For WordPress 4.6 release video subtitle captioning and translation to few Indian languages we organized a translation sprint.
As India has many languages, we made small teams based on languages. We paired expert contributors with new ones.
We mainly did three things:
- Created teams, so there was a sense of team/togetherness among contributors
- Each team had a leader, so learning was smooth
- Each team has a goal, so every team has something to accomplish
The result was that new contributors learned overall contribution process much faster and became motivated.
Many of those first-time contributors went ahead and still contributing.
As an example – the Gujarati language, one of language we set up a team for, was at 60% completion when the meetup started. During the meetup, we finished an additional 10%, but many new translators worked on weekends and overnight to get Gujarati translation to 100% in less than a week.
We believe other community meetups and events can use this sprints to gain more/returning contributors.