On Tuesday night we had our first official setup sprint – an IRC get together where OpenHatch volunteers test an open source project’s installation and contribution process and documentation.  Our inaugural project was Oppia, a tool which helps non-technical users create interactive educational activities online.  Three volunteers (Carol Willing, Anurag, and myself) spent two and a half hours working with Oppia maintainer Sean Lip testing and improving documentation.  The quick, casual feedback process meant we made a bunch of changes, including restructuring the documentation to be easier to navigate, adding explanations (and/or links to tutorials/guides) where documentation was too terse, and changing the output of the testing suite to be more understandable.  We also managed to create the project’s 100th issue.

Although there’s always more work to do, we’re pleased to say that Oppia is ready for students to contribute to at our Open Source Comes to Campus events, including the next one on March 9th at UMass-Amherst.

If you’re interested in welcoming new contributors to your project by having it featured at our events, check out our OpenHatch-Affiliated Projects page.  It explains in detail the steps needed to get your project ready.  It also explains why we run setup sprints: “A sprint will help you quickly find and fix problems with dependencies, documentation, and more.”  Or, as Sean remarked during the sprint: “It’s very helpful to have a tight feedback loop with these things.”

If you’d like to contribute to open source projects by participating in these sprints, let us know and we’ll make sure you get a heads up before they happen.  The next one should be soon!