10 community groups that make your neighborhood better. And we can ask community leaders who might have a database to recommend 50. From discussions with different non-profit groups & people in politics, it is clear that some people are concerned with sharing their data. One group of users - regular citizens - is are not as concerned and has basic needs for information that are not being met. Meanwhile, all of the community organizers get calls all the time asking for their lists. We might just need to seed the database to show the utility & need, and then hope that these community leaders come around & share more. 

    In this instance, we are working directly with city governments, and the hope is that the local government can support these projects to provide basic infrastructure for citizens. It seems like it would be helpful to have a 3rd party that is less biased & has a direct legal call to serve all citizens. That’s a big part of why I’m trying to organize this project as democratically produced open source software.

    We need Boston point people

    At this point we have a lot of things in place that we would need to launch CityGroups as a small project in Boston, with the hopes to grow over time. The strategy with this project is to have a few groups in different cities that have communities around the project. In Boston, we have a great developer community & the support from the City. And we have some champions. That’s pretty good for just a few weeks. If you know anyone who you think would be a good point person, who could be dedicated to help kick this off for at least the next 6 months, please let me know.

    It would be great to have some Boston partners & advisors to be involved with any grants that we write so as to support local community management and the creation of marketing materials, supporting local sprints & any custom development features that Boston might specifically need.

    Also, it would be great to do a Kickstarter campaign once we have a project that serves Boston well. Foundation support is one thing, but Kickstarter makes you explain the market value of what you are doing. Which is probably a good lesson for any die-hard open source advocate! :)

    What’s next

    • We are sprinting to get CityGroups ready for prime time in Seattle - which means that a lot of the code is getting stabilized, the copy in the site is getting
      improved, and we are writing press releases to get community members involved.
    • After September 21, I will make a schedule of when I’m working on the code & available for ‘community sprinting’ (it will go on our blog, but i’ll update this thread)
    • As I said, we will have some sprints in October, and bring CityGroups to BADCamp. (Bay Area Drupal Camp, 1000+ attendees, Non-Profit Summit, later in October)
    • At Code for America, we have a big summit of cities October 13/14…so I’m getting ready to present this project to all of them.
    • Lots of hard work on the sustainability plan - which mainly involves getting a few cities participating (community groups, community leaders, stakeholders, point people, developer community, government support.) and finding some foundation support for the next year or two to facilitate the community management of the project - as a project that serves cities, and serves developers, designers, writers & community organizers who want to give back to their city & contribute to solving a problem that costs our local community organizations a lot of time & energy to track down other like-minded people.

    Can’t wait to see what happens next.

    Thanks everyone for participating!!

    Warmly,

    Chach

    1 year ago  /  0 notes  /