Sprinting in Bampton

Sprints are a highlight of working with CiviCRM for me personally, and I think that's the case for a lot of others as well. It's always inspiring to meet old and new friends from around the world, to find out what people have been working on recently, and to discuss the future of the project with others that are involved.

We made progress on a few different fronts over the week, and people have already written a couple of posts about what we got up to. One area that I think deserves a special mention is the work lead by Claire Williams on making CiviCRM more accessible for visually impaired users.

This was the first year that we held the developer training alongside the sprint. The aim was to give new developers a flavour of the sprints and offer them the chance to stick around after the training, and put their new skills to pratice (or just enjoy the local food, beer, pool table, etc.) I think it worked quite well and it was great to hear about John Birchall's experience as a first time attendee.

I was the lead organiser for this sprint, ably assisted by Oliver Gibson, who has organised the past three year's events in the Peak District. Since people had come from around the world (including Spain, Germany, the Netherlans, Serbia, the USA and Australia) I wanted to give them decent taste of the local area and made sure as much as of the food and booze was locally sourced. Some of the more adventerous even enjoyed some local wine (no, not Buckfast!). And the foolhardy went out for a walk in the mud.

Organising a sprint is a lot of fun, and a great way to get to know the community and contribute back to CiviCRM. I highly recommend you try it and am happy to give a hand to anyone that wants to give it a go.