Ready, steady... Sprint! Creating open-source ECM

Sprints vary in how they're run. Some organizers insist upon sprinters clocking in at a particular time each day. The Boston event is less formal with people rolling in whenever they choose. Typically, the day gets underway around 9 a.m. and finishes up around 6 p.m. "It can be hard to make people stop," Aune said. "You sometimes have to coax them out with food."

Aune and Burt said they've learned from past sprints what tends to work and what doesn't. Having the necessary IT infrastructure in place is vital to ensure a productive environment, and that involves plenty of up-front liaison with the organization hosting the event.

In the case of the Boston sprint, Aune and Burt made it very clear to the Christian Science Monitor that they needed wireless access, all outgoing Internet ports open, some wired connections, and plenty of power strips. They were also able to work through IT issues in advance of the sprint during two days of Zope 3 training Burt headed up in the same location. About half of the sprinters also attended the training.

Previous sprints have called for ingenious workarounds to resolve technical limitations. At one event in Austria held in a remote mountaintop hut, the participants has to use a power generator and a satellite Internet connection to ensure they could work online.

Remote sprinters communicate in real-time through a text-based channel on the IRC server network. Aune noted that it's proven very difficult at previous sprints to fully integrate remote participants into the proceedings. "They tend to feel a little bit isolated," he said. In order to counteract that tendency, there's a remote sprint facilitator at the Boston sprint, an onsite individual who's constantly mediating between the physical and remote participants.

Plone has held some fully remote sprints, but those events can't yet duplicate the benefits of a physical event where members of the widely dispersed community can come together to collaborate on the software, exchange skills, and get to know each other better. After the coding's done for the day, being able to go out for a beer with other sprinters can really help cement a rapport to enhance future working together whether remote or onsite, Aune said.

There have been several sprints where the video feeds have also been available in Second Life, thanks to Plone developer Christian Scholtz, who's created a virtual Plone Conference area in the virtual world. In future as virtual environments evolve, Aune thinks the Plone community might use those meeting places more for collaboration.

It's important to get corporate sponsorship for the sprints to cover the event's costs and also often pay for some participants to attend. The Boston event is being sponsored by its host the Christian Science Monitor and Jazkarta, the Plone-focused development and consulting company Aune heads up, as well as Friends of the Earth, The Nature Conservancy, New England Wildflower Society, Oxfam America, and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.

The number of Plone sprints is steadily increasing with recent events taking place in Barcelona, Spain; Berlin, Germany; Sorrento, Italy, and in Mountain View, California at Google's headquarters.

The next sprint focused on multimedia and following up on the progress made at the Boston event is scheduled to take place in Naples, Italy, in October straight after the annual Plone Conference in the same location.