On the 22nd October Manchester saw it’s very first Drupal Sprint, this was run in parallel with London Sprints.
Regular sprints are now becoming a great way to help out with Drupal Core and Contrib. In the UK there are now two sprints covering London and Manchester. In India there are 3 user groups all sprinting regularly. No doubt there are some in the US and in other countries.
Sprints unlike regular user groups are an ideal place to flex your code knowledge and get your hands dirty. With initiatives such as the Drupal Ladder it’s proving that everyone can contribute in some fashion whether this be via code, documentation or testing. Within the first 30 minutes of Drupal Sprints Manchester we had our first commit to a contributed project (Omega 4) by a first time contributor.
We communicated with London via Google Hangouts where we updated each other on our progress, I know in the past that London has spoken with India an impressive feat considering the time difference.
It’s not out of the realms of possibility to organise a monthly world-wide sprint. The idea being that user groups all over the world organise a sprint for a specific date with the aim of working on core and contrib. I believe this will be possible with a minimal amount of effort as we can offload a lot of the organisation to each user group. Coordination of communication can be done through IRC. It would be a great publicity stunt as well, something that every country could benefit from especially in the run up to Drupal 8 release.
If anyone is interested in a world wide sprint comment below and lets organise something!
Update - Thanks for the extra information Berdir and YesCT. It’s really cool to see the community come together for things like this. Subject to our venue being available Manchester will be ready to sprint on the 25th January.