[Talk-us] SOTM-US compared

[Serge Wroclawski]

Frederik,

Thank you for this valuable feedback, in particular regarding the sprints.

I feel very badly about how the sprints went, and I want to go into
detail why, and what I'm going to try to do next year about them.

First, I want to say that for those people who were calling this a
"hack day", I don't blame you, for two reasons, but that I hope this
changes in the future.

1. OSM does not have institutional experience with sprints

It was evident to me that many OSMers were interested in the sprints,
but had only attendeded hack days, so to them, the terms were
synonymous. They are not.

A sprint is far more organized, more like BoF sessions going on, each
with their own space. Imagine if a conference tried to have every BoF
going on simultaneously in one space at the same time. This wouldn't
work, and so what we had at the event was the equivalent.

2. There were not sufficient resources were not put into the sprints

Running sprints is expensive. It requires multiple rooms, or a very
large room with lots of room for groups to work independently of one
another, out of each others way

In addition, I had expected that we would have a session for
lightening talks, as we'd had in previous years. Lightening talks are
key to getting sprints going, as it gives the opportunity for sprint
organizers to talk about their project and lay out the goals for the
sprints (which are very result-oriented).

It was a surprise to me that we didn't have lightening talks, and by
the time I found out, it was too late to change the situation, and so
there wasn't any coordinated efforts around the sprints.

Lastly, the number of days we were sprinting changed from two, to one,
back to two, and the information about the sprints changed on the
website. This lead to a lot of confusion in folks' mind.


The feedback I received has been very positive on this topic, though,
with more developers coming together than we had ever had before at a
single OSM event (roughly 10% of attendees attended one or both sprint
days). There is clear willingness by the community to work on
challenging technical issues.

I am hopeful that given the amount of interest, that sprints will be
featured next year, and will be given proper resources. In addition,
we should re-introduce the lightening talks, and bring up the sprints,
and sprint coordination, at the opening ceremony, and again at a
closing ceremony (which we also didn't have this year).


I'll be doing my best to make sure this happens next year so that we
move towards a more successful sprint in 2014.

- Serge