 Welcome to the session on what's next for Drupal.org. If you're in the wrong room, I won't take offense if you leave, because, you know, that kind of thing. So, yeah, of course you're in the right room, right? Yeah, Drupal.org. So, my name is Webchick. I work for AQUI in the office of the CTO, where I basically get paid full-time to work on important community stuff for Drupal, which is a pretty sweet gig. I'm a Drupal Association board member. I'm actually a founding member of the Drupal Association, and I've been on the board since 2007. And I'm the author of Using Drupal, which is going to be out in stores in a month or so. So, go get the early release copy, yay. Okay. So, first, I want to give an update on what's happened in the past year, because I think a lot of people don't realize that there's actually been a lot of stuff happening on Drupal.org, and they maybe come out in little spurts, and so they're not really noticed. But I wanted to first talk about some of our wins in the last year, and also credit some folks who helped with that. So, get migration, yay. Plus one subscribe, yay. We now have an actual means of making API change notices that is not editing a freaking documentation page as this long, yay. There's a little toolbar so that you don't have to know HTML to help out with documentation, and anybody at all on Drupal.org can upload an image and put it in their post. Pictures in your post, whoa. Yay. Issue summaries, we now have a solution in air quotes for the situation where there are 300 comments in an issue, and you walk in and you're like, I have no idea what's going on, and I don't have time to read that. We take an issue summary initiative, somebody comes along, they summarize it, so the first post in an issue is usually the summary, so you only have to read one thing instead of 300 things, yay. The documentation team did a bunch of work to actually turn on the community and community documentation, so actually make it much more obvious to people that our community documentation is wiki and you, and you, and you, and you, and you, and you can edit it, and you should edit it, and these are the people who have edited it, and all that kind of stuff, so give it up. We launched improved distribution tools on Drupal.org just like two weeks ago or so. So in the past, all of the successful distributions that you've actually heard of, like PressFlow and Open Atrium and all of these, were all hosted off of Drupal.org because they couldn't do things like put dev releases in or add a patch, or add an external library of some kind or any of that kind of stuff. Anything that actually makes distributions useful, basically. So all of those restrictions have now been lifted. You can include any external GPL library in your distribution that, as long as it's on our whitelist and there's a process for that. So external libraries, patches, dev releases, reference git clones of specific branches or specific revisions, basically anything that ever sucked about our distribution tools has been fixed. Yeah! And then finally, I don't know if people have noticed this, but api.drupal.org has gotten kind of awesome. Like, it supports full class hierarchies and browsing object-oriented code. It actually, like in addition to knowing where functions were called, it also knows where hooks were called and where theme functions were called. So, like, you can look up a function like theme breadcrumb and it can show you all the places where theme breadcrumb are called. You can look up all the implementations of a hook and core and gazillions of other stuff. And as a testament to this work, View's module now hosts on api.drupal.org instead of its own separate infrastructure, which is awesome. So, give it up. And finally, another thing process-wise, I don't know if we want to cheer for this, but this is really important process-wise. Neil Drum has done a bunch of stuff to set up a process for getting a Drupal.org development sandbox. So if you have an idea of you want to make Drupal.org awesome, there's a process you can go through. You can get basically a clone of Drupal.org. It's sanitized so you can't, like, steal people's passwords and stuff. So you can get a clone of Drupal.org, hack away on it so it does the feature that you want and then get people to look at it and collaborate on it and this kind of stuff. And just about all of those improvements I just showed you were done through this process. So it's really great that this exists. Yay! And then finally, we have documentation on how all of this works. Yeah! All right, so please give a hand and this is only some of the people- I'm sorry to have time to get everyone's faces, but this is some of the people who have made this possible and let's give it up for them, okay? All right, but none of you came to hear about this crap. I just wanted us to feel light and fluffy. Okay, so what we want to talk about is actually the plan for this year on Drupal.org, right? So, I want to preface this with a couple of caveats. I have no idea what I'm doing, okay? I don't know my Jenkins from my Hudson from my Puppet, I don't know, all those crazy things, but what I do know is that we have an amazing infrastructure team, we have an amazing community of web developers and things were broken process-wise and stuff wasn't happening and so I basically saw a need and I jumped in to try and fill it. This is not the penultimate plan of the Drupal Association mission for the rest of life. This is basically something for the next six months to get us through, get some major changes done and so we can have a platform from which to do even more things, okay? So please don't hit me because I'm very sensitive, okay? So this year, the Drupal Association put as, it has six major initiatives, two of them are MakeDrupal.org Awesome, which is great, for site builders and developers, which is a pretty cool mission, right? I mean, if anybody should be in charge of Drupal.org, if anybody is, the DA should certainly have an ownership stake and that should certainly take responsibility a lot more than it has in the past. I think most people would agree about that. So site builders and developers, what that also means is there's an unspecified third tier here, which means we need to make Drupal.org Awesome for our sponsors as well so they can help fund the things that we want to see happen, okay? So we have to make it nice for the construction hats, the nerd glasses and the fancy ties. So what does that actually mean? That's a nice platitude, MakeDrupal.org Awesome for these people. What does that actually mean? So I had no idea. So what I did is I started having a lot of conversations with people and so I talked to these folks, meaning the community. I put up a voting tool and yes, it's not on Drupal and sorry, but it worked for just banging out a couple of things to try and get a general sense of what our insider contributor community thought was important because obviously protecting the needs of the insider community is extremely important. They're the people who actually make Drupal.org happen. I also interviewed almost all of these folks. These are the folks, this org chart sort of thing, are the folks that actually do the work on Drupal.org. So there's people who are in charge of project module, people who are in charge of the Git structure, people in charge of like solar, general infrastructure, this kind of thing. These are all the people who know everything about how our website works. I talked to a bunch of them to find out what they thought was important and what they felt would be good to do. And I also talked to these folks. This is Jacob Redding and May and Seneke from the Drupal Association who do a lot of business wrangly things because I certainly don't know what businesses want and they have a better idea of that. To try and like take all of this input and like stir it up into like a big soup, okay? A soup of delicious Drupal-y goodness, I don't know. Okay. So here were some common trends that came out of that. The first trend that was loud and clear was there are like critical things that basically everyone is in agreement that we have to do but they're stalled out. Either because there was a community initiative around it and it got killed because nobody cared or there isn't a community initiative around it and there really never can be because it's so big and so daunting that the community can never take care of it. But one way or the other there's like big things that we know have to get done and aren't doing it. Plus one subscribes a good example of this, right? Like we knew for seven years at least that that was like a critical community performance issue. But because we couldn't get our act together and raise a peasley little 7,000 bucks until last year it never got fixed. So looking for more opportunities like that of fixing the really obvious things that help improve the performance of the community. The second big point that came out loud and clear was that there are community driven and Drupal-y-org initiatives. I mean we did a huge push on this like towards the end of last year trying to get people involved because we're like before that we're a community of web developers who can't make changes to our own f-ing website. Okay, think about that for a minute. So we did a whole bunch of work to make these processes and documentation and sandboxes and all this kind of stuff but yet because there was nobody whose job it was to just kind of like stay on top of those things and there's literally like 17 issue queues that this stuff lives in that's really hard to keep track of everything but they were like happening, they were going through the process and then they were just sitting there dying on the vine and that was terrible because it destroys volunteer morale it blocks our community and it's so hard to build up momentum once it's destroyed like that and so we want to make sure that doesn't happen again. The third point is that Drupal-y-org's bus factor that? That is f-ing scary. I love all these people dearly but basically no one of those people has any idea how the entire thing works. They all know their little pieces that they get and there's some people with more general knowledge than others but it's a really scary situation because if anything happens to these people you know hopefully nothing violent or anything like that but just they get, they decide to get a girlfriend or no I'm just kidding but but you know and they start doing something else we're in a precarious position and a lot of them you know they were really passionate about this stuff a couple of years ago and now they sort of stay on because they feel very obligated because it's like a moral obligation for them to really care about the community but they have other interests in life you know they want to be playing bongo drums in Brazil or they want to be helping you know occupy Wall Street take over the world or whatever so our bus factor is really bad and we need to fix that problem. The fourth thing came out loud and clear and I was actually surprised about this because I just assumed like you know this would be stuff that like I would care about since I'm the Drupal-7 maintainer but nobody else would really care about but everybody across the board said it has to be on Drupal-7. The business people said it because they said it's absolutely stupid that I get into a meeting with a client and I tell them to use Drupal-7 and they say your own f-ing website doesn't use Drupal-7 why should we? I heard it from the developers who really want the kind of capabilities that a redesigned project module built on modern tools would give them and I heard it from site builders who want to you know benefit from those capabilities as well so everybody thinks we need to be on Drupal-7 and this is one of those areas where it's not like a bunch of people tomorrow the code sprint are just going to sit around at a table and make that happen right this is something that needs strong leadership I mean maybe guys impress me see what you can do tomorrow however probably we need funding behind that and we need you know someone to sort of head up organization of that and sort of things so this is the plan for the next six months we want to build out a team we need the Drupal association I'm wearing my pointy Drupal association hat now we want to build out a team that works full-time on Drupal.org as opposed to only when there's something emergency happening or as opposed to only something when someone's yelling enough that they're not getting enough attention we want to build a team that works full-time on Drupal.org on the following three things one is the big scary stuff that only the DA can do and there is a class of problems that's like that two is the high impact low hanging fruit stuff it's just dumb stuff like issue issue summaries or like let people post images it's like it's not like that will take eight months of someone's time you can probably bang it out in a week or less I think we did actually but you know but having somebody to just bang those things out so we can show a constant stream of improvements and really help people feel like Drupal.org is our infrastructure we use to build our software it has to be awesome for everybody and then the third tier of this team's responsibilities is reviewing and deploying community-driven initiatives so when the documentation team says we really want to see curated docs happen we can say awesome here's your sandbox here's the passwords whatever you need go ahead and do that thing ping me when it's ready for review I will review it and I will schedule it for deployment as opposed to the current process which is like ah ping Neil he's around sometimes maybe I don't know so here are some examples of things that fall into these buckets so big scary stuff that only the DA can do I categorize under those things like the Drupal 7 upgrade there are some things like project ratings and reviews this is a feature request that's been around for seven years it was the number one and most requested change by all of the people on the voting tool and it's not something that is really well driven to community initiatives because obviously if it was it would be fixed by now if something is wanted that badly and hasn't happened there's a problem there in terms of high impact low hanging fruit I mean things like get blue cheese on groups.drupal.org which actually just happened last week so and now third tier what I see happening under those things in terms of reviewing and deploying community improvements are things like make Drupal.org awesome or sorry api.drupal.org awesome so additional features to api module to fill out that site and also like the case studies section you know making it so it's not just a sad list of text you know referencing sites that probably aren't even on Drupal anymore so that kind of thing so and this is the fourth right everything down because right now almost nothing is written down and it's all on the heads of various people and so I'm going to be trying to like make sure that I know what's happening and it's written down and all that kind of stuff so here's our team today we have Neil Drum who is our senior architect just within the last week we've been able to read the Drupal Association we know to reallocate his time so he's 100% on Drupal.org and community initiatives as opposed to being the DA's IT guy which is not really a good fit for him and you know it's not a good use of his talent. Second we've hired Captain Intern who is Tyler Ward and he is working on a number of different things across Drupal.org he worked on hosting page improvements a few other things more for our business community and then we're hiring by the way because what we need is we need a project coordinator for Drupal.org to kind of keep all of these things straight and sort of like you know help sort of project manage the whole thing without using the term project manage because that's a terrible term but it really is about coordination it's about coordinating with a bunch of people it's about setting priorities that sort of thing so if that sounds like fun to you please come talk to me by 2013 however we hope to grow this team out more we have some initial things we need to bang out we need to get through the other side of but once those are done what we really hope to do is clone Tyler I'm just kidding no but hire additional developers to work on Drupal.org full time and also break out our staff with additional resources for example a UX lead for Drupal.org somebody to focus primarily on DevOps things like that not to replace these folks I want to be absolutely clear these folks are amazing and they're the lifeblood of how our community works we do not want to replace them what we do want to do is we want to support them in the same way that the Drupal association supports the Drupal project all of the stuff that is either hard for them to do is soul sucking for them to do or they just frankly don't have the time and we're trying to basically fill gaps here we are not looking to replace anybody okay cool? guys are quiet yay okay so yeah yeah yeah you're going to make a team so how exactly is this team going to make Drupal.org what are they going to need to work on so this is how we read the next few slides and I think this wasn't very clear the document that I posted if anybody saw that so I'm hoping that this makes things a little bit more clear so anything I write under big things those are the primary goals for q2 and q3 meaning by DrupalCon Munich we want to bang out these things okay the second column is the small things and these are examples of things that we could work on these are actually going to change week over week so I couldn't even begin to tell you what this is going to be done by Munich but I'll have another report by then to tell you what we did do but this will be like the little things that are just hanging out there they wouldn't take very long to do and there's stuff that the community found important or community things which are things that don't quite fall into that bucket of someone could just bang it out in a day or two and don't quite fall into that bucket of a soul sucking problem that everyone universally agrees has to get done but it's somewhere in the middle and what that means is that if something like that appeals to you you can drive it home you can bank the improvement on a sandbox that you deployed so for site builders this is an example of a roadmap projects ratings and reviews is actually a really huge site builder improvement because what we do to people is we have say download Drupal which is useless out of the box and then we say and now if you want to extend it all you need to do is go into this huge pile of 16,000 modules and find the three or four of them that don't suck okay and we insiders we community insiders we understand what you need to do is you need to look at the commit history and you need to see oh that's Merlin a chaos module that's a good module but this one's a web chick module so stay away from that one we understand these things we know commit history is really important we know to look at the issue queue and look for a long trail of fixed versus active issues we know all the signs to look for but somebody who's just downloading Drupal for the first time has absolutely no idea of that and we all have our internal 5 star rating of what a module looks like you know it's like oh views that's a 5 star you know anything that web chick touches that's a 1 star stay away from that you know whatever we all have that but that is not transparent to our community it's not at all so we really need to fix this and this is a critical issue it's also something that dovetails nicely with porting Drupal.org to Drupal 7 because that means we're going to be doing project stuff anyway so you might as well bolt it on small things we're going to be doing this on Lisa Rex's page Lisa Rex is sort of heading that up it's really good stuff happening there and improved event listing on groups.drupal.org so having one place to go to find all the camps and you know things like that happening around the world maybe with a little map you know sign up pages all that kind of stuff because the info is all there but it's just very difficult to find and if you go to like say a massive calendar module so it would be cool if we could sort of improve that for people and then in terms of community things the documentation team is about to spearhead initiative to essentially like we have the community initiatives which are wikis and stuff like that that's all cool they also want to spearhead an initiative that's like more like top down curated documentation so the documentation team saying this is the exact outline and the exact flow and everything else is how like an official handbook that is more tightly controlled and only people who like are sort of into the team and know how to speak English natively or can work within that framework sort of prioritize that stuff so sort of two paths for the community to learn how to do drupal stuff and then a better support section there's a sprint happening on that tomorrow you know we had a huge community discussion about whether we ought to not close the forums down and move to Stack Overflow at least link to Stack Overflow and that kind of thing and what my observation has been is that the people who actually help in support on Drupal.org really want the tools to move to Drupal.org and not only that but the people when we surveyed the general community which includes developers and people who use Stack Overflow today that also ranked incredibly highly on the list which was I found it surprising and also really encouraging because there's a lot of like relatively small changes we can make to our support section that would really improve it the way over the way it is now so those are examples of things we can do for site builders in terms of developers the big thing is porting Drupal.org to Drupal 7 and you're like why is that a developer improvement why do I care so one of the things that we're coupling with this port or this is the current plan again this is all in flux I was literally in buffs up until this very moment talking to people but one of the things we want to do when we port Drupal.org to Drupal 7 is basically Drupal commerce if I the project module meaning build the functionality we want out of project module but build it on modern tools views rules organic groups all the stuff that we all use in our regular projects and we know how to work with as opposed to this is keratin in the room crap okay don't listen for as opposed to this kind of cruft up thing that we've sort of been like you know carrying forward since about 2003 and although some other people use it for all intents and purposes it's a Drupal.org custom module I mean honestly we've made several attempts in the past to sort of you know do improvements to it to make it more generalizable for example the issue queue listings all being powered by views and that's all great improvements but it clearly isn't enough because people just don't know how to deal with the code in there and so that's that's a major thing and when we do that re-architecture that opens up the door for all kinds of stuff like activity streams like the ability to intersperse commits with you know issue queue comments the ability to treat project pages as organic groups so you could do like you know per project news feeds and per project documentation or you know potentially I don't know I'm hand waving a little bit here okay because I haven't run this past the docs team at all but these are the types of things that we could do and I think it's really empowering the other thing that it does and this is huge is it moves our collaboration stack to the version of Drupal that every one of us is using so that it's much easier as a contributor who wants to make Drupal to just jump in so that's the big thing small things backlink commits and issues there's a couple of ways we could do that one of them involves a bunch of get improvements one of them just basically is very minor but it would still be better than nothing stuff like that really helps when like certain core maintainers sometimes forget to do get apply hyphen hyphen index when we're committing patches and so forget to add files and then break test bot and then I get emailed on a weekend and I go in and anyway certain core developers we won't name names so that happens so stuff like that also like you know little usability improvements to the follow link for example just the other week Derek right rolled out a little counter so you can see how many people are following an issue which now makes me just want to know well who are they so maybe that'll be the next thing we do small things like that right like little things that are quick wins that we can just bang out and then in terms of community things Jennifer Hodgson has been amazing at just rolling out additional improvements to API.Juplitor like that's her baby she's just made it amazing and so we'll keep rolling out more of those I know Jay Thorson and some other folks are working on automation for the project application process Jay Thorson, Klausie and probably some other folks to try and get our you know contribution process around contributed modules you know more streamlines so people aren't waiting quite so long for reviews and stuff like that so those are examples of community things that might be bubbling up from the you know grassroots that we can help support with this team in terms of sponsors you don't get any big things sorry but you get some small things you know some stuff like hosting better hosting pages a better marketplace we have this marketplace previous man sitting there forever and just really just needs to get launched already lets you like find businesses by like sector and location or a couple of other simple things you know because right now the best place to go for that information is aquia.com and I don't need to tell you how stupid of a situation that is so you know better job boards the ability to do groups.juplitor is kind of fine you know but jobs get posted into groups that have nothing to do with anything and it's really hard to tell what jobs are open versus closed and stuff like that and those kinds of things and then some community bubble up things that are happening is like people are working on things like a better book listing, better case study section so it's really important for me to say here that as part of these improvements what we're going to try and do is monetize certain aspects of Drupal.org a little bit and that sounds scary what I don't mean by that is putting fricking ads on the issue queue pages what I do mean though is that maybe on the jobs listing it pays us a couple of grand to get a featured listing or maybe on the distributions listing page somebody can pay a couple of grand to get their little featured distribution the advertising would be like very clear that it's advertising but we need some way to supplement the income that we get from Drupal.com because if you look at our at the Drupal.com I mean there's little annual reports you can look at this yourself our income comes like 94% or something from Drupal.com we're going to have to buy ticket prices which means we have to charge high sponsor prices all of this kind of stuff and we would like to decouple those two things so that we're not dependent on a conference to fund our non-profit so just so you know people like Jacob Redding and people like that are going to be in the issue queues and they're going to be trying to stay out of your face when you're like collaborating on the thing but for certain aspects of the site they're going to want to find some way to help supplement the funds that the Drupal Association raises so please talk to me, please talk to Jacob Redding because we fundamentally do not want to disrupt our collaborating community that's absolutely paramount but yet we need to figure something out because right now like our hosting page probably could be netting us 500k a year which would completely pay for this team but it's been traditionally really difficult because of all the processes that are in place and stuff like that so please help us help you because we really want to make Drupal.com but we have a lot of fundraising to do to get there so to summarize here's our 2012 timeline so my goal for QQM1 or Denver was basically to bootstrap the team so get an intern hire, get Neil Drum off of other stuff and on to Drupal.org and then to set up some basic community processes that we'll go through in a sec Q2 we're holding at Drupal.org at port Drupal.org to Drupal 7 Sprint in Portland at the OSL offices April 23rd to 27th if you want to go to that please email me drupal.webjik.net and I will try and work something out we can't obviously have like 100 people there because that would be insane but we want to try and fly all of the main lead people in and we want to try and fly in a bunch of people who are like hey I'm smart give me some stuff to do and I can go do it so if you live in Portland or you can come to Portland and that sounds fun to you please contact me because we'd love to have you we're going to be having probably what's going to happen in Q2 is it's mostly going to be contractors so we're probably going to end up paying somebody to care about get to care about test spot to care about solar and some of these other things because internally within the DA meaning Neil Drum we don't have that knowledge right now and so we have to like somehow supplement this we're probably going to be hiring some contractors on a short term basis to help us get through the Drupal 7 upgrade and then of course incorporating community improvements is the number one thing when we have community improvements we want to make sure that they're looked at quickly they might have to wait until after the Drupal 7 upgrade we don't know it depends what they are but we'll definitely like you know give you guys an expectation that like okay that's awesome we will totally look at that and this is the date that we will look at it and stuff like that by Q3 Munich I want to have the Drupal 7 port done wouldn't that be nice and with that I'd also like to have project ratings and reviews done and the point probably a couple weeks before Munich I want to reassess the community priorities because the way I did it was very like janky it was like one of those 2am oh my god I got to figure this out I don't know do I deal scale and then it does flashing messages and I don't know so you know reassessing the community your priorities we have a bit of time to think between now and then about what that process would look like and then by Q4 we should be able to increase our staff headcount because we'll be on the other side of Munich and we'll have additional funds by that time hopefully and then we'll be able to look at our reassess community priorities we'll be able to figure out what is the staffing thing that makes sense there and then we'll add to the team cool is that okay okay alright alright so the important thing is that we can't do any of this without your help okay because like I just outlined I have basically one and a half people to work on Drupal.org for the next five months plus some contractors so and even if we had a team of like 50 people we still couldn't do all the things on this list like we really need the community to help us help make Drupal.org awesome so we've set up a process called office hours Drupal.org office hours which I should probably rename because it's a terrible name but that's what it was called on the wiki page when I took the screenshot yeah we can bike shed it later let's bike shed tomorrow noon we'll ask what this is is essentially a dedicated time on IRC if you come to Drupal hyphen infrastructure come to us tell us what you're working on and then you know I work with Neil until we get a project coordinator please for the love of God apply for the project coordinator position but anyway until then talk to me and Neil and we'll try and figure out how to get it slotted in so it gets deployed in a timely manner this right below that is our hit list for the current week so we're going to start documenting what we're working on after you know at the end of that meeting so it's like this week you know this was for last week you know we worked on the Drupal.org case studies page we worked on porting you know blue cheese groups that Drupal.org all this kind of stuff so that we can credit the people who helped with that and so we can basically copy and paste this into our newsletter and let everybody know what we're working on and what their money is doing on our site so please get a sandbox yay and let's make Drupal.org rock woo so I just want to say two other things one I really have to say thanks to Aquia because this stuff just kind of came up and I kind of had to drop everything else I was working on and kind of focus on this and they were very understanding about that so I really appreciate that and also please come to our board meeting so the Drupal Association is doing its first public board meeting in room 602 right after the closing plenary so if you want to watch governance take effect it's probably going to be kind of a trainer because we've never actually done a public board meeting before but it's in the interest of increased transparency we really want the community to come get involved in the DA and see what we do so if that sounds interesting to you after the closing thing come to room 602 and now I will take any questions go ahead and go to the mic Mike please hello Randy hello Angie fantastic work beautiful features great progress and I'd like to give you a hand for making the process happen since you and Neil I know but making the process happen since Chicago because that's that greased the wheels so thanks for doing that I think that's awesome and it broke the log jam and it's just absolutely fantastic and I have to tell you everybody it does work yes it's in a secure place and you have to find it but I have gotten actually things on Drupal.org myself you know and I know how to do it and I'll tell you how to do it if you don't know but it works it it's not trivial but it works it can be done which that hope I never had that hope before at all okay so can I put instiller of hope on my business card yeah you can please do all the things I saw there are like features they're like techie feature great great stuff every single one of them is great but to me the big thing about Drupal.org that is looming is the the content and the IA and even though we work on those from time to time there's not an owner of Drupal.org that says this is what Drupal.org should become this is a site builder or a web master you know a thinker an IA thinker who is always pushing it to where it ought to be and to me that's a huge thing that is not this techie feature and that techie feature and I would love to see us actually have a visionary owner of Drupal.org pushing it to where it could serve its users better that's a great comment that's a great comment yeah so on that note so my little cute little plan that I banged out however only went through the end of this year just for like staffing kind of things and again if we raise a crap ton of more money I am happy to hire people sooner so help talk to your businesses donate to Drupal.org become a member all of that fun stuff so in the longer term plans however we kind of have to bootstrap this team and find out how they work with the infrastructure team and how not to step on their toes so there's some stuff there want to try and get those things out we also want to bang out some community features because honestly the DA has an awful lot of credibility to recoup like we've done some great things we've done the Drupal to redesign we've done the Git migration some of this other stuff but it's very ad hoc and it's very like big bang and then we go away and we don't touch it again for several months so in my opinion based on talking to people the DA has a lot of credibility to build before I think most members of the infrastructure team would be comfortable with the DA saying and now we own Drupal.org too you know what I mean I think it's time to work that up and so that's what the next six months is about however so I wasn't saying that that was the DA's responsibility that's one way to do it but that's not at all what I was saying I was saying that we should make that a priority one way or another I agree so in the DA's roadmap for next year after we get kind of this initial team built out we actually do want to think about staffing that position a product owner for Drupal.org analyzing Google Analytics logs figuring out where people are coming from figuring out oh if we make these two cosmetic tweaks to this page did that move our traffic up or down from the how to contribute page would be doing things like you know basically doing what I've been doing for the past month which is talking to a bunch of people and figuring out their priorities and stuff like that and would actually own the vision around it you're right it doesn't necessarily have to be the Drupal Association the DA in my opinion is probably the best suited organization to do that at the moment and I know no one on the current infrastructure team that I talked to anyway has any desire to own that role that I've seen and it is a role that really could use full-time attention it's not something you can sort of do in nights and weekends it really needs a full-time thing so that is in the roadmap and I agree it's critically important I think for and I could be wrong about this but I think for the credibility of our organization we need to show the community that we can get some shit done before we start saying and now give us even more money so we can hire more people does that make sense you may not agree and I don't know that I even agree with myself but that's the current thinking around it but basically let's have these discussions again in Munich because I think that that would be a time when we will know one way or the other whether this team was effective for the last six months and we'll have a lot better opportunity to discuss those kinds of things cool hey Laura so I have a comment and it's really not a but but an and because I cannot disagree with anything you presented here I may not be the typical Drupal.org user because I'm a site maintainer I'm a GDO moderator I sort of have my fingers in a lot of pies but I was out of pocket for a few months the last few months and when I started to reintegrate I realized to a grand scale how balkanized and hard to find it is information that's relevant to me there's the huge volume of information and I think everybody can agree that when you just sort of browse around Drupal it's like you could just go to sea and you never find anything for days yep it's solar has been a great thing for finding things relevant when you're actually searching for something you get your right keywords and you drill in and you can find answers very quickly and it's made Drupal's internal search often better than Google for finding answers but when it comes to discovering new conversations and whatnot one of the big problems I have is that the only way I can find out about them is through Twitter or Facebook or someone mentions it you know in a meeting or discussion or something like that and that's because we haven't really leveraged the community kind of tools the community crowdsourcing tools that are available either in terms of concept or actual modular solutions that can help us find relevant things for example being able to follow certain people and then be able to have the content that they're following highlighted so I have a group of people that I'm always interested in they have to say and sometimes they're epic posts like webchicks posts or Larry Garfield's posts and sometimes they're little short things and little observations that are just like gems and then what they're seeing is of interest to me and I can't just follow them through my dashboard or anything and being able to bring visibility to these things can help all of us because I think there are people who work in Drupal in education or libraries or whatever they're working on they have their group and they're discovering things and being able to leverage and expose to each other what we're seeing kind of like what Facebook is doing and things like that or Google plus and bringing those tools can actually help this hierarchical effort of trying to drive it from the top with project owners and leads and whatnot with a little more crowdsource effort because we're kind of all stuck in our own issue queues and we can follow our issues but if I don't know about the issue there's no way for me to discover it unless someone mentions it in IRC and I happen to be looking in that 10 seconds span before it's scrolled out of the window that's a really good point I just want to point out the prairie group did a bunch of work on designs for something called topic pages let's see if I can see that make that bigger kind of bigger oh you can't even see that ha ha this wonderful thing you can't even see which is kind of interesting it's kind of hard to see but essentially there'd be tags and feeds of stuff that you could follow and you could follow people in the activity so this would be the user experience topic page pull in commits, users group posts, blah blah blah all this kind of stuff in to sort of one centralized view so that you as Laura you might be interested in following theming improvements both across Drupal core but also cool contributed projects and all this kind of stuff so a means of bubbling up that sort of stuff either in an automated fashion or potentially using social tools like that this is exactly the kind of thing that I want us to work on once we're past the Drupal 7 like gauntlet because it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me but there's a lot here in this little mock-up there's a lot here and to me it makes more sense to get the stupid boring plumbing crap that everyone agrees we have to do out of the way first and so that we can staff up our team and then we can start attacking stuff like this because I agree this would be amazing however if somebody wants to drive this through the community initiatives process I would love to support you in that as well and then it just becomes a matter of slotting it in with everything else going on but so totally agree with that so my plan only goes out to Munich I'm going by the end of the year we have some stuff like this to show people that can help with the content curation that can help with the finding what the heck is going on in Drupalador because I agree it would be great not to have to rely on proprietary closed platforms for that information yeah and it's also discovering this you know getting a it's a whole thing prairie initiative group prairie initiative yeah that's they're working on things like this like big things to help make collaboration smoother thanks hi I'm Lynn for the recording Lynn Clark and I wanted to know a little bit more about the community initiative I'm sorry if I missed it in what you're talking about in your roadmap but I know that the Drupal association in the town hall you talked about the office hours where people would be in IRC once a week to talk with people who are kind of leading their own scratch your own community initiative and I'm wondering is that are we talking that starting six months from now or is that going to be going on while you're ramping up that's going on starting not this Monday because it's the day after Drupalcon and Neil Drum needs a day of rest but literally this is going to start March 27th okay I'm sorry if I missed that announcement no it didn't really announce it very well so thanks for asking so this is the community initiatives page for Drupal.org which you can get to which is not very obvious you can get to it from your dashboard community initiatives and then it's under here oops not core that's my other hat this one and so this is our office hours blurb so normally it will be Mondays from 11am to 12pm pacific however we're like we're declaring this Monday a holiday because Neil Drum needs a break and we're going to move it to Tuesday instead but thereafter it's going to be Monday and this is right after the Drupal association staff meeting so they'll have an idea of what the DA's priorities are then we'll get the community priorities and then what we're going to do is update this list here to figure out what are the priorities for this week and I'm just going to keep stacking stuff on top of each other moving it to our I don't know but basically so that anyone at any point in time if they missed that meeting could come in and say oh okay this is what's on for the week and then can try and get their thing slotted into but the key thing about having dedicated time on the infrastructure channel is because like I consider myself reasonably active in the Drupal community okay and I cannot keep on track of what everybody's where I mean it's impossible so this was a way to let it be bottom up let people tell us what they're working on so that I don't have to literally follow 17 different issues that I know about it so if you I know you're very interested in like the RDF tagging stuff and being able to pull in external resources to Drupal.org and if you wanted to get a sandbox for that and you wanted to start working on that with a team of people then yes that would actually be the thing if you come to core office hours or sorry wrong hat Drupal.org office hours and you could bring that up or else you know just ping me it's fine you know that'll be the process and then it might be that that thing is too big to handle this week but essentially what we would be there for then is like you say I need a sandbox we get you a sandbox and then you work and work and work for a while and then you say oh I'm this far but I have a question about a performance aspect of this and so we you know find you somebody to help you with that okay so it would be more in an unblocking capacity and less of a development capacity right because the development capacity I really want to reserve for those things that only the Drupal association can do yeah and that makes sense I'm totally I'm 100% with that one question I do have is more about process yeah how can people who are doing these community initiatives because I've already built out prototype modules and everything I've done a lot of development work the thing that terrifies me is the idea of bringing this into the infrastructure process and having all of my energy totally sucked out by like trying to figure out who I need to get permission for for what or who's buying I need to get right and or you know going a couple months into the process and then realizing that somebody who has not seen it at all really needed to see it before I started yeah so is there going to be like a way to define who needs to sign off on what decisions I imagine we're going to handle that through office hours as well so depending on what it the answer is it depends right who needs to look at it really does depend on that gigantic org chart at least in the short term until we get institutional knowledge on how everything works so what I would say is again come to office hours and you can say the specific thing I'm working on is X and then we the infrastructure team now wearing my infrastructure hat which is like it has a propeller on it but anyway so we can say oh for that we need to pin kills first before you even get started because he's going to have a lot to say about that or Ryan we might screw it up I'm just going to put that out there because it is very complex and I still even though I've been spending a lot of time on this for the past year and a half I still don't always know who to talk to but between me and Neil and the other people active in the issues we should be able to figure it out okay cool yeah yeah hey hi could you speak briefly about whether mobile accessibility for things like the issue queues are part of the plan for the move to D7 yes they're explicitly not part of the so yes the question is our mobile experiences for issue queues part of the D7 plan and my answer is yes I would like to do that because that's like a little nice carrot that I can put I'm looking for carrots that I can stick onto the Drupal 7 upgrade that is like it's not a whole lot of work outside of what we would have to do anyway but it's like a nice feature to like encourage businesses to give us a crap ton of money so so yeah so I what I picture is and whether it happens technically on Drupal 6 or Drupal 7 and kind of remains to be seen but but yes there's a bank house is working on porting blue cheese to Omega which gives us responsive layout kind of stuff um we're going to need some help on like how to actually do like forms and stuff like that using the form API in a responsive way and that kind of stuff but yes that's one of the things I'd like to tack onto the carrot of a Drupal 7 upgrade so not only the better collaboration tools but also the mobile friendly Drupal.org because it's going to be kind of embarrassing if we ship Drupal 8 with a like yay mobile first kind of thing and then you go to Drupal.org and it's like three side scrolls over you know it's kind of like you know hurts our credibility but yeah to answer your question that's one of the things that I would personally lump under the Drupal 7 port because we have to rewrite the theme anyway so why not do it responsive. Awesome, thank you. Sure. So Laura just spurred a thought um I don't this this is just a follow on from what I had asked earlier about you know having a having a leader a thinker about IA and about about the whole site building and content of Drupal.org but you know like search is a is something that a person could own in the community and currently it's just like if somebody notices that the search doesn't work and they understand solar they might work on it right but it's so important and it's one of the fundamental experiences and every time I've had a problem and I actually found a solar expert to tweak the problem I've been happy forever after but nobody owns that and there might be pieces like solar that we could get somebody to actually own that would take away that whole like oh we have to hire somebody to solve that problem and search I don't know there might be other things besides search but I'll bet you that we have a solar expert in our community who would just take it on and fix it when it was broken and have a plan for it. That's good feedback. Yeah I mean something I'd like to do so something like that really needs to be done with in respect of and in consideration of the people who actually own the thing meaning they probably don't own it but they did the work on initially so something like that I wouldn't be comfortable unless I talked to Damian first about us getting someone else in there to help support solar since you're busy making commerce guys amazing but yeah assuming that that was cool do you have thoughts on how best to recruit when we find an opening like that and the infrastructure leads like yes please go for it because I haven't figured that out I mean I guess we can mention it during Drupalador office hours and maybe pull in a volunteer that way but the bottom line is if you want to help Drupalador come to office hours please because we're still getting our feet under us and it might take us a month or so to kind of really get rolling so but good feedback. Hey Gabor Hey so I've heard that Drupal people work on some new version of Drupal core which might be called Drupal 8 or the new Drupal or depending on what's happening Yeah I heard it kind of sucks and Is it like somewhere fit in the plan that like maybe more people would hear about it if they go to Drupal.org and like learn something about it like improving the visibility of that so did it appear in the priority anywhere? Yeah I would totally like I would like to run that as a community initiative because it's stupid that you come to Drupal.org and you have no idea that we're working on Drupal 8 or that we're working on this for that matter so yeah I would like to own that as a community initiative to try and get better call to actions on different pages and I don't know what that looks like if you're a designer and you'd like to help me figure out what that looks like I'd love to talk to you but I don't feel like Neil Drum need to spend his time working on that you know three or four of us could get together tomorrow and just bang out so that's the kind of thing but that's exactly the kind of thing that I think we should do through community initiatives for now until we have the product owner and the UX design lead and then they would sort of head up those kinds of things, okay? Okay thanks Damian McKenna for the logs so obviously there's the reality that managing and running Drupal.org takes a lot of investment and a lot of ongoing costs both just managing it and trying to do more with it where do you find or where do you see the balance of needing to both bring in the income for that but also not running into perception of monetizing the community too much it has been a problem in some communities where basically you get the free GPL core main CMS part and to do anything really decent with it you have to buy everything so obviously not taking it to that extreme but how do you find or how do you see being able to balance that? Okay that's a really great question so what I mean by better monetize Drupal.org does not mean we have a for-pay and a for-free version of Drupal at all because for one thing the DA does not control, operate own anything the software we are only about the infrastructure so we can tweak things on Drupal.org and if we do the wrong tweak the community can say screw you we're now Rupal.org and they can move and that's fine, that's wonderful so in terms of what I mean by monetization what I mean is stuff like this so on the hosting page which you only go to if you want hosting that there's little banners here and we make a big deal out of how these people support the Drupal community and then there's different categories like you can go to enterprise and as your platformer does the service this kind of thing and then charging people to have their logo on this listing that's what I mean I mean stuff like that where it's very targeted very specific and it's only to people who are actually looking for that information and it helps them find other things but it also like makes the DA a little bit of money by the way if anybody is in the market for a web host if you like any of the hosts listed in any of these pages and you click on the link that's why you're hosting through here if you're on a crappy host like dream host for example SSH passwords in plain text anyway so yeah that kind of thing and then a similar thing with the marketplace preview which you can see right here we have little listings here and stuff like that which is currently in alphabetical order which is kind of a terrible way to list things because guess who's near the top and guess who isn't near the top so you know being able to like allow featured listings that are very clearly marked as featured similar to how Google search results will like this is an ad if you want to click it click it not saying like we support these people and we can vouch for them or something but just saying like this is an ad so that's the kind of things we're generally talking about and I don't totally know how it will work you know because we're still trying to figure it out and again I'm very open to ideas on how we could stick things that would piss you all off I really would love to know that but in general that's the kind of things we're talking about we're talking about sections of the site targeted specifically at businesses and customers looking for businesses not anything touching where the community collaborates and definitely not touching the software in any way how about things like chip in for issues or projects or whatnot you know that's another one of those things we can probably look at after Munich but I was surprised by the like this is the site by the way I was really shocked by how contentious that was like overall it ended up raking pretty high in terms of ideas but like if you read the discussion it's like there are people on polar opposites of that issue either it's a great idea we should totally have donation infrastructure or this will destroy our community that's pretty much the delta there so speaking as the DA I have no interest in getting involved in an issue like that and trying to arbitrate something the community does not have consensus around all what I want to do how I want to spend the DA's money is around things that there is near universal consensus need to happen now maybe eventually this issue will show up where is it there's a lot of great ideas here by the way this one here yeah so it is definitely in the top 10 doesn't mean it's never going to happen but it does mean like how the best way for something like this to happen would be for someone to drive it through the community initiative process because if they did that and there was enough consensus around it to get it to RTBC then it's like oh we're just going to do what the community was doing anyway as opposed to the DA from the top down saying this is a direction we're taking for Drupal Network it totally changes the conversation if that makes sense so I am not really sure where I stand on this issue however the cool thing about this little stupid site with the flashy messages is that you can actually see who agreed and who disagreed on these things so if, well this is good though right because if you're someone who wants to see that happen here's the list of people that you get a sandbox site with okay and you start hacking on it and you start like showing it to people and you say what do you think of this and they go ah and you go okay well what do you think of that you know and hopefully over time we would come to consensus and say okay we reached consensus that this little baby step is a really good step in the right direction and it doesn't overly monetize Drupal Network or whatever it ends up being but if any of the things on these lists are stuff that you feel passionate about you know that's your team go find them go connect with them come to office hours get a sandbox and let's get rocking on some awesome features yes Hey Adjie I'm Sean DeArmond Is there going to be a group working during the sprints tomorrow on Drupal.org and where and when? Right There's at least several sprints happening on Drupal.org um help that one I can never find that link so these are some of the sprints happening these are like the featured sprints meaning people that we sort of flew in special or not flew in special sorry we gave free tickets to attend um so one of the things happening is a to Randy's point a content improvement sprint for Drupal.org led by Lisa Rex so that's really great um I know the Git folks are going to be getting gitting together okay sorry to be talking about future improvements for the Git structure stuff whether we do per-issue repositories whether we do you know better sandbox integration or some mixture of both whatever we talked about that today where we talked for like an hour but I think tomorrow the intent is to expand that conversation the test spot folks are getting together all kinds of people do you know where most of these are I noticed there's very few uh locations listed there is there one place that's all the sprints are happening tomorrow? Line excellent there that's where they're happening great I didn't even know that I was going to come here and look really awkward so I just wanted to add a plug um related to the sprints and related to the Drupal.org work there's a few features um in the plan which is on groups of Drupal.org for the commons distribution of Drupal for Drupal 7 that overlap with some of the things that are in the idea scale list of features and so um I would love to talk about how you know maybe we can just kind of like build those for commons and then put them on Drupal.org or something like that um where's the link to find out more about that sure groups uh it's the commons group and then there the post is um commons uh Drupal 7 MVP user stories and then unfortunately that links to a Google doc but it's publicly viewable and uh we're looking for feedback on that oh sorry yeah that's sorry and I haven't had a chance but I will post either tonight or tomorrow at the sprint a link to the relevant um Drupal.org issues that are related to the stories that are in the backlog there cool so if you like groups at Drupal.org and you want to make it more awesome then go find Ezra in that room that we looked at before thanks Hyatt mineral room A through C yeah thank you okay I guess that's everything and we should all head off to the closing plenary which is somewhere somewhere I don't know but anyway thanks everyone for coming and uh yeah