Community Update - May 2021
Continuing our series highlighting the work of initiative groups across the Drupal community, this month we are catching up with six more groups:
- Documentation and Help, by Jennifer Hodgdon
- Contribution Mentoring, by Elli Ludwigson
- Drupal Swag Shop Working Group, by Will Huggins
- Discover Drupal Initiative, by Angie Sabin
- Local Drupal Associations, by Leslie Glynn
- Accessibility, by Rain Breaw Michaels
The takeaway message this month seems to be that there are some great things happening in the Drupal community but they could be even more awesome, and help to grow our community, if more people were able to contribute, even an hour a week.
Whilst some people have more available time than others, for those that do have the privilege of time, then please do read carefully and think about where your time could be best spent.
If you spot a place where your skills fit, don’t hesitate to contact either the group’s spokesperson, or Community Liaison, Rachel Lawson.
Documentation and Help, by Jennifer Hodgdon
What have been your priorities in the last three months?
- Migrating the remaining content from the old Getting Involved Guide.
- Adding new content (task, role, and area pages) to the Contributor Guide.
- Making it more obvious how people can contribute to Documentation.
- Moving the Help Topics in Core project towards completion.
And what has been your greatest success in the last three months?
We recently added a block to the sidebar of Documentation pages that clearly states what you can do if you find a problem in a page. I've been seeing many more people following the suggestions in the block by either editing pages to fix problems, or setting the page status to Needs Work (along with a comment stating the problem they found) since the block was added. I'm also very proud of the fact that all of the content in the old, disorganized Getting Involved Guide has now been migrated to new locations (with redirects in place for people with old links and bookmarks).
What has been your greatest challenge in the last three months?
- Finding people to review help topics patches for Drupal core.
- Connecting with leaders of other initiatives and working groups so that we can add content to the Contributor Guide for these areas.
Do you have a "call to action" you want to make to the Drupal Community?
We have only 3 more open issues for adding topics to the Help Topics project, which all have patches that are waiting to be reviewed. If you're interested in reviewing, the open issues are listed near the top of this issue: https://www.drupal.org/project/drupal/issues/3041924 -- and each individual issue has review instructions in its issue summary.
Contribution Mentoring, by Elli Ludwigson
What have been your priorities in the last three months?
Getting ready for DrupalCon North America 2021, updating first time contributor workshop videos, and setting up the open social contribution platform.
And what has been your greatest success in the last three months?
During DrupalCon North America, we spent a lot of time in OpenSocial which gave us a chance to learn, make changes on the fly, and adapt to the needs of new contributors and mentors. The team did an amazing job making this happen and learning how to leverage the existing functionality in the platform to create and coordinate contribution time and space. The OpenSocial contribution space is reusable for future events so we can continue to iterate on this success.
There are lots of great updates in the contributor guide, take a stroll through some of the pages: http://drupal.org/community/contributor-guide
The mentoring leadership has added two provisional coordinators, a big welcome and thank you to AmyJune Hineline and Chris Darke. AmyJune has done an extraordinary amount of work at virtual events in the last year, giving contributors a place to get started with Drupal. Chris Darke gave his time and expertise to update and segment the First Time Contributor Workshop videos, which are available any time.
Rachel Lawson, Kristen Pol, and Gábor Hojtsy also did a lot of work to make sure the contribution space ran smoothly during DrupalCon. Thank you to all the folks who mentored and contributed!
What has been your greatest challenge in the last three months?
Learning more of the ins and outs of the OpenSocial platform! We set up some initial spaces for each initiative and directed everyone to them but had some kinks in the pipeline from Hopin. These were quickly resolved by collaborating with the Drupal Association.
Managing participation on the platform during DrupalCon week required significant time and effort from the existing mentor team, every day of the week. In particular, Matthew Radcliffe went above and beyond in terms of his time and energy. Having four days of contribution was amazing! But, we need more hands on deck in order to make this happen in a sustainable way in the future.
Do you have a "call to action" you want to make to the Drupal Community?
The mentoring group particularly needs more hands on board! Share your ideas and your help coordinating and mentoring at events. There are meetings in the #mentoring Slack channel every month.
Be on the lookout later this year for a dedicated mentor orientation event before DrupalCon Europe!
Drupal Swag Shop Working Group, by Will Huggins
What have been your priorities in the last three months?
DrupalCon is the peak time for the Swag Shop when demand goes through the roof, so the build up to DrupalCon NA 2021 was no exception. It starts with agreeing the designs which this year included sponsor logos on the back of the clothing items as well as the logo on the front. Everything after that is about raising awareness and promoting the swag.
And what has been your greatest success in the last three months?
So far this year Swag Shop has driven over $700 directly to Drupal Association which will rise even higher after all the DrupalCon swag sales filter through. The range of products on offer is growing and perhaps most importantly, we have proved we can create a sustainable, community managed swag shop that both promotes Drupal and drives revenue for DA.
What has been your greatest challenge in the last three months?
Marketing and awareness is still our greatest challenge, which is funny because when we started, we thought that would be the easy bit! We also want to engage more DrupalCamps to see if we can work with them to provide the swag for their activity like we did for NEDCamp 2020 last year.
Do you have a "call to action" you want to make to the Drupal Community?
The main areas we need help with are:
- Marketing: help us promote Swag Shop - at least 10% of all sales goes directly to DA
- If you are organising a Drupalcamp or community event - get in touch, we would love to work with you to provide the swag for your event
- Got a design idea for our swag? Create an issue and once it gets approved by the Drupal Association, DA we will get it on sale right away!
Discover Drupal Initiative, by Angie Sabin
What have been your priorities in the last three months?
We’ve been working to get all materials organized, launch pages on Drupal.org, align and finalize schedules for trainings, and spread the word to potential students and sponsors.
And what has been your greatest success in the last three months?
We are optimistic about the excitement building for the program. The community members that have learned about Discover Drupal are enthusiastic about it.
What has been your greatest challenge in the last three months?
Pulling the schedules together and finding alignment on how the program should function was a challenge. Every trainer has a slightly different approach so we had to find a system that would work well with their existing content rather than creating new content. For now, we determined that each trainer should take one student pathway (site-builder, front-end developer, or back-end developer) so that a group of students within a specific pathway would have the same experience.
Do you have a "call to action" you want to make to the Drupal Community?
We need mentors for our upcoming cohort that starts in July! The application for becoming a mentor is open now through May 31. Mentoring is an opportunity to inspire a new generation of Drupal contributors and bring new perspectives to the Drupal project. You can apply here: https://www.drupal.org/association/discover-drupal/become-a-mentor
We also need financial support. You can become an individual sponsor or ask your organization to support Discover Drupal as a sponsor. https://www.drupal.org/association/discover-drupal/support-the-program
Finally, if you have a laptop you want to donate you can reach out to us: drupaltalent@assocation.drupal.org
Local Drupal Associations, by Leslie Glynn
What have been your priorities in the last three months?
To become more familiar with the Local Drupal Associations across the globe and to start to lay out objectives for how we can increase communication and sharing of content across the Local Associations.
And what has been your greatest success in the last three months?
DrupalCon and DrupalFest have provided opportunities for Local Drupal Associations to share information about their groups to the global Drupal Community. DrupalFest presented a great opportunity to host events in local time zones and in languages used locally.
I attended the Drupal Africa Meet and Greet on April 22nd with folks from across Africa and around the globe. Other DrupalFest events outside North America included: Drupal 20 years Mexico, Drupal DACH Online Meetup, DrupApero, Drupal Buenos Aires, Drupal Austria Remote Drinkup, Drupal CS Meetup, Drupal Israel April Meetup, DrupalPeru Meetup, Drupal Chile, and Meet Drupal France. Based on the number of global events, DrupalFest was embraced by Local Drupal Associations and was a great success.
What has been your greatest challenge in the last three months?
The greatest challenge continues to be determining a strategy for increasing both communication and sharing of content across all of the Local Drupal Associations, both new groups and those that have been around for many years.
Do you have a "call to action" you want to make to the Drupal Community?
It would be great if each of the Local Drupal Associations could:
- Attend an Event Organizer Working Group meeting - We meet on the 2nd Tuesday of every month. Times alternate between 12 pm UTC and 12 am UTC. The May 2021 meeting is at 12am UTC
- Add their local events (camps, trainings, meetups) to the new Community Events page on Drupal.org (https://www.drupal.org/community/events)
- Join the Drupal Camp Organizers slack channel (drupalcamporganizers.slack.com)
Accessibility, by Rain Breaw Michaels
What have been your priorities in the last three months?
Our priorities have been to support Olivero in passing all critical accessibility gates and to get more people looking at the backlog of accessibility issues in the queue.
And what has been your greatest success in the last three months?
Olivero has made significant advances, and the maintainers office hours are starting to see more attendance. We've even begun to see more community members contributing accessibility-focused modules, such as @itmaybejj's EditorA11y.
What has been your greatest challenge in the last three months?
We continue to struggle with having enough time and people to make the kind of progress we want (and frankly, need) to make in order for Drupal to be the accessible framework it aims to be. Additionally, given this complexity, staying up to date with Slack conversations has been complicated, and we hope that we can find a better and more accessible communication method moving forward.
Do you have a "call to action" you want to make to the Drupal Community?
Join us! Become an accessibility champion. If you have something you'd like to present at office hours, sign up on the agenda or contact Rain Breaw.
If you have time to pick up a core issue tagged with accessibility, please do, and consider bringing your work to office hours to review or discuss.
We also need help with our Accessibility Contrib Guide, if anyone who is strong with documentation has time to pick this up.
Finally, you do not need to be an expert to help make this happen. We have plenty of experts who can answer questions along the way.