About
Sprints are interactive, participatory events. The idea is for you, our OJS, OMP and OPS users, to collaborate with staff and other community members to problem-solve, code, write, and test our way to a better software. It doesn’t matter if you are a librarian, editor, system administrator or service provider – what matters is your enthusiasm and interest in contributing to the future of OJS, OMP and OPS.
Why do we put you to work? As a not-for-profit initiative that produces free, open source software, PKP depends on the contributions of our community. The more we work together, the better our software gets. Sometimes these contributions are financial, as with our sustainers and development partners. Other times, they are in the form of partnerships. With sprints, contributions come from individuals participating in real, community-driven tasks. We’ve got a lot of experience on our team, but the real magic happens when we collaborate with the everyday experts – those of you that use our software and/or belong to the agencies and organizations supporting scholarly publishing.
What will you do at the Helsinki Sprint? Well, that’s up to you. Participants can make suggestions or join any group they’d like. Topics submitted at previous sprints have included: accessibility, documentation, multilingual support, in-app OJS tool tips, ORCID integration, XML workflows, and more. Once you’ve decided on a topic to lead or join, you’ll get together in smaller groups and begin working on your projects. Over the course of two days, you’ll work through a specific task with your new colleagues (like usability testing, writing documentation, or brainstorming solutions). We feed you while we work, take you out to dinner, and at the end, share work completed. There’s no homework. No further commitment (unless you’re keen to contribute more). And you’ll leave behind a small but significant stamp on the infrastructure you use to make knowledge public.