Open Source Summit + Embedded Linux Conference Europe 2020

Contribution sprints provide an excellent opportunity for project maintainers, users and aspiring contributors to work on open source projects. A common trend is to organise such sprints around other events such as developer conferences (i.e. PyCon). With most OSS projects being developed in a distributed way, in-person events bring together developers, designers and project contributors. Project maintainers often use these events as an opportunity to discuss the project roadmap or work on complex features as a team. The current worldwide panorama has changed our in-person interactions. As a consequence, most conferences have moved online, and with them events like contribution sprints. In this talk, we will present the many challenges we have faced when moving mentored contribution sprints to online formats. We will discuss how you can organise virtual sprints while preserving and enhancing the mentor and contributor experience - from technical to organisational and logistic choices. Finally, we will present the Mentored Sprints community handbook: a community-developed and oriented project aimed to support organisers, mentors and attendees of online contribution sprints.