eLife launched its first open source application, Lens, in 2013, followed by the first version of Libero, then called Continuum, in 2016. There was an expectation that holding a launch event and opening the code would attract users and contributors without additional effort. It soon became apparent that growing a community does require a specific effort and so fostering engagement with the Libero community is something we have been working on for the last two years.

Listening to the community is also very important, so it was serendipitous that the idea of holding a Libero Community Sprint came from a conversation with Paul Mollahan, Libero community member and Services Director at innovative digital consultancy, Digirati. We thought it would be beneficial for everyone who intends to work on Libero to simply “reserve a couple of weeks in the summer so we can all work on Libero at the same time”. Borrowing ideas from the eLife Innovation Sprint and post-conference sprints such as those held at DrupalCon, we set out with a number of high-level goals:

• Bring the community together
• Foster engagement
• Give people a sense of ownership
• Reduce friction for future contributions
• Broaden the diversity of ideas
• Get some community agreement
• ...and write some code!

eLife hosted the first two days as a workshop in its offices in Cambridge, UK. Attendees from Digirati, the Coko Foundation, Hindawi, eLife and the Royal Society of Chemistry flew in from places as geographically distributed as Canada, Greece and Scotland. For the first two days we expected to see “mostly coding”, “plenty of whiteboarding” and “a bit of discussion” with some potential, tangible goals including some well-named and well-structured repositories on Github, a build, test and deployment pipeline and a journal website with an article heading.

We left the agenda of the two-day workshop to the attendees, suggesting discussion topics on the day using Open Space Technology. This technique meant there would still be natural gaps for people to pair program and have informal discussions, while giving some structure to proceedings. Topics were diverse and covered items relating to all types of people present: software developers, infrastructure engineers, technologists, product managers, user experience designers and publishers.

This resulted in more discussion than we had expected, which was generally thought to be a positive thing, because it gave us the opportunity to solve problems as a community and reach agreement on areas we’d been discussing for a while.

Read the post in full on the eLife website here.