Our 10th anniversary!

It’s been a really good 10th anniversary year for us and we would like to thank everyone who participated in sharing their memories of #booksprints10. We solidified our small company, diversified our client base, worked on refining our method, and reflected on the last decade. We also now have a trademark on Book Sprints! For the next decade we are busy expanding our method and experiment with other formats of product-oriented facilitation Sprints.

A few highlights from the past months:

10th Anniversary
We received a number of great stories and memories shared by our community of Sprinters under #booksprints10 – from Times Up Linz on how they’re using what they learned in Book Sprints for future workshops to BCcampus on how they wrote a Geography #opentextbook in only 4 days.

Trademark
BOOK SPRINTS is now a registered trademark. While we love to share our experiences, we also maintain a strong identity and the trademark will help us do both. Adam Hyde reflects on the process in this blog post: https://www.adamhyde.net/whats-in-a-name/

First ever team retreat
In October we brought our whole remote team together in a big stone country-house in Southern France. We spent a few days getting to know each other face-to-face and brainstorming ways to improve our service for clients and our workflow within the team. More about that here: https://www.booksprints.net/2018/10/15/our-first-ever-team-meeting/  

Testing out Editoria
Editoria, the open source collaborative online production platform built by our partner organization The Collaborative Knowledge Foundation, is in the process of being customized for Book Sprints. This year we have already been testing it out in a few Sprint environments and have a list of feature requests which we put forward at Editoria community meeting in San Francisco in October: https://editoria.pub/2018/11/12/editoria-feature-proposals/ We’ve also had a hand in the production of the Editoria handbook through a Book Sprint and have enjoyed watching the diverse and enthusiastic community of people growing around it.

New clients we’re excited about
It’s been a good year for new clients! We had the pleasure of working with Publish What You Pay, a network of organizations working to create transparency in the extractives industry, Xentaurs, a technology consulting firm specializing in outcome-based selling, the German publisher and business consulting firm Haufe Group and we joined World Wildlife Fund in Washington DC for a guidelines Book Sprint.

Experimenting with new formats
Our Book Sprint methodology is fairly watertight by now, but what about other Sprint formats? We receive regular requests for other production sprints, so we are starting a Sprint Lab next year. We ran a conference documentation sprint at the PMI – Professional Development Day in Honolulu, working with a group of students to document the sessions and produce a booklet on what went down at the conference. We are also planning to run a Sprint with youth, and are thinking about learning material production. These are just a few examples but we are open to other ideas. Get in touch if you have one!

Thanks to everyone who followed us this year and helped us with feedback on our services. We hope to see more of you in Sprints next year!