The Library Carpentry sprint is part of the 2017 Mozilla Global Sprint, which will take place worldwide on 1-2 June, 2017. Check out our sprint entry on Mozilla Pulse. For those new to the field, a sprint is like a hackathon - it is a way to get people working together to create, update or extend open projects like Library Carpentry.

Join us to be part of it!

We are using this sprint to amend, update, and extend the existing Library Carpentry lessons and get draft lessons on SQL, Python, web scraping, and other topics into final shape for launch. We welcome contributions from librarians, archivists, information professionals, digital humanities researchers … anyone who wants to contribute to building the lessons and this burgeoning community.

Not sure what Library Carpentry is? Check out our ‘front page’. This provides links to the published lessons. For the ‘back end’, repository view of the lessons, check out the lessons prefixed library- or dh- here.

How will the sprint work?

We will use our chatroom and this GitHub repository to organise work during the 2-day sprint. Join the chatroom at any time using your GitHub username or your Twitter handle. These are the issues we want to work on during the sprint. To find out how you can help, look at the README and CONTRIBUTING files. The issues we hope to resolve are all labelled #mozsprint. Feel free to create new issues if you need to.

People can start working straightaway on any of the #mozsprint issues. There will be designated people available to answer questions at most times during the sprint. We will use the chatroom to wrangle those questions and clarifications. You will be able to ask questions via scheduled video calls as well (which we will also use for networking). If you are not sure about something, post a question in the chatroom (directed to someone in particular, if need be) and someone will get back to you.

How the sprint will be organised

• There are a number of dedicated sprint site locations, all of which will start working at different times as the sun moves around the globe. People will also be working remotely. Sites will organise their own work and report back on how things are going during video calls, via the chatroom, or through the daily handovers (where the baton will be passed on to the next locations).
• Handovers will take place at the end of the work day in the southern hemisphere and at the beginning of the new work day there.
• Sprinters can work on whatever lessons or issues they like. If you are not a coder, try to pair up with others and work through a lesson of your choice. Then raise issues, suggest changes, or propose scenarios or workflows you would like to see addressed. We are interested as much in ideas and feedback as in new code. Our aim is to make the lessons as useful and as relevant as possible to librarians, archivists and other information workers. If you have a dataset to contribute that would help make a good lesson, that would also be useful.
• You can just use the sprint to network. Most of the Library Carpentry community will be taking part in this sprint at different times. Use the sprint to meet these people virtually and talk about running a workshop, hosting a workshop, or other issues that have cropped up for you, your institution or your country. We want to spread the Library Carpentry word as far and wide as possible, so use the sprint to find out how you can help.
• Our etherpad is another tool we will use for organising the work of the sprint. Dedicated etherpads will be created for each lesson being worked on - they will be listed on this etherpad once the sprint is underway. The individual repositories are all listed below.
• Links to video calls will also be posted on the etherpad, with the scheduled times.
• Since people are working both at dedicated sites (see the etherpad for locations) and remotely, we will touch base regularly so everyone feels part of things. You can use the chatroom at any time to say in touch, or to post updates or ask questions.
• If you are a tweeter, please tweet about the event using the handle @LibCarpentry and the hashtag #lc2017. Photos are good too. It would be great to have photos of each site’s people working away so we can do a Storify later of how the sprint went.

What you can do

Work on existing lessons by

• submitting pull requests to suggest changes (please keep each pull request small - one or two changes only per PR - to make them easier to manage for maintainers)
• raising issues for discussion/amendment against specific lessons using the Issues tab on each lesson
• chatting with others in the chatroom or via the daily catchups and video calls
• working through lessons with colleagues as a way of familiarising yourself with the material
• discussing the project with colleagues, especially about how you might bring Library Carpentry to your institution
• identifying any confusing gaps or assumptions in lessons so we can make the lessons more learner-friendly.

Social Media and Communications

The sprint hashtag is #lc2017. Please use this to tie tweets together, and also use Library Carpentry’s Twitter handle, @LibCarpentry, if you can.

You can also chat to other projects in the Mozilla sprint chatroom. If you post images on Instagram or Facebook, please send us a link via the chatroom so we can tweet them.

Mozilla are also running Vidyo for project check-ins and reportbacks during the sprint. Here are the details on installing Vidyo and connecting to Mozilla’s channel. Details of check-in times are on their etherpad.

Lesson Maintainers

This is a list of people who maintain each Library Carpentry lesson. If you are editing a lesson, be sure to check in with them throughout the sprint. Volunteers to help maintain a lesson after the sprint are always welcome!

Individual Lesson links and GitHub IDs of Lesson Maintainers

Git - weaverbel, jezcope

Shell - weaverbel, jt14den

OpenRefine - ostephens, ccronje

Python - c-martinez, # sprint-goal: find a second maintainer

Draft new Python - richyvk # new version of python lesson linked above - aiming to complete and make THE python lesson

SQL - mpfl, c-martinez, mkuzak

Data Intro, Jargon Busting, Regex - drjwbaker, ccronje