No Community Members Were Harmed in the Making of This Doc Sprint: How we ran a 48-hour Event to Collect Community Wisdom into a Guidebook for Newsroom Developers
summary
A 48-hour documentation sprint gathers 11 in-person contributors and about a dozen remote editors to produce an eight-chapter Field Guide to Open Source in the Newsroom, using Google Docs + GitHub + Read the Docs, timed 45-minute writing blocks, chart-paper clustering and remote editorial sprints. The guide launches publicly, issues on GitHub capture remaining gaps, community contributions (including a half-finished Spanish translation) continue, and the experiment demonstrably works.
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chapters (15)
- 0:00Intro
- 0:36OpenNews
- 3:35We think a whole lot about human beings
- 7:16Communicate early and often
- 7:42Document your own event
- 9:21Do the homework
- 11:24Give writers a head start
- 13:08Build a diverse team of community experts
- 15:16Two days, a dozen writers, one room
- 16:06A structured yet flexible process
- 18:57Pair writing: what we imagined
- 20:28Pair writing: what actually happened
- 20:59Balancing writing, reflection + snacks
- 23:38Weaving things together
- 24:11A plan for outreach + adoption
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