I've just returned home to the UK after an extraordinary Outreach Sprint in Paris. I'm still buzzing from the experience and I feel sure my fellow Joomlers felt the same. Nine participants from 5 nations came together to work through some of the bigger challenges in our marketing and communications. 

But first, to our arrival. With only a couple of exceptions we'd never met in person and so it was essential to break the ice in the best possible way via the medium of confectionary! A couple of us had independently come up with the same idea of bringing biscuits and choccies associated with their home nation. This meant copious amounts of Stroopwafels, Tunnocks Tea Cakes and many other tasty treats.

Before the sprint, I'd drafted a series of potential projects that we could workshop and during the Thursday evening we discussed and ranked them and based on this, we prepared the agenda for day 1. 

Day 1. Friday

Tom van der Laan courageously volunteered to make an early run to the boulangerie to pick up a selection of tasty croissants and baguettes (we thank him for his service) and so after breakfast we split into three rotating teams (team Croissant, team Baguette and team Eclair) to work out the Who, the What and the How. 

 When we say who, we mean who are the people that actively work with Joomla. From this we arrived at six distinct personas who we could identify as distinct Joomla users.

 And the why. For a marketing strategy to be effective we need to understand why people (specifically our six personas) would choose Joomla. We identified a range of features and benefits that each persona would associate with Joomla and from these we were able to rank Joomla's features.

The how was concerned with how users interact with Joomla, specifically those seeking information, training, knowledge or wishing to volunteer. There are many channels by which individuals can connect ranging from joomla.org, forums, videos, newsletters, events, jugs and so on.

 We then came together to pool our knowledge and prepared for the post lunch session: with that out of the way we threw ourselves into the first proper project which was to reimagine the volunteer journey and create a complete end to end on-boarding protocol for volunteers. Over the course of the afternoon the teams came up with strategies and a framework to imagine the experience from every touch point. This could be a chance meeting at an event, an attendee at a JUG right through to a cold enquiry directly from a form on joomla.org. 

One of the ideas that we all agreed was a winner was a buddy system (which we shall refer to as 'adopt a noob!') to team up new contributors with seasoned Joomlers.

Another bottleneck we also agreed on that needed revision was onboarding to the Joomla Identity Portal and Mattermost so that is now an active task. By the end of the day we'd considered every onboarding touchpoint and how it should be improved.

As a final coda to this project we also worked on creating an official Offboarding protocol to follow up with volunteers who'd disengaged or needed to drop out for any reason. We all agreed that it's important to acknowledge and officially recognise the contributions that individuals have made to the project. We want to ensure that when someone leaves the community it's on the best terms and that they understand that they were greatly appreciated. 

Day 2. Saturday

Before the sprint, I'd considered that the joomla.org redesign effort had to be the main project to workshop. Currently we have a working group dedicated to this but it had got bogged down without a clear direction. 

To bring clarity back to the project I proposed to break it down into 4 sub-teams focussed on structure and content, presentation, the build and lastly the merch store. For the rest of the day we worked on structure and content.

We'd already worked out the kind of personas who would be looking at joomla.org and what information they'd want to see on that all important home page. As per day one we split into 3 rotating teams, this time called Team Custard Cream, Team Hobnob and Team Ginger Nut (what can I say, I like a biscuit!) and workshopped how a wireframe might look that would appeal to each of our personas. After this breakout session we compared notes and pooled our data for refinement later. With a clearer idea in our minds of how the site could be, we then moved onto the elephant in the room, namely the overcomplicated menu structure. We'd looked at how many other CMS's and Open Source projects tackled this and cherry picked what works and what doesn't and applied it to the sheer volume of content that's accessible from joomla.org. Splitting into two teams this time (team rich tea and team digestive) we spent a considerable period of time working out how to group content into a megamenu with a minimal number of top level links in a single row. And the good news is, it's totally doable. It will greatly improve usability and look better on screen.

Other sub projects that we did not get time to workshop but established were required includes the actual marketing messages that we will use plus developing our own iconography that's unique to us.

As we wrapped up after day two it became apparent that there is no substitute for in-person sessions. So much communication is non-verbal (up to 90%) and that so much can be lost or not conveyed via email or even over video call. Especially when we are from different cultures. We definitely bonded and have a better understanding of each other which means that there will be much less miscommunication in the future. I think it would be fair to say that we'd achieved 6 months worth of planning in 48 hours. 

With some of us having early flights and trains the following day it was only fitting that we wrapped up the sprint with a barbeque followed by karaoke (there ain't no party like a Joomla party)!

Many of the tasks (which combine to create the two projects) have been assigned to sprint participants but others will require additional input and the Outreach Roadmap will appear in the next week or so on the Joomla Community Portal.

I'd like thank the following Joomlers for giving up their time to make the Sprint work so well: Emmanuel Lemor, Sigrid Gramlinger, Benjamin Trenckle, Angie Radtke, Tom van de Laan, Anja de Crom, Rachel Walraven and Nadja Lamisch.

Of course, whether the sprint is a success or not comes down to following through on the planning and bringing our ideas to life. This is therefore where the real work begins.