Planning a Dev Days Event: An Internal Guide

1

Choose an organizer and/or organizing committee.

This includes a project sponsor—a member of the leadership team who serves as your primary contact for company-level questions, providing support and encouragement for the event.

2

Create and present proposal.

Include on the following:

• Purpose

• Request

• Date

• Time

• Company involvement

• Process

• Budget

• Roles

• Socials

• Communication platforms

• IT Support (if needed)

3

Identify and meet with Project Informed Captains.

Schedule a meeting with prospective Project Informed Captains to inform them of the event, request their participation and outline their responsibilities requests.

Further details on Project Informed Captains (PICs) are provided below.

4

Create Communication platforms.

Landing Page

• All the information in the proposal but in more detail with links to various sites for further information.

  • Example: Confluence

Communication platforms

• Slack & Teams Channels.

  • Example: #[company]-aswf-devdays-2040

Storage

• SharePoint & Google Drive.

  • To house all video recordings, presentation documents, and other

5

Promote the event.

Promotional emails and Slack/Team posts, announced the event and directed attendees to the landing page, highlighting upcoming information sessions.

6

Send calendar invitations for virtual or in-person meetings.

Meeting schedule:

• Dev Days Information Session: An overview of Dev Days.

• Project-Specific Information Session: A session dedicated to project-related details.

• Environment Setup Help Session: Assistance with setting up the development environment.

• Dev Days Event: Send as an all-day event to not block team members' calendars.

7

Host Dev Days Information Session.

Host a meeting with all potential participants to explain what Dev Days is. Have the project sponsor speak to the importance of the event, have each PIC introduce the participating projects, and share communication platforms. This meeting will provide an opportunity to answer FAQs.

8

Host Project-Specific Information Session.

These meetings will vary, as project leads (PICs) may not be available for every project. They're designed to provide detailed descriptions of completed pull requests (PRs) and offer guidance to team members interested in joining. The meetings combine informational sessions with drop-in help.

Open

9

Create a registry for Dev Days participation.

In tandem with the instructions from the ASWF Dev Days website, we asked that all participants post in the company Slack or team channels to indicate their participation and specify the project/PR they are working on. We tracked this information to ensure that they would be set up properly and to provide assistance if needed during Dev Days. This also allowed us to track completions, and prior to the event, we were able to inform their manager about their participation.

Open

10

Check in with IT.

We held a meeting with IT to ensure that the infrastructure to contribute to open source code would be allowed, and we provided them with details about the event and the participation list. They had someone on standby during the Dev Days in case a firewall, etc needed to be opened.

11

Established a budget and schedule for socials.

To generate excitement for the event, we provided lunch for participants and sweet treats for the entire Technology department.

12

Environment setup help session.

This is an office hour for those who have already chosen their first issue. Individuals should have already verified if their environment is working or not. PICs are requested to be available during this meeting to answer participant questions.

13

Set up CLAs (contributor licensing agreements).

Further details on CLAs below (contributor licensing agreements).

14

Assistance during Dev Days.

We had a three-tier system for support during Dev Days. The first step was to reach out to the PICs (if available). The second step was to post your question in the company Dev Days channel for community support. The third step was to post on the official Dev Days or official project channel for help. We saw a spectrum of questions, ranging from those that could be easily answered (such as administrative ) to more difficult questions that required input from the wider open source community.

15

Host social.

There were two events: First, an invitation for lunch was sent to the participants. They were free to grab and go, or some chose to stay and discuss the projects they were working on. Second, an invitation was sent to all technology staff for the 'Dev Day Doughnut.' We used this time to allow participants to share their work with others, which piqued the interest of those who didn't participate.

16

End-of-Event

At the end of the Dev Day work window, we checked in with participants to review the progress they had made and encouraged everyone to post updates in the company channel.

17

Event Summary

Following the Dev Days, we used the registry data to create a post-event report. A survey was also distributed to gather feedback on various aspects of the event, including coordination, setup, and contributions. Finally, we compiled information from the overall Dev Days project for internal team sharing.