The blog is written by Sheetal from KEF, sheetal@keyeducationfoundation.org

Usually, I write my post-sprint reflections at the airport, on my way back home, capturing the experience while it’s still fresh in my mind. However, this time feels a bit different. After a week of intense work post-sprint, where I shared new learnings and features with my team, and experimented with potential use cases, I now find myself reflecting and determined to pen down my thoughts. This sprint felt a little different and a lot more familiar;  I felt better prepared for the sprint this time, with a good sense of what to expect, what questions I have to ask fellow NGOs and the Glific team, an idea of what I want to take back to my organisation and a list of what I want to do differently this time. 

Having participated in sprints organised by the Tech4Dev team from their very first one in July 2022, I have seen the sprints evolve and my learnings grow. This time, when Tejas from Glific wrote to us and asked if I could plan for some opening and closing circles with him for this sprint, I took up on this offer almost immediately. This seemed like a good opportunity to contribute to the space they have created with so much thought and effort. 

You know how teachers say “this batch of students are very smart”, I felt like that when I started my opening circle; everyone in the circle had already interacted with multiple peers in the room, they knew what they wanted to get out of this space and some of them even shared ideas they would like to build on during their time at the sprint. 

This helped us jump right into sharing and learning during the peer learning circles the Glific team had planned for day 1. Gautam from the team had us sharing one challenge each and by the end of it, we had moved on from addressing some of these to building on new ideas that I am now sitting in Bangalore and exploring. Just some examples of how that excitement has now spread within the team! 

Now while we do a back and forth on the whole AI piece for the chatbot, one thing we know that is going to make our lives easy is the auto translation feature. When you are disseminating content in different languages on your platform, you are spending a considerable amount of time on translations, reviews and then the content dissemination itself. Now that’s exactly what we are going to rely on this feature to help us do while we still add our touch of making it conversational and accurate ofcourse! 

Day 2 had us sitting in teams and comparing different LLM tools, while I am catching up with one tool alone, the team had us exploring multiple and comparing them, I am very certain that I wouldnt have done this by myself in the office. Something that also stood out to me was how this collective has moved from building features after individual conversations with NGOs and notificing increasing demand to now when we have a mix of platform users sitting in one room and voting for feature priorities. I think this is the growth and positive change I was trying to reflect and catch up on in the past week. 

On one of the infamous Lobo organised sprint walks last year, I posed a question and in response he told me that it’s not about the capacity to build a feature for one organsiation but it is about building for many that will in turn increase internal capacity for each organisation. Over time, I have seen that come through so well. 

As I sign off and get back to the grind, I am grateful for this space that comes up every few months to take me back to a few days of seizing every learning opportunity I get and making every conversation count. 

During the closing circle, while I hadn’t had the chance to word what my experience was like, I think the cohort did that in an interesting spectrum of words. Leaving that here: