Participant Guide
As a participant, your contributions are central to the Sprint– they can supercharge projects with new energy and ideas,
and move work forward by leaps and bounds!
As a participant at the Global Sprint, you might:
Participants should be aware that their contributions to projects during the Sprint will fall under each project’s own license, and may be be reused, remixed, and shared according to that license. By registering for the Sprint, participants understand and agree that any data they provide will be handled according to Mozilla’s Privacy Policy.
In 2018, the Sprint will take place on May 18-19th, from 7am to 7pm on the 19th local time, wherever you are. You can participate at a local sprint site (if there’s one near you), where you’ll work and network with others, or you can join from your home or workplace. If you’re sprinting virtually, simple, free tools like online chat and video conferencing will help you connect with others at the Sprint.
You’re not required to attend both full days of the Sprint– though you’re welcome to! But if you do join us, be sure to allow enough Sprinting time to meaningfully contribute to a project– usually two or three hours.
Whether you work from home or at a site, you’ll use free online collaboration tools like online chat, video conferencing, and GitHub. If you’re new to these tools, don’t worry! There is information about these tools in the section “Collaboration Tools.”
Still not clear on what’s involved? Check out this 2017 success story from Geraldo, participant and site host in Brazil.
Finding Projects
To get started, find a project! There’s a “featured” project list on Mozilla Pulse. Featured projects have gone the extra mile to be contributor-friendly, so this is a great place to start. So, for example, if you want to work on the “Teen Driven inquiry and working in the open” project, click on the blue bar “VISIT” bar in Pulse to go to the project-specific info, on a website or gitHub repository.
As you click through from a pulse listing to project sites, you may get your first glimpse of the code/content sharing and collaboration tool GitHub. GitHub may not be pretty, but it’s easy to use– if you’ve ever clicked around on a website and left comments on a blog post or youtube video, you can use GitHub for the Sprint.
Tip! Each individual Sprint project (and the Sprint as a whole) has a repository or “repo” on GitHub. A repository is a public collection of files– stuff like code, content, and discussions for collaboration. In any repo, look for a file called “README.md” that explains what the project is about.
In addition to featured projects on Pulse, there’s a full list of 2018 projects in the “issues tab” of our main Global Sprint repository. Each issue represents a project in the Global Sprint. You can click from these issues to that individual project’s repository to learn more.
Finding Projects
At the Sprint, you’ll use GitHub to discover projects and tasks to work on at the Sprint, and to discuss your work with Project Leads. In GitHub, the issues tab is where you find information about work underway in that repo (the project’s collection of code and content).
You’ve seen that in the main Global Sprint repo, we’re using the issues tab to track projects. In a project-specific repo, the issues tab will track discussions and tasks for that project– like, “help design a logo” or “debug search function.” That’s where you’ll find your Sprint tasks. In 2018 we’re encouraging project leads to tag their issues with skills, like “game design” so you can see and search for tasks that match your skills.
Once you’ve picked a project to work on, get in touch with the Project Lead to say hello and let them know you’d like to help. You’ll do this via GitHub, but first you’ll need a free GitHub account to reply or comment on issues.
This short video walks you through the basics of getting your account set up, finding a project and a task, and communicating with the project lead using GitHub issues.
Sharing Your Story
Share your Sprint story!
Part of the “open” nature of the Sprint is connecting and sharing our work, processes an experiences. During the event, we encourage you to post updates– both in the Gitter chat, and on social media. You can follow the #mozsprint hashtag on Twitter to see what Sprinters around the Globe are up to (If you’re new to the Sprint, #mozsprint will give you an idea of what previous events were like).
Blog posts are a great way to recap your Sprint, and capture your learnings, challenges. and successes. Check out these posts from the 2017 Sprint: