Stay For The Community

Stay For The Community was originally proposed as a keynote for the 2014 Pacific Northwest Drupal Summit. This was the original event description:

"Come for the code, stay for the community" — this slogan stands at the top of the drupal.org homepage and has long been shouted from the rooftops as a rallying cry by Drupalers far and wide. But what does it mean, really? We have spent hundreds of thousands of hours discussing coding standards, architectural minutia, and any number of other technical issues. However we have spent precious little time discussing our community. What are its values? What are our goals in choosing when and how to grow it? In recent years there has been a lot of movement in this area around DrupalCon and events, but what about in the rest of the community, where the work is done and we spend countless hours together. For a moment, let’s focus our attention away from the issue queues and talk about us. Let’s focus not on what we're building, but how we want to build it together. 

After the summit, I turned the talk into an article on Medium that has had over 4,000 views and sparked a good deal of discussion within the community. Despite the fact that this talk is two years old, I feel that the issues that were raised are still relevant to us, and while we have improved in some areas, in others the experience of being a Drupal contributor remains problematic. I would like to reprise this presentation for DrupalCon New Orleans. It has a greater impact presented live than read, and I would like to take the opportunity to update it with a discussion of what has happened in the intervening years, and how we can continue to expand and grow not just our code base but ourselves.