 it is on. Well thank you everybody for coming. I wouldn't have my feelings hurt at all if you would just come as far to the front as you can because what we're supposed to be having here is a conversation and I think we all have things to contribute to this conversation so I'd love it if you came up here. I think everybody here knows something about the topic of burnout and it's been a conversation that we've been, I guess I should introduce myself, I forgot to, right? I'm Randy Pham, RFAA on Drupal.org and I'm like many of you kind of a Drupalholic and Drupalholics can have some trouble with with burnout. So what's that? How long has it been since you Drupal? Here I am at Drupalholics Anonymous. Yeah that's right. So just to get, to set the stage for what we want to accomplish today we want to just go quickly into understanding what burnout is kind of as a as a diagnostic not as a, it is a formal area of study. There's formal research about what it means. It's a serious issue in our current world just in general, you know. It has specific characteristics and there are specific things that can be done about it and there are ways of looking at it both from the individual point of view and from the organizational point of view. So one of the most important researchers basically says that burnout is all the fault of the organization. I think we all know that that's not entirely true but the fact that she has written a whole book to that effect tells us perhaps that we can adjust our organizations to affect how we how we take care of our individuals. So we're gonna talk about burnout from the individual and the community perspective and the big point the reason that we're having a conversation is to talk about what we as a community can do to prevent, to cure, to deal with this whole thing, okay. So that's the, that's the point of this. Yeah, go for it. Thank you. I appreciate it. So burnout, if you're kind enough to be here you might have read the set of blog entries that I wrote about, about this, that go into more detail than then we'll go into today but kind of a formal description would be a state of emotional, mental, physical exhaustion and you're probably familiar with the can't do anything syndrome from having worked too hard on something for too long that at some points can be quite difficult to recover from. You know if you run a marathon you may be sick of the marathon but probably in a week or so you'll probably be okay but it seems that some kinds of burnout can just stalk us and stay with us in a way that we wish they wouldn't and it can be difficult to to get our lives back together. So the key researcher on this points to three dimensions of burnout exhaustion, emotional, physical, cynicism, I think we've seen that in burned out members of our community sometimes where you say, ah, that'll never, that'll never be fixed in Drupal. You know, no way you're gonna get any, you're not knowing, no way you're gonna get so and so to do that. Like move the core directory. When was that issue opened? 2005. I think it might have been 2004 it's so but on November 1st it's going in so. And ineffectiveness is a is a third a third dimension. You know you start to feel like you can't do anything when in reality you know you used to do stuff but as you begin to feel ineffective you you don't seem to be able to do it anymore. Go ahead and hit that next one if you would things. So I actually don't want to minimize what we as individuals should be doing to to deal with burnout even though that's not what this conversation is about. I think it's really important for us to recognize that we have responsibilities and individuals for marshaling our own resources and that's not just for the community that's for us. So obviously these are very these are things that your wife or your husband has been telling you over and over again you know I mean these are very obvious things but it doesn't mean that they're not true. So budget your physical resources eat good food get some exercise get some sleep well and and and these may need to be true over the long term. Like I said sometimes with a marathon you can recover in a week or a day or whatever your recovery period is but sometimes when you've done some damage to yourself by working too hard working too intensely or becoming too emotionally involved with some thing for some reason it takes a lot more time of dealing with these things honestly to to get that straightened out. Obviously prioritizing there is a limit to what we can do we are not infinite and we are gonna have to make choices about what we do work on and and that you know it's just obvious. One of the key things that was pointed out in everything I read about burnout was that your social connections are fundamental to maintaining your equilibrium. So we're all doing great socially right here now we're having a great time with all of our Drupal friends but a lot of us are can be fairly isolated you know you go in IRC that is not the same as having a close friend and I tend to get most of my social involvement actually most of my social involvement is either through my wife's friends because she's a good friend-maker we live in a little town and she's done a great job in the last couple of years of getting involved with some people there and I have not so a lot of my own personal social involvement is in fact IRC and Drupalcon and it's just not gonna it just doesn't cut it so anyway very strongly pointed out in there that you need to have real social activities going real friendships going on and I thought that this quote here was absolutely fundamental and that we should all just memorize it the Scientific American article on burnout said as early as possible in your career you must absorb internalize adopt the idea that your physical and mental health are at least as important as anything you can do seeking success at work and of course in this context work means Drupal community your modules that you maintain and blah blah blah whether that's work or not but that idea of recognizing that you are more valuable than the work that you can do is so fundamental if you don't if you don't keep yourself alive then you won't be producing anything next year or two years if you don't keep yourself it from your own perspective if you don't take care of yourself this year you won't be contributing to Drupal next year it's it's an easy equation right but how many of us really get it we you know we you probably have screwed up before because you're here right I mean it's just you know it's just you definitely wouldn't be listening to me why is he talking about there was a tweet today why is he talking about it something wrong you know why is he talking about burnout okay thank you go ahead and so as I went through this this great book by the by the most important researcher in this field she said a number of really really important things and and went into those in some more depth but some of the things that were listed we feel overloaded that's a pretty easy thing as a contributor in the Drupal world to get yourself in that position a lot of us are basically suckers for love you know I'm you know if somebody if I do something and somebody says something nice to me I'm gonna do more of it right and and and if I see something that I can do and that somebody will love me if I do I'm just a sucker for it and I think in communities like this there may be a lot of us out there well that very very quickly leads to overload and there are many ways that the Drupal community is maybe worse than that worse than some other situations because I can see that this needs to be done therefore I could do it and this needs to be done therefore I could do it and we have to figure out a way to deal with that as a community one of the classic examples is we have that there's many many examples like this but we have some we have some module creators in our midst and I think that I think quick sketch would probably be among them and Dave Reid and Eaton and a number of other people who are just generating modules you know just I mean just Dave Reid we joke about every day right I mean it's like every day there's a new module well in the Drupal community when you create a module you're actually expected to maintain it so if you generate things like that you are going to be overloaded very very very quickly and how to deal with that is one of the things that we have to talk about a second area of burnout how organizations can burn out individuals is the lack of control over what we do and in this book they talked a lot about that from a like a corporate standpoint where you don't have enough control over your own work but in the in the Drupal world there's so many dimensions of it you just can hardly stop you know it's like if you work on core work you might be working on an issue that you became interested in in 2004 and haven't been able to figure out a way to get it in yet you might you know you might have worked on if you've worked on core stuff then you have issues that you wrote up and you solved a year or two ago that haven't yet landed and maybe they and you have a few that never will it it's it's extremely painful not being rewarded for our work we're actually pretty proud in the Drupal community that we do reward people for their work but all you have to do is talk to a few people and you'll find that not everybody feels that way all the time especially in some of the less visible areas I think we could find a lot of people who work on the documentation project who don't feel rewarded for what they do they don't feel acknowledged they don't feel like what they do is important there's a whole bunch of different places in the community and and even though we've worked on that and we value that as support is another great example and there's a long-running tragic issue about that right now we're even in the issue people are feeling unappreciated and so even though I on this one even though we claim that we know how to reward ourselves for our work I don't think we do and I think that it's easy to find out if you just talk to a few newbies or a few people around that you find that that's not that we're not as good as we wish we were the breakdown in community bullet I find really interesting I I remember as we were getting close to having Drupal 7 come out did you remember seeing some core contributors saying horrible things on Twitter like this will never work and it's all going down in flames and essentially that's it's probably both cause and result of a breakdown in community you know where people aren't people are depressed themselves the community is not working the way it ought to how people start to snap at each other just what you would see in a in a poor morale in a shop with poor morale or family with poor morale so this whole breakdown in community thing is another thing that we have seen happen and we've seen it happen periodically I thought the fairness bullet that we aren't treated fairly was really interesting there are lots if you're going to work in the Drupal community you actually have to already accept that you're not going to be treated fairly that you're not going to be necessarily acknowledged at the level that you expect or or the things won't go the way you expect how many of you as a young contributor an early contributor to Drupal were treated poorly in IRC or yell that or you know that was your first experience Angie right getting jumped in IRC or or you posted a patch you like figured out the whole patch thing right you posted a patch and and then you just get ripped up some one side and down the other or from another perspective you you try to solve a problem and there's no way to figure out how to solve it you know it if if you take the time to solve a problem in a community as open and as you know as soft as Drupal is Drupal is soft you can find your way to do things in the Drupal community there are ways to get things done but a lot of times especially when you're new you don't know how in the world you would do that so who do I talk to well there's only one answer right if you want to get something done you just talk to web chick but that doesn't scale very well and in fact I think there's a whole eaten has a whole domain right web chick doesn't scale or something like that so that's another area of the whole fairness thing that I found really interesting is that because it's not clear who the leaders are or what the rules are and because the organization is self-organized rather than having a hierarchical or an obvious hierarchical structure we have some serious issues with that and I think one of the ways that we have to deal with that is we have to we have to make it more obvious who people are what rules they play make it more explicit you know we have a lot of areas of that with we think about in terms of Drupal.org content and users but it's actually an organizational characteristic that we have to find our way through and then of course the conflicting values thing we're all geeks with you know with phones that are on the internet all the time and where we can work as much at home as we work at work if they're not the same place and how do we sort out what we're doing that is work from what's community work and are the same thing there are so few boundaries in our lives in general it's not just the tech issue that lots of people deal with it's the fact that we are in community that has something to do with work that has something to do with hobby lots of us work at home we just have all these conflicting values in addition to of course classic conflicting values like can I get this done and at what quality and in what time which are just standard software type conflicting values so I think the Drupal community is actually got a number of very explicit and I mean at this book just nailed many things about the Drupal community so let's go on to that next one how are we doing we've got ten minutes left so you have you're the only one in the Drupal community that has boundaries which basically means you're way too lazy yeah yeah she doesn't do enough I can tell you she doesn't do enough yeah yeah that that's I commend you for doing that and I try that I have a long ways to go because creating those boundaries and keeping some boundaries is a fundamentally important thing you are a smart person do you give lessons yeah yeah that's good okay so now I want to I want to do some brainstorming I did a blog post with a lot more bullets than this but I'd like to do some brainstorming and have you come up with you know with some ideas and we'll we'll scribe those and and get get some of those in there but it's fundamental to us that we have to keep our contributors and keep them healthy that's us right I mean we're the future of Drupal or we're gonna get replaced by all the newbies one of the two right but wouldn't it be better to have us and the newbies I think so we're pretty good we got Drupal where it is right we're we've all been a part of this it'd be better if we were part of its future as well if we burn up ourselves we aren't so my opinion is that we have to rethink and drop unsustainable processes we just have to recognize them and we have to say this has to be fixed and I can name a number of those the the handbook is one that's unsustainable I don't know any way that we can get the handbook ever under control given the what it is today and its history so we have to figure out what we can do about that that that's an example I I listed some others the UX team leads that's another one you know it just it goes it goes on and on the number of things that we have that we just oh well we're gonna have it 530 we're having a conversation about about the full project application process okay which we tried to do according to our values a year ago but well and two years ago and three years ago and we have not succeeded in actually doing what our values say we want to do so we have to do something different we have to come up with something that we actually do instead of just intending to do so I think increasing resources is a great thing it doesn't always work there isn't an infinite amount of money in the world but you know with the Drupal dot org redesign it got done with some increased resources and the give migration I don't think could have succeeded without increased resources that was that was brilliant another idea is recycling responsibilities so I think that the Dave reads of the world should be able to drop their modules off in the recycle bin and people who are interested in those modules should be able to pick them up we have a process like that but it's much scarier we call it abandoned modules and and it's not nice right it's like oh well this was a module and somebody went away and left it and now it's abandoned you know we need to explicitly recycle responsibilities we need to make that normal and good so that people can move on I like that so so she said you could make it where you sign up for a new term so you can make it you can make a commitment to a module but it has a limit it's not perpetual I like it I like it yeah yeah I think adopt instead of abandon would be a good idea yeah well I I totally agree so so Eaton's point is that he got in trouble for giving away a module to somebody that maybe was unknown but you know if I don't take care of my module how am I better from somebody that's unknown you know and we just have to deal with that and you know if if somebody comes along and they're willing to take care of a module and I am not in reality taking care of it I should give it to him yeah I agree I think we have to work on that and we all know if you maintain modules or maintain projects we all know that there are issues that people come and they're interested for a little while and they go away and it's not that easy to keep a smart person invested in a project or documentation or whatever it is that they're working on but I think I think just coming up with a way to I heard a couple of great ideas just now about term limit or not term limits but but signing up for a time limited commitment on on on a thing that you do and explicitly recognizing when you when you can't maintain something and looking for other stuff so rules and rules I think we're talking about everywhere and I think that's important yeah yeah so so the idea is that you need to set expectations and and maybe move a little more gently between maintainers you know like we've we've we should probably let new maintainers in more easily and we should probably take over a maintainership of modules more easily co-maintenorship we should probably let that flow even though there's some risk involved but the risk of us over committing is extremely high and that's what we need to realize is that it's not just a risk that you get some newbie that will screw up the work that you did there's also the risk that you'll screw yourself up so that you can't contribute in new areas and you know there's real opportunity in burnout if you can take somebody who has has found a way to recycle themselves and restart in a new project they can do new things with some energy that they couldn't do if they didn't get out of there so civility is a long-term theme of the Drupal community when we are not civil we damage the people around us and that's kind of like that breakdown and community thing but I think that civility is something that we have to pay attention to we've had some Twitter's get Twitter escapades lately where people go and pile on and Twitter that probably how they will probably wouldn't in real life and we probably have to stop piling on and Twitter yeah or stop using Twitter yeah Twitter's pretty well established you might not have noticed that but you've already proven that she says she's made like 200 only 200 tweets in her life but she's already proven that she's smarter than we are because she turns off her IRC at five so so what else can we do what else can we do nice simple practical one my first core patch ever patch was a small little feature edition back in the Drupal 47 days I think but at that point we were still small enough trees always remembered when he committed a patch to say thank you in the issue queue after he said it committed thanks he still does that like 98% of the time and that is very much to his credit if you maintain a module please please please say thank you every time you commit a patch that's right there's some some maintainers that are very explicit thanks for reporting that you know I like that yeah that's it and and saying thank you when you commit is a great yeah a great influence on civility thanks especially if you're dealing with a newer contributor that word thank you with and the more high profile you are in the community the more important that that's a good point that's a good point check I agree with that so yeah one of the things that the Drupal code of conduct says very explicitly is that we will step down gracefully it needs to say a little more that was all copied from Ubuntu of course but I think it needs to say a little bit more it needs to say we will step down gracefully and this is what it might mean and here's where the recycle bin is and you're welcome when you come back you know so I definitely think that Drupal dot org slash DC OC Drupal code of conduct so yeah yeah we yeah if you we're done we're done with everything so we're we have to move on to the we have to move on to the project review a committing to a particular term for responsibility yeah I don't think we're saying that that so so his point is that we don't we probably can't make everybody commit for a time limit to every responsibility I don't think anybody was suggesting that I think they were saying that instead of a perpetual responsibility module maintenance for example should be a time limited responsibility doesn't mean that you can't make a single contribution in the queue oh that's the abandoned module process but that's a different thing yeah it's yeah anyway what I think this is an important conversation I'd like us to continue this conversation throughout the Drupal community and see if we can adjust our processes to with respect to what they do to our people I think we have to think about that in all of these different angles and I appreciate you coming and conversing about it so