What is Umbraco Retreat?
Like the name suggests, it's a “retreat-style” event at a summerhouse or the like once a year in the weekend leading up to Codegarden. A format focusing more on walk than talk, including a selected mix of people from the Umbraco community. Around twenty people participate with the majority (⅔) coming from the community and the rest from HQ.
The retreat takes place the weekend before Codegarden (so April/May), and invitation emails are sent 6-7 weeks beforehand.
The purpose of the retreat is to:
- make sure we stay in sync as a product and as an open source project.
- inspire HQ members to be open for external input.
- give our biggest ambassadors direct unhindered access.
How does it work?
We gather around 20 people in a remote location for an extended weekend (Saturday to Tuesday) for a mix of workshops and hackathon-style sessions (don’t worry - we always make sure it’s a nice location and we make sure to feed the attendees extremely well😉)
The selection of the invitees is based on a short list of MVP nominations and the people in the community that in the past year have shown a high level of contribution and have a diverse mix of skills (Backend, Frontend, Documentation, Full Stack,..)
The first day is at the Umbraco HQ where we use an open space style format to pick and refine subjects to be worked on at the retreat.
The rest is at the Codegarden venue with plenty of hackspaces where we divide into groups and hack either through code or documents.
The outcome is a combination of working docs, prototypes and finished pull requests...and some smiling faces!