Contributors to Sunbird - Getting Started
- Joel Johnson
Welcome!
Hi there! Welcome to Sunbird!
Thank you for taking the time and effort to make Sunbird a better tool to help the cause of education. To get started, we have put together a few pieces of information that you might find useful in your journey of understanding Sunbird.
Sunbird Learning Series
Most of what we’ve built as part of Sunbird will be explained through the Learning Series.
Events
Our sessions are kept (here), for you to go through at your convenience.
Blogs
We’ve written about the principles of how we’ve built Sunbird, amongst a few other interesting reads - if you wish to understand more about Sunbird from a height (here).
Documentation
Our detailed tech designs and product requirement documents are available here on Confluence. Do take some time to go through the spaces here.
Discussion forums
Do you have questions that you can’t find answers for? Or do you want to collaborate and brainstorm on some new capabilities? The discussion forums is a great place to start.
Contributing to Sunbird
Now that you’ve gone through what Sunbird has to offer, you’re probably wondering how you can roll up your sleeves and start contributing. The following should help with this.
Release calendar
Sunbird development happens within a fairly quick and mostly rigid timelines. If your feature wasn’t completed within a particular release, please don’t worry - it can make it into the immediate next one. The release calendar gives you a sense of the upcoming timelines that the contributing teams adhere to.
Roadmap
The contributing teams are maintaining a high level roadmap in a folder, that will get updated once a quarter. For now, it’s maintained as part of a Drive folder - but we’re looking at moving it into a Jira roadmap soon. Here’s the link for now.
Contributions process
The contributions process that is repeated each release has been put forward on the discussion forums (here). Since we have multiple contributing partners, and the pace is quicker than many open source projects, it requires us to be clear on the various stages so that all contributors work in a synchronized manner towards delivery. If you have questions, please raise them on the same thread - so we can evolve the process if required, or answer doubts that you have regarding the same.
Next Steps
Now that you have a rough idea on how Sunbird has been designed and built, and you know what the frequent release process is like - here’s our view on how you can get into the release.
If you haven’t yet reached out to the Sunbird team, and wish to contribute as an institution, please send us an email. At this moment, we aren’t actively involved with individual contributors. We expect to open that opportunity up at a later point of time. All contributors are expected to hold the same responsibility - add to Sunbird, and maintain it for a minimum acceptable duration of time.
Once you’ve spoken to the Sunbird team, it’s likely that an area for contribution has been mutually identified. Do read up on what has been built so far in this area, so as to add/improve it (or maybe even replace it?)
Choose a tiny enhancement that you’d like to add in your area of interest, so you can go through the full release process and understand each stage better. There’s only so much that reading a document can do. (Did you read tiny before? Great. Just wanted to be sure. tiny.)
Once the tiny enhancement has been made, and accepted into Sunbird as per the contributions process, you’re now better prepared to take on something bigger. Ideally, before the release has begun, you have already discussed on the forum with the relevant team members at Sunbird - so as to align the contribution with the principles of Sunbird. To be clear, when development for a Sunbird release begins, the product definition and the high level tech design should have already been detailed and reviewed by Milestone 1 (Start of Scoping phase in a release).
Once every week, there will be a call between the contributor and the custodian of Sunbird (e.g. at this moment, EkStep Foundation is playing this role for Sunbird-Ed). This call is meant to help unblock any issues that are stuck for too long, or need to be unblocked urgently.
Once every two weeks, there will be a call between the leadership of the two organizations (contributor and custodian) to review the progress and ensure we’re on track with the larger goal.
As far as possible, we will be using the discussion forum to interact with one another. We use Confluence for documentation, and Jira for project/task tracking. The intent is to avoid silos of information and one-on-one information sharing. If we all fulfill our responsibilities ideally, in the near future, any organization (or individual) will be able to contribute to Sunbird without having to interact with the custodian. This can only happen if our documentation is comprehensive and easy to understand, and the struggles that a team faced via onboarding is openly visible for those that come later to see and learn from.
If using the discussion forums is causing delay and reducing momentum, you may choose to get on a call with other contributors - however, it’s important that any useful information within these calls (for the sake of the future) are published in public on the discussion forums or in the Sunbird Confluence spaces, for the sake of the objective mentioned above.
It’s not easy to be open and vulnerable, we are learning this ourselves too. We wish you the will and courage to work with us on this, so that more people can join in to make Sunbird an effective tool for the purpose of education.
Do you have feedback on this document? Make a change here, or discuss with us on the forum.