Channeling Community Contributions to Scientific Software: A Sprint Experience

In 2014, the khmer software project participated in a two-day global sprint coordinated by the Mozilla Science Lab. We offered a mentored experience in contributing to a scientific software project for anyone who was interested. We provided entry-level tasks and worked with contributors as they worked through our development process. The experience was successful on both a social and a technical level, bringing in 13 contributions from 9 new contributors and validating our development process. In this experience paper we describe the sprint preparation and process, relate anecdotal experiences, and draw conclusions about what other projects could do to enable a similar outcome. The khmer software is developed openly at http://github.com/dib-lab/khmer/.