The Community Summit

Authored by AmyJune Hineline, Community Ambassador at Kanopi Studios, with support of the Community Summit Leads 

DrupalCon is our annual stomping ground... Sure, local and regional camps and meetups are fun, but where else can more than 3,000 Drupalists get together and reunite, socialize, share knowledge, set goals and move the Drupal project forward for a whole week?

In 2019, the Community Summit brought together 50 community members to just talk about the community... And this year, we want to do more than talk—we want to move some of our action items forward, so we don't talk about the same issues next year.

Building Communities

People need to know what they get out of participating in the community. Participation helps users improve themselves and Drupal. They learn to be successful by using Drupal, and they make Drupal better by contributing improvements. People do not have to define themselves as technical to improve Drupal. Improvements include code, infrastructure, user guides, training, documentation, and social and financial support.

Asynchronous and Virtual Meetings

Drupal is a global community, and communication can be tricky when time zones and languages of the attendees all vary. Weekly meetings can have fluctuating times to accommodate the world stage of tech. Threading messages in Slack and uploading transcripts have proven to have positive results.

Regarding virtual meetups, Donna Bungard shared with us: “With A11yTalks, we’ve learned that we can bridge the gap of distance and the time between camps through virtual sessions. We have open calls in which we share and allow for Q&A, as well as recordings for those who cannot make it at the scheduled time. We share, collaborate, and encourage each other to be aware of accessibility challenges from multiple points of view: it’s a truly powerful tool.”

Baking Community into Our Roles at Work

  • More formal engagements with organizations - agencies and end clients 
  • Some kind of structure within the community that drives this
  • Pitch the idea of contributions - value, benefits and how
  • Think more about the value that organizations can get and market that better
  • Some kind of formal reporting to help build the visibility

Burnout

Volunteerism is a privilege many people working with Drupal do not have, but there is this unspoken rule that we must give back to the community. So, how do we prevent burnout, keep the fires at a minimum, and stay motivated? Sources of burnout were identified on a number of levels—personal, work, and community, among others—and strategies for mitigating burnout—setting boundaries, letting go, and reaching out to others.

Conflict resolution

With every community comes conflict, but what can we do as a community to ensure our Code of Conduct is enforced in thoughtful and meaningful ways? Training and coaching opportunities should be available to camp and meetup organizers, because ideally conflict should be resolved on the local level. Toolkits, revised code of conduct, empathy training, resources around soft skills. There are no simple solutions to everything; show the different options & set expectations around different possible solutions.

Mike Anello of DrupalEasy, and member of the Community Working Group, says, “The Drupal Community Working Group is committed to providing both conflict resolution services as well as proactive community health initiatives—contact us if you’d like to be involved.” 

Speaker Diversity

The more diverse our speakers are at our camps and conferences, the more diversity there is in attendance, and ultimately more participation in Drupal. 

Marc Drummond, Senior Front-End Engineer at Lullabot, says, "The Drupal Diversity and Inclusion Group worked this last year on a Speaker Diversity Initiative to help improve the diversity of speakers at Drupal events by empowering people from underrepresented groups to share their knowledge with the community. We partnered with Jill Binder, who has had great success improving speaker diversity in the WordPress community, and thanks to a generous matching fund from Pantheon, and sponsors like Lullabot, Kanopi Studios, the Drupal Association and Dries Buytaert, we worked to offer an online training workshop to help people from underrepresented groups to overcome imposter syndrome and develop an idea, a pitch, and an outline that can be used in a talk. We also offered a workshop to prepare people within our community to lead similar workshops at Drupal events, and we are excited about the workshops that are already being scheduled in 2020, at events like DrupalCamp New Jersey, Florida Drupal Camp, MidCamp and DrupalCon Minneapolis. Learn more. 

We hope to schedule more trainings and workshops at local meetups and regional events throughout 2020 and beyond, and we are grateful to the sponsors and people in the community who stepped up to make this initiative possible. We hope this helps to open doors for community members and sets the stage for community change."

Changing the definition of Case Studies

Incentivizing experiences can help encourage organizations to move initiatives forward. Case studies for how websites are built or migrated give credits to agencies on the Drupal Service Provider Marketplace. Can we encourage these same agencies to hire interns and junior devs by allowing them to write a case study and share their positive experiences with others?

Avi Schwab, from the Events Organizer Committee, said, “I was particularly touched by the continual discussion of coaching and mentorship, but a number of us discussed a concern with shops that advertise “only senior developers.” We identified a need to better incentivize programs that bring new people into the community—whether they’re junior folks, tenured developers from other communities, or people from “diverse” backgrounds. A possible solution was to broaden the scope of Drupal.org Case Studies to people or initiatives instead of specific technical work.”

Being that only 50 of us were in the summit, we welcome comments to help push this from ideation to reality.

Topics of interest mentioned by attendees:

  • Bringing people in
  • Internships
  • Follow-through
  • How to manage volume after conferences
  • Who is next
  • Why Drupal
  • More speaker diversity
  • Virtual meetups
  • Drupal diversity and inclusion speaker workshops
  • Inclusion at regional events
  • Bridging technologies
  • Switching to tech socials versus Drupal users group volunteer
  • Baked-in community hours at work
  • Conflict resolution
  • Project help
  • Inclusive events
  • Huge learning curve between versions
  • Why do we care about attendance
  • Drupal nine will have a cool story
  • Expand the definition of case studies
  • Developers
  • Outreach
  • Mission statement
  • Asynchronous meetings (language, time zones)
  • Corporate citizenship
  • Global stage
  • Burnout
  • Mentors and new developers
  • Learning from the global community