Another achievement by Srijan folks—we now have 200+ commits in Drupal 8 core, thanks to all the 37 contributors!
We are proud of our team which has helped us to achieve this goal. Everyone has given their best. A special mention must go out for Manjit Singh, who is not only actively contributing to Drupal and its core issues, but also mentoring people in Core Office Hours and helping to organize Drupal events.
WoooHoo. We have 200 #commits in #d8core now @srijan #drupalcontribution #d8issues
— Ravindra Singh (@ravindrasingh01) August 5, 2015
When no one is given the responsibility to complete something, it becomes difficult to achieve a goal. This applies to open source contributions too. Everyone was working voluntarily, just for the love of Drupal. We learned a lot from this experience about how to involve and motivate people to contribute.
Here are some of the experiments we tried at Srijan to achieve our goal.
We usually keep sprints open for everyone for the whole month, but to increase participation from internal folks and achieve our goals, we organized internal codesprints at all Srijan locations, usually on Friday evenings and Saturdays. Our community mentors—Manjit, Subhojit, Aman, Manauwar, Jayjit and I—did our best to lead from the front.
Needs more #rtbc @drupal 8 issues. @Srijan @lsheydrupal @DrupalCampDelhi pic.twitter.com/NwraqdlhIF
— Ravindra Singh (@ravindrasingh01) June 5, 2015
Night sprints can be quite interesting! We mostly held them on Friday nights when everyone was in party mode. We promoted them with the tagline: “Let’s party with CodeSprint”, and kept a lot of refreshments to maintain people’s energy levels. Night time codesprints proved to be very productive. We also kept games like Counter-Strike and carrom boards, etc, around for when someone needed a break.
refreshment with ball :) #codesprint #drupal8 cc @lsheydrupal @Srijan pic.twitter.com/EWzjMeqLNb
— Manjit Singh (@Manjit_Barnala) June 5, 2015
Sometimes you have to listen to people and ask what works best for them. Taking an entire day for a sprint is difficult, so we tried to keep internal sprints for Fridays after finishing work. This didn’t work well, but I would still not say it was a waste, because every sprint helps us build the credibility to continue with our contributions.
All these experiments were taken up after considering the feedback from previous sprints (Retrospective of Drupal Codesprints). Now, our goal is for everyone to learn Drupal 8 and then work towards doubling the number of commits.