pyOpenSci Sprints#

TL;DR

Before a sprint

pyOpenSci staff go through the pyOpenSci repository issues and ensure all relevant help-wanted and printable have appropriated labels and have been added to the GitHub project in the appropriate column (beginner-friendly, Python, dev-ops/ci, Python, Sphinx).
pyOpenSci staff ensures all issues on the project board have enough specific information for a new user to follow and complete the task needed to be done. The more specific the issue is, the fewer questions a sprinter/contributor will ask during a sprint. This saves significant time and energy for both the sprint attendee and whoever is leading the sprint.

During a sprint

Label all newly submitted issues as sprint-event
Merge small PRs that are mergeable without significant review. Examples include typo fixes and other easy-to-review contributions.
For PRs, add contributors to the GitHub repository that they contributed to using the All Contributors bot using the command: @all-contributors add @githubusername for code, review (if the contribution is a pull request) or @all-contributors add @githubusername for review (if the contribution is an issue). More on using the bot here.
IMPORTANT: Be sure to add all contributors to each repo they’ve contributed to using the all-contributors bot. Merge the PR immediately after it is opened and before another contributor is added to avoid merge conflicts.

After a sprint

Triage issues and pull requests. • Ensure that all contributors are added to each repository they’ve contributed to using the all-contributors bot. • Prioritize replying to, addressing, and merging pull requests. If an issue has a lingering TODO, tag it with a help-wanted label for a future sprint. • Send follow-up thank you notes. • Collect, process, and aggregate sprint metrics.

What is a sprint?#

A sprint is an open session where contributors come together to contribute to an open source project. Contributors may range from beginners, who are new to sprints, GitHub, and git, to experienced developers. Below we review how pyOpenSci runs sprints.

There are three types of pyOpenSci sprint events:

Community Sprint Events: pyOpenSci hosts these at meetings it attends, such as PyCon US and the SciPy meeting.
Online Sprint Events: pyOpenSci may hold its own sprint events online to encourage global contributions.
Community-hosted Sprint Events: Contributors and community members host pyOpenSci sprint events at meetings they attend.

During pyOpenSci sprints, contributors need tasks that are “sprintable.” Sprintable tasks can be worked on and potentially completed (or partially completed) in a single sitting, whether that time is a half-day or a full day.

Sprints last 1-5 days but are usually 1-2 days long. PyCon US sprints last an entire week, and SciPy meeting sprints last two days on the weekend.

Tracking sprint contributions#

Contributors frequently open numerous pull requests and issues during pyOpenSci sprint events. It’s essential for pyOpenSci to track information around the following:

Who is attending,
Where they are from (country, state, etc.) and
What contributions they make.

This information will support pyOpenSci’s community impact and support and be beneficial when we write grants and solicit sponsorships.

pyOpenSci uses a combination of GitHub project boards and user surveys to track participation and success metrics. More on that below.

What motivates sprint participants?#

Sprint participants are often motivated by different things. Some come to:

Learn
Help and support a project they care about
Connect and build community

pyOpenSci supports and empowers all of the above motivations. We thrive on empowering new contributors to make their first (or second) contributions to open source! This impact aligns well with our mission. We also greatly benefit from more experienced sprinters who can help move the organization’s infrastructure and needs forward.

Sprints are always a win/win for pyOpenSci.

pyOpenSci sprints are accessible#

PyOpenSci should always be accessible to new and seasoned contributors, aligning with our mission, vision, and values. We aim to ensure that all participants have a successful experience within our community. Some participants are new and may be submitting their first-ever issue or pull request to an open-source project.

These participants:

may need help using git and GitHub, or
they may feel intimidated by their first contribution (but they want to try!).

Others are more experienced and comfortable in a sprint environment but may have questions about more technical open issues and the outcomes that pyOpenSci wants to see in issue solutions. Supporting all of these participants is crucial to our mission and can require significant effort during a sprint event.

As such, it’s essential for anyone leading a sprint to come prepared! In most cases, having community helpers will go a long way toward supporting beginner contributor success.

Sprint infrastructure - GitHub projects#

To efficiently manage and track contributions during sprints, pyOpenSci utilizes GitHub projects. We use projects to organize issues and pull requests that contributors could potentially address during or outside of a sprint. Label any discrete task that someone could complete during a sprint as sprintable.

An organized project ensures that contributors, whether new or experienced, can easily find and work on tasks that suit their skills and interests.

Help-wanted board#

The pyOpenSci help-wanted project board is an organization-level GitHub project board that provides a central place where contributors can find tasks that pyOpenSci needs help with. We have two automated workflows set up for the help-wanted project board:

Any issue or pull request with the help-wanted label is automatically added to this board.
When an issue or pull request is closed, it is automatically archived from the project board.

Tasks on this board are ideally smaller, well-defined, and can be completed or significantly advanced within the duration of a sprint. Someone on the pyOpenSci team should update the project board throughout the year as new issues are opened in our organization’s GitHub repositories. Continual updates make it easier for:

Contributors to jump in and start contributing and
Sprint leaders to prepare for a sprint as the board will be more up-to-date.

Tracking annual contributions: the sprint project board#

At the start of each year, the pyOpenSci community manager creates a new Sprint GitHub Project Board. Here is an example of the 2024 sprint project board.

The board will have several columns or statuses, each of which represents the name of a sprint event (example: pyconus-2024, scipy-2024, fall-festival-2024. pyOpenSci uses this project board to:

Track issues and pull requests opened during a sprint event
Organize and Monitor Tasks: Keep track of the progress of tasks during the sprint, ensuring clarity on which issues are being worked on and by whom.
Manage the Triage Process: Track which pull requests have been addressed and merged and which ones still need attention.
Calculate metrics: Provide counts of activity that has occurred during a sprint event.

These boards allow pyOpenSci staff to easily monitor sprint activities and outcomes, enabling timely resolution of all sprint issues and pull requests.

Year-round sprint tasks#

Below are tasks to stay on top of throughout the year. By adding “sprintable” and “help-wanted” issues to the help-wanted project board as they are opened, you save time spent preparing for a sprint.

Maintain the pyOpenSci help-wanted project board#

pyOpenSci uses the GitHub help-wanted project board to keep track of tasks that volunteers can assist with. When you see an issue opened, or if you open an issue yourself in any of our GitHub repositories within our pyOpenSci GitHub organization, always consider whether the issue is something that someone else could help us with.

If the issue is something that someone else in the community could do:

Add a help-wanted Label: any issue or pull request with the help-wanted label in our organization will be automatically added to our pyOpenSci help-wanted board.
Add a sprintable Label (if applicable): if the task could be completed during a sprint (meaning it is something that could be completed within an hour and up to a single day’s worth of work), also add the label sprintable to the issue.
Update the Status on the Project Board: once the issue has been added to the project board (it normally takes our CI workflow 30 seconds to a minute), update the status of the issue on the project board based on the type of skill needed.

The current types of tasks in our board include:

Python packaging
Beginner friendly / non technical
Dev Ops / GitHub actions (Continuous Integration)
Python programming
Website - CSS or Ruby

Make sure issues contain specific, detailed information before adding them to a project board

If you are creating a new help-wanted issue, it’s important to include as much detailed information in the issue as possible. Imagine someone else reading the issue (that is not you!). In reading the issue, does an outside contributor have:

enough information to understand the problem? (be specific, provide examples, links runnable code, broken github action runs)
enough information to solve the problem?
know exactly where the problem is occurring (provide links if you can or code examples)

When in doubt, more information is always better!

It is important to label issues with help-wanted / sprintable throughout the year and as they are opened as we can. This will save significant when preparing for a sprint. It will also make it easier for fly-by contributors to find things to help us with throughout the year.

Pre-sprint tasks#

Triage (help-wanted) issues across the pyOpenSci organization#

Before a sprint begins, someone on the pyOpenSci team should go through and triage all of the open issues in the organization to determine:

Whether some of them are sprintable.
Whether they have enough specific and detailed information for someone to work on the issue without too much help during a sprint.
Whether some open issues can be closed.

This could be a small team exercise at a pre-meeting event held online for pyOpenSci staff and sprint community members (if there are any contributors participating).

The information found in the body of an issue is critical to running an effective sprint. If the issue has very specific information that gives a potential contributor everything they need to know to begin working, they will have fewer questions during the sprint. If you have a table of 10-20 people sprinting for pyOpenSci, this means the person running the sprint will have less to do on-site! Sprints are busy—please add as much specific information as you can to each issue!

Ensure issue and pull request templates are up to date#

One challenge of a successful sprint is that there will be many issues and pull requests to triage after the sprint. To keep track of new issues during an event, every pyOpenSci GitHub repository should have a sprint issue template. Adding this template only needs to be completed once. However, if there is a new pyOpenSci Github repository (this rarely happens), make sure that repo has a sprint issue template.

The sprint template will auto-populate a sprint-event label on the issue or pull request when it is opened. We will then setup a GitHub action on the sprint project board for that year to auto-add any issue or pull request with the sprint-event label on it to the sprint project board.

Tasks during a sprint#

Below are tasks that should occur during a sprint event.

Collect participant information#

This section will be fleshed out soon…

Update the sprint issue and pull request board#

During the event, the remote sprint support team (either Community Manager or a volunteer), should:

label all issues and pull requests as sprint-event and with the label for the event - e.g. pyconus-24 as they are opened.
Once that the sprint-event label is applied to an issue or pr, they with automatically be added to the project sprint board.
Finally, once on the sprint board, they can then move each issue and pull request to the event name status on the sprint board. (this also can be done from the issue itself. )

This process, if done during the sprint, will make triaging issues and pull requests after the event, easier.

Review and triage pull requests and issues#

If you see small pull requests coming in that are clearly fixing things (typos, etc) in a guidebook, please review them and approve if that makes sense. If you see an issue opened that makes sense to work on remotely with a participant, feel free to comment on it.

Acknowledge sprint contributors - All-Contributors Bot#

pyOpenSci uses the All-Contributors bot to recognize and celebrate the contributions of all our contributors. This bot helps automate the process of adding contributors to the repository, making it easier to maintain accurate records of everyone’s efforts.

To add contributors to the repository using the All-Contributors bot:

Use the Bot Command: In a comment on an issue or pull request, use the following command to add a contributor as follows.

@all-contributors add @githubusername for <contribution types>

If they have opened an issue only, or reviewed an open pull request use:

@all-contributors add @githubusername for review

If they have opened a pull request use: @all-contributors add @githubusername for code, review

Merge all-contributor bot Pull Requests Individually: The bot will create a pull request to update the contributors list when you call the commands above. IMPORTANT: Merge each all-Contributors bot pull request individually and immediately before adding another contributor to avoid merge conflicts.

By recognizing contributors for their efforts, we foster a positive and inclusive community, encouraging more participation and collaboration.

After a sprint tasks#

Issue and PR triage#

The biggest effort after a sprint will be triaging & addressing issues and pull requests that have been submitted during the sprint. This could take 1-2 weeks and up to a month depending on the scope of each change submitted.

If there are new issues with no associated pull request, you can:

Invite the issue author to submit a PR if the change seems reasonable and they are up to the task.
If the issue is one that we agree should be addressed, then label the issue with help-wanted / sprintable so someone else can tackle it at our next pyOpenSci sprint.

Review each pull request submitted (or invite community members to review) and determine if the pull request looks good as is or requires changes following the standard GitHub review process.

Merge the pull request when it is complete and ready to be merged.

Followup thank you notes#

After a sprint, we will follow up with participants to show our appreciation and encourage continued engagement with the pyOpenSci community. Here are the key steps to take:

Send a Thank You Email: Send an email to all sprint participants thanking them for their contributions. Express gratitude for their time and effort, highlighting any significant achievements or milestones reached during the sprint.
Provide Feedback: Include any relevant feedback or outcomes from the sprint. This could involve sharing metrics, such as the number of issues closed, pull requests merged, or any specific contributions that stood out.
Invite Continued Engagement:
- Newsletter: Encourage participants to subscribe to the pyOpenSci newsletter to stay updated on future events, news, and opportunities.
- LinkedIn: Invite them to follow pyOpenSci on LinkedIn for professional updates and community highlights.
- GitHub: Remind them to continue following and contributing to pyOpenSci repositories on GitHub.

Stay Connected:
- Upcoming Events: Inform participants about upcoming sprints, webinars, workshops, or any other events they might be interested in.

By thanking contributors you are helping to maintain the momentum generated during the sprint, while also fostering a sense of community, and encourage ongoing contributions to pyOpenSci projects.

Final wrap up activities#

We will have several outcome tasks to do to wrap up a sprint. These are listed below:

Blog post about the event with stats around activity (number of participants, pull requests, issues, etc). This post might highlight wins both big and “small”!
Social media promoting the success of the event and above metrics
LinkedIn newsletter reusing that blog post content

Welcome new contributors to slack#

Because some participants come to sprints to learn, they may not stage engaged with pyOpenSci after a sprint event. As such it’s best to invite people who continue to stay engaged with us either via GitHub or some other mechanism (becoming a reviewer, editor, submitting a package, etc).

Meeting metrics that pyOpenSci collects

Number of pull request submitted
Number of issues submitted
Number of contributors contributed
- Where are the contributors from (country, place of work / organization)
- Type of user - student, professional, non profit/ public sector.
- Optional - demographics