Some guiding principles
We have a few guiding principles that informed our process and creation. While we believe these to be necessary to our own process, we recognize that everyone’s approach may differ! Feel free to adapt and adopt as it suits your context.
Minimum viable product (MVP) : The just-enough-functionality version of a product that can go out to market and be tested by users to help improve later iterations. Rather than letting perfection (or completion) be the enemy of good, we work towards incremental iterations of the product and let future decisions be guided by early users. For us, in the realm of sprints, this meant not getting stuck on a single format and encouraging our participants to let us know what they thought at the end.
Bilingual by design: As many of our bilingual readers know, translating something is not the same as building something out from scratch in that same language. Sentence structure, syntax, and even expression often have to be contorted out of whack to fit the skeleton built by the original language’s structure and idiomatic characteristics. How, for example, do we translate “empowered”? Do we consider outillé, which maybe brings to mind a full tool box and set of drill bits? Authorizé, which implies authentication badges and a vetting process?
So, rather than rely on translation for our Sprints and the OER that were created, we worked instead to build it bilingual from the get-go. Training materials were created simultaneously in French and English (a process which is expedited by having our facilitators and creators being bilingual), and participants were encouraged to work in whichever language they felt was best for their working group. Questions could be asked and answered in both languages.