 Thank you guys for so much for coming. If you're still coming in and you didn't hear me before, I'm going to go off this slide, but I'll leave it up here. I'm really interested in the topic, and we're going to come into this a little bit during this talk about motivation in the tribal community and what motivates people in the first place to spend a whole bunch of time working on this project, which is just such a complicated issue. So if you could share with me and with everyone kind of what motivates you by tweeting to this hashtag through motivation, that'd be great. We'll come back to it a little bit later. All right, so let's go ahead and get started. The name of this talk is Building a Learning Community through Competition. And I'll explain a little bit about where I'm coming from in a second. But thank you all for coming. It's a huge room. So just really quickly, a little bit about me, just so you might have some idea of who it is you're listening to. My name is Mike Hayden. I'm a freelance Drupal developer, which basically means I spent a lot of time playing Call of Duty at home in my underwear. We're actually going to come back to Call of Duty and video games in a second. But that's just a joke. I used to be a high school teacher. I used to be a science, math, and computer science teacher. And I'm really interested in the overlaps between education and the Drupal community and also the Drupal software project and education. So there's a picture of me in front of some kids. I've done it myself and I've maintained reviews attachment to a bunch of sites. If you haven't checked that out, it's a really useful module. I suggest you do. I think it brings me here to talk to you today about motivation, about learning, and about competition. This site that I started, that's called the Moduloff. Can you just raise your hand if you've ever heard of the Moduloff before? OK, cool, so about half of you, maybe. I'll get into some details later about the Moduloff itself. It's a Drupal developer competition that I've been using to try and motivate people to contribute, and we'll talk a little bit more about it. The teacher in me says before I give a talk, I'm supposed to discuss the goals first. So what I want to do is talk about motivation and open source. I want to talk about the Moduloff and the lessons I've learned building it. And I want to talk about the motivational tools that we have in the Drupal community already, and also the tools from other communities. Here's how we're going to do it. I'm going to start by telling you couples my story, coming into Drupal, and maybe kick it back to your stories. We'll talk about some motivational research, about how motivation works at open source and otherwise. I'll ask you to do something at the end. OK, so I'll just really, really briefly tell you about my story coming into the Moduloff or coming into Drupal. I sort of fell into Drupal. A high school teacher, like I said, like every high school teacher, you wear 20 different hats, and I was the guy that knew something about technology. They said, hey, you'd like to have an internet. Can you build that for us? You know something about computers. I said, yeah, I guess. I had a web hosting, and I went to their console, and there was a bunch of one-click installations. There was one for Drupal, and there was one for WordPress, and I thought the little drop thing for Drupal was kind of cool. So I kept using it when I started coming to the Meetups in Boston. That's when I started being really interested in the idea of contributing to course and was really undergoing this series of lessons and steps that will take you from I've never contributed to core before to I'm like a deep Drupal contributor. And I think it's Brian Hurst that's a big part of this and some other folks. And that was a big part of my first experience when I was starting to go to this Drupal Meetup. It kind of, you know, inspired me to get started with core in the first place. This is a tweet from 474 days ago. So it's one of my first-ever tweets and it says first core Drupal patch committed by web chick woohoo. Most of y'all don't know me, but for me to put woohoo in a tweet is kind of a big deal. So the elation that I had that I had committed something or something that I had done had been put into the Drupal project on the whole was just a spectacular or had this feeling before. I think this was a deep patch. I think this was a doc's patch that was like fixed a grammar mistake in somebody's documentation. But I felt so good that I had done it that I even said woohoo in a tweet which is a big deal. And I came to that camp last year and met a bunch of contributors and really started to get a little bit more involved in core. So what I discovered in doing that is that contributing to Drupal is really hard. And if you ever tried to do anything that says the number of new concepts to learn in Drupal is too damn hard. It's really difficult to get into this in the first place. And so I became really, really interested in the idea of what motivates these people. Who are these people? Super, super challenging work. Who are they? And what's their motivation for doing it in the first place? Because it's very, very difficult stuff to do. So let's talk about that for a few seconds. I'm interested in what the answer is for you all as well. So what I said is that I contributed to Drupal because I want to be ready for Drupal 8 when it arrives. Mark said he started contributing to Drupal because writing modules and fixing things is more fun than checking boxes which is definitely true. Identifying common solutions to problems, sharing fixes we discovered in our environment so that's the front of that community. Blake also said the same thing. Repaying is debt to the community. Helping people is fun. We have great websites that help hundreds of thousands of students in California in higher education. This person is new but wants to get started so that's a great person for them to be here. So I guess my point is if you look at those tweets for a lot of different people the answer was they want to help other people. They want to be a part of something big. They want to be a part of a community. I think that's spectacular. We're going to get into that a little bit deeper into this. I was going to have you all turn to the person next to you before people talk about Drupal. They say all the time come for the code and stay for the community. People come originally because the code is really useful but they end up staying because everybody is really great to work with. This is an image of the code in Drupal 8 and how it has changed from all the way from 4 up to 8. You can see 4 on the far left at Drupal 8 on the far right. This comes from David. He has a bunch of excellent infographics about the size of the code base. It's really expanding quite a bit. To me, that means that we really also need to increase the number of people and the processes that we have for bringing in the number of people who can contribute to core, can look at core, can teach people how to use Drupal. All of these things are going to have to increase for us to keep up with the pace and the code base is also increasing. Not only does the code increase but our community tools need to get better as well. Here's another tweet. This one's from XJM. Drupal 8 is going to come out. You can either get hit by the bus that is Drupal 8 or you can get involved now and help sheet it. I think that's so true, right? If you just saw the number, was anybody here for the last session before this one? It was about converting your modules from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8. Another example of how there's just so many new things in Drupal 8. It's extremely difficult to just jump in and get started so that earlier you can get in here to take a look the better. This question's about motivation and how difficult it is to contribute to core. This brings me to the fundamental question for this talk here, which is working on core or contributing to Drupal or learning Drupal, all of these things are really hard. They take a lot of time and then you need motivation to complete them. I think we actually do a really, really good job of supporting new contributors, right? If you're coming here for the first time, there's Drupal, there's core office hours, there's really good documentation in line. There's so many, you know, there's people in IRC who will help you just for the sake of it. There's so many great people and tools that you can have to learn Drupal, but what's motivating people to do it in the first place, right? And what's actually motivating people to keep going once they get in there? I think that's a different problem and I'm not sure it's one we've touched on at all. Okay, so let's talk about motivation because I think that's really important. Like I just said, I think that's a really important thing for us to start addressing. And I think that's a really important thing for us to talk about in terms of the importance of motivation in science and educational psychology. So one of the big things to talk about is extrinsic motivation versus intrinsic motivation. Extrinsic motivation is what is the traditional sense of motivation, right? You think about carrots and sticks, right? You think about a donkey where if you hold a carrot in front of them, the donkey's going to go forward. It provides a little bit of motivation. It's a reward for somebody for doing the thing that provides motivation external to the person that you're saying, do this because I'm going to do something else, right? There's something outside of the person that's motivated them to do it. There's a separate type of motivation that's called intrinsic motivation. Intrinsic motivation is internally generated. It's something that you do because you think it's a cool thing to do because you think it's the right thing to do. You do it for its own sake. When you do something, when you're intrinsically motivated it really makes you feel like a Superman character. Like, you're flying through the air. You've done this thing because it feels good to do. You understand the difference? Extrinsic motivators are not getting paid to do this. Intrinsic motivators, like, I think this is really interesting. Economics people, right? They study a lot about extrinsic motivators because they think about, oh, how much should we pay people to do this or not to do this? Or how much should we take away from people if they're not performing and there's a lot of research that's going into this right now is to figure out which one of these is better. And it turns out all health being equal a bunch of studies have shown that people will do better if they're intrinsically motivated to do it if they're doing it because they think it's cool. Let me give you an example. Smokers who quit, they did a survey of a bunch of smokers both before and after they quit smoking and they asked them, what were the reasons why you quit smoking? And the people who said that they quit weren't worth it for their own health. These people were way more likely to successfully quit than the people who tried to quit because of social pressures. They decided they wanted to quit smoking because people thought that it was gross or something. That's why they wanted to quit. Those people were not successful. The people who decided to stop smoking for themselves, they were the people who were way more successful. And this applies also in schools, students who are already intrinsically motivated to do better at it. And they can also have that intrinsic motivation turn to all extrinsic motivators. This is a really interesting study. So they took a bunch of kindergarteners or I think they were first graders. They just sent them out on free play and it had a bunch of different activities that they could do. They could be playing with blocks, they could be playing with crayons. It didn't matter. They let them do whatever they wanted to do. Then they gathered up all the kids in the classroom later and they split those kids into three groups. One of the groups they said, here's some crayons if you want to play with crayons. Then they had a second group and they said, listen, we got some crayons here. I'll give you a cookie if you play with the crayons. And then it's without saying anything to them. So basically there were three groups. There was one group that they just left them up to their intrinsic motivation to use the crayons. There were two other groups that afterwards they provided rewards of extrinsic motivators. When they put all the kids back and the kids were running around doing whatever it is they wanted to do and they found that the kids who were originally intrinsically motivated were kids who were originally intrinsically motivated to use the crayons. If they got cookies, they didn't want to use the crayons anymore because they were expecting cookies after that. Now they only want to do the cookies if they're going to get paid to do the cookies. I think this is a really important lesson for us as we're thinking about ways to motivate people. If there are Drupal developers out there thinking about paying them or giving them points or something like that for doing it, we don't want to shut people down if they're expecting points and we're not giving them. So we'll get to that a little bit later. But that's a really interesting example. I think also the entire open source movement is a really interesting study in extrinsic and intrinsic motivation. So many different projects and people who contribute to these things, they're not getting paid. They think it's interesting. They think it's a difficult problem to take on. There's a video by a guy named Dan Pink and the name of the song is Drive, the surprising truth about what motivates us. This is animated by somebody on a whiteboard. This video is super interesting, Matt. And I can't play it all because we don't have enough time. But I'm just going to start it right when you start studying that open source stuff a little bit. Let me just get out of your way. One day a lot of times we produce things that never emerge. Let's talk about mastery. Masteries are urged to get better at stuff. We like to get better at stuff. All these people who are acting in ways that seem irrational economically. They play musical instruments on weekends. Why? It's not going to get them to make them any money. Why are they doing it? Because it's fun. Because you get better at it and that's satisfying. Go back in time a little bit. I imagine this if I went to my first economics professor, a woman named Mary Alice Shulman. And I went to her in 1983 and said, Professor Shulman, can I talk to you at the classroom for a moment? This is my business model. I just want to run it past you. Here's how we work. You get a bunch of people around the highly skilled world who are free and volunteer. They're trying 20, sometimes 30 hours a week. Oh, but I'm not going to give it away rather than sell it. I'm not sure what it is. I'm not sure what it is. But what do you have? You have Linux, Powering, one out of four corporate servers and Fortune 500 companies, Apache Powering, Wikipedia. What's going on? Why are working at jobs for pay doing sophisticated technological work? And yet, during their limited discretionary time, they do equally if not more technically sophisticated work. Not for their employer, but for someone else for free. That's a strange economic behavior. Economists who look into it, why are they doing this? It's overwhelmingly clear. Challenge and mastery can't contribute to it. That's a challenge and mastery along with making a contribution. These three points are his big ones that people are motivated to work on these open source projects because it's a challenge, it's difficult and they want to take it on just like Climbing Mountain Mastery because it's going to make them all three of those things pretty much intrinsic motivators. Big powerful types of motivation that you're going to contribute to this sort of movement from education and how I think you could apply over here and already does apply in some open source communities. Extrinsic motivators are not entirely bad particularly for these short non-complex tasks. They work really well. For example, I ask you to carry a bunch of rocks from one stage to the other. You're not going to do that because it gives you a fuzzy feeling for the community. Let me tell you a really interesting example of extrinsic motivation for the community. They were looking at their data and they saw that people who downloaded their free trial were likely to install it once and weren't very likely to buy it. If they installed it and tried it a couple of times then they would definitely buy the software a few times. What they did was they gave a buy the free trial process which is ridiculous. You just download a free trial of software because you tried doing inside the software. You don't just download and install it. You're competing with... That seems so silly, but people for whatever reason when they see a leaderboard, they get into it and these people are conquering it and there are sales numbers from people downloading free trials but not by 40%. Just because they put a leaderboard in them there wasn't anything else more to it. They aimed it to be kind of an adventure to discover territory. That's a lot of techniques. We're talking about a 40% jump in sales for a free trial process but that's a very large number. The point is that these badges and achievements have also been shown to education to increase student achievement so they'll do better on tests afterwards if you can motivate them to do these repetitive tasks particularly with badges. If you've ever heard of Khan Academy or some other websites that were trying to coach kids through learning activities if you're going through a bunch of problems it'd be nice to say if I got five in a row I get a little bonus. There's some little colorful thing on the screen and it seems silly, it seems meaningless because it's just some dozen that can't take it to the plunge and get $5 for it but for whatever reason it motivates us. A lot of studies and education have shown what I was discussing before that if we give people badges for things that they would do on their own that they don't need badges for then they come to expect badges and they do worse if they don't get them and so what we do with intrinsic motivators is that gamification, these badges, points leaderboards, stuff like that it can get people in the door it can get them started especially when they have to start with these junky contests in the beginning and over time we need to kind of transfer over to intrinsic motivation because the badges are going to lose their value and you're not going to rewrite the entire graphic system image that's not going to work great but it might help you to contribute some documentation to motivation in general and around kind of education how it might apply here let's look at some of the tools that the Drupal community has already to try and motivate people let's take a look can you raise your hand if you've ever heard of the certified Turok.com okay yeah, so this came out from Greg Knattison and a bunch of other guys who were growing venture solutions a couple of years ago the idea here was that it formed out of the debate over kind of certification in Drupal if you've ever tried to hire a Drupal developer before you might find you get a bunch of applicants who are not exactly Drupal developers maybe they speak a little PHP maybe they've done a little WordPress with Drupal here you know what I mean and so there was this idea that maybe we should come up with a Drupal certification but that has all kinds of problems say to be the certifier of Drupal A to get certified to be a Drupal how does that work and I actually think certified Turok is an excellent solution for that problem you know, if you have a Drupal.org username and it will spit back out a score of how much contribution you've made to Drupal it'll tell you if you put in trees in there to get to the level that the scores go up to 11 so the highest we can get is 11 most people are way lower than that but what it really did was in a very quick and one number score show you how much contribution this person has made to the Turok community and there are some obvious benefits to that that means that in order to become a Drupal Rockstar according to these people and that in some way makes you more hireable you have to contribute to the project itself increases your score was never released because then it could easily be gained by somebody right but I think it's a cool tool it's been somewhat abandoned it's still around it's still up but the index hasn't been updated in some time and I'd love to see it updated because I don't have a spoiler and I've been around for a year or two so many are the user pages on there's a lot of work itself there's check boxes that you can put there that say I contribute patches I give support in IRC there are badges on the side that say I've contributed to I'm a member of the Drupal Association we have this intuitive sense already in our heads that people want to display this information about themselves it's something that they feel proud about it's something that gives them their own intrinsic ownership over their work and their work on the Drupal project right on other piece that I think is really nice in here which I didn't put in a bullet for this but it's important to notice this mentors feel that we have on Drupal.org profiles now it says these are the people that have mentored me into becoming the person that I am right now in the Drupal project and that I think is really great also as the code base continues to grow as the number of people contributing to Drupal will grow we're going to need to also scale up the educational systems that we have around Drupal so that more people are doing mentoring and we should be really really really bowling those people and saying thank you for the work that they're doing if you ever come out in IRC before of course there's the bot in their Drupal.com and you can give you can say a person's username plus plus and it will give them a little bonus point according to the Drupal.com and you can ask the Drupal.com for what your score is for how many people have plus plus to you or you can go to the Drupal.com website it's all listed there at the top of this list with 1,800 people who have said thank you by giving you a plus plus it's also interesting to know that you can see at the bottom the box was 1,337 so somebody has game this and made himself the worst but also the leadest so I think this is a really interesting tool because it's community power it's not just like you can't game this because it's people that have to have to give you the plus plus but it's also one of the ones that great motivation you can help somebody they'll give you the plus plus afterwards that's going to make you feel good it's a little bit of an extrinsic motivator so that's some of the tools we have already there's one big tool which is I guess I'm most qualified to talk about I'm going to talk about the module off which is a website that I run that is trying to motivate people to learn more about Drupal as well so the module off is a website where I have element challenges where people will code up something in response to the challenge and submit it and then there's a prize for the winner and that's provided by several different Drupal vendors for example posting vendors video lessons all these things subscriptions to Drupal Drupalize me as a good example find these vendors and they offer up a free prize for anybody who parts it wins and the competitions last for two weeks and it provides a little bit of motivation for somebody to come in and try something new learn something new and give it back to the community also after the competition is over the submissions are made public so that anybody who so that after the fact if anybody is searching for the topic of the challenge they can come upon the solution so I'll give you an example we had a challenge that was create a fuse plugin which people submitted to that one and so the hope is that we don't go along with that challenge the hope is somebody who is later on Google a use plugin maybe they'll come upon the solutions they'll find the winner they'll have that certified as a good solution a good answer to the question they can take advantage of that resource afterwards we have about 300 registered users it's very difficult for me to figure out exactly how many people have registered because of the amount of spam but I think this is all over 300 people real people who have actually registered and they get emails and stuff about it I'll just briefly get into this people always ask me about how I came up with this idea it's kind of funny stories I'll tell you I had this really bad habit of late night domain registration does anybody else suffer from the same place yeah I was thinking about this cat laser to an idea I have like kittycams.com I was watching the challenge you may know it as the real world road rules challenge on MTV and it's a silly show where people are basically they put very volatile people together and have them do physical challenge I had this funny idea in my head because I wasn't even really watching TV I was just sitting in my laptop coding and I had this funny idea what if we actually put a bunch of like core drupal developers or experienced drupal developers in a room together and force them to do that's what originally inspired it and I was like oh let me try to figure out a good theme for it and I registered the moduleoff.com and as I started to mature the idea a little bit I said oh this could actually be pretty easy to do and I had a bunch of vendors to offer up the prize for free I already have hosting this could be something that's totally free for me to put together and would be a nice benefit for the community if after the fact the challenge was out there for people to see and all I really have to do is a little bit of marketing and so that's how I came up with the idea I was just literally inspired by MTV so I guess we can thank them for a ton of work for me to do because all I really had to do was put this idea together at first and do a little bit of marketing and then ask me about how did I actually implement it so I'll just talk about this very briefly just how I did it it's a couple of weeks of development time my spare time it uses the omega theme it's responsive it's my first responsive site it doesn't look beautiful on a phone but it works I also have the Twitter and MailChimp modules in there so that when people sign up they get the newsletter and if people submit something the site kind of tweets out about it to try and spread the word and there's a blog out there that gets so you know just trying to get the word out as best I can I'm here today also to kind of get the word out a little bit if you're interested you should definitely check it out it's moduleoff.com let me talk a little bit about some of the challenge that I had putting this together if anyone's ever tried to run an international contest it's a very difficult thing to do even for big companies so technically in the official rules it says that you have to be from the United States to participate people have been very very upset about that I'm sorry I just don't have a legal team with it some countries you actually have to register if your contest has a real value prize some countries you have to actually register that contest I'd have to register a contest every two weeks in that country and I just don't have the resources to do that unfortunately but I'll say with the wink and maybe we could pause the recording for a second that if I don't know where you're from then I'm not going to stop you from participating I'm just a guy, just some guy who am I to be the one to judge these modules right I actually threw down a little bit of my own cash to offer an Android tablet as the prize because I wanted to and so we got a lot of interest we had 11 different people submit a module which I was super appreciative of but one of those people was a very prolific core contributor and a very very good Drupalist and that person did not win and was a little bit upset about it and perhaps that person should have won I trust their knowledge of Drupal pretty and so this gave me this idea maybe I shouldn't be the sole arbiter of who wins these things so for challenges where I've had a lot of submissions I've invited some people I know Dave Breed has helped out Tim Plunkett has helped out to actually look at some of the solutions and help me to make sure I'm making the right decision another thing is that interest has kind of faded over time maybe it's because I'm not offering an Android tablet anymore but we still get a submission or two for every challenge but the interest isn't there as much and improving this presentation and a little bit more marketing effort but I think it's a powerful tool and hopefully we can get some of the interest back to it there's also been some skepticism early on I don't know this guy Dave I actually really appreciate this feedback so I'm not calling about it right after I came out with it it says my verdict on the Drupal competition site stay away by submitting an entry date or your code and strictly open to U.S. citizens so he actually dove into the legalese that I had downloaded boilerplate from some other sites somewhere and read through all of that I appreciated this feedback because I changed it so that the code is eventually published out of the GPL and people have been skeptical of this thing from the start they think somehow I'm trying to benefit when I talk to the vendors that I'm trying to get to sponsor these things they're like what's going on here are you just doing this how does this benefit you people actually think that I'm just post posting these challenges because I'm trying to get people to do my work oh I need to do this piece of functionality can somebody please do it for me for free that's not the case for the community but people are skeptical and I appreciate that but it's going to challenge to try to convince people we've all set some successes like I said the very first challenge had 11 different people to take it on it's hours of their lives that they put down to try and make more of these modules and make a screencast explaining it so I thought that was a great success I found sponsors for 10 different challenges these are vendors from the Drupal community who are offering up their product for free that's been very successful finding them there's a project called trust issue queue extras which is a result of this quote is from Greg Anderson he's one of the trust maintainers and also the author of this extension says the Moduloff trust challenge was the perfect motivation for me to finally pick up this idea and implement it due to my limited time I had to pick something that I thought I would implement eventually anyway but without the motivation of the competition it might have been a long time not just like that warm fuzzy feeling that I said with who in the tweet in the beginning it's the same idea when I finally had somebody speak out loud to me that this site had provided them the motivation to give something back to the rest of the community made me feel so good about what I was doing and I think that there's probably other people where this is the same way they just didn't email it to me afterwards this module is actually really cool it's a trust extension where you can post a patch to the issue queue with command line motivating people to actually build something for everyone else to get back to the community on going issues I'm actually seeking co-maintenors if there's anybody in the room who thinks this is an interesting idea and wants to get involved please I'm going to be gone for like the whole summer we're going to start camp and I'd love to have somebody help me stay on top of this have some trouble finding the time to market it and the more sponsors I can get the better I turn to and I don't want to swing back to the beginning it's only been like a month or two so if you're in the room if you're somebody else in the room that wants to donate a couple dollars or donate a piece of the product to sponsor more competitions please come on by afterwards and talk to me or send me an email to sponsor this project so that is the whole module off piece and again we're talking about that in the context of trying to motivate people to contribute to core the first time to learn triple work I'm going to show you a couple of other tools so have you ever used anybody use Ubuntu and have you ever been to ubuntuforum.com thank goodness for the site this is like taking me through the darkest of days my very first year of teaching at iSchool for whatever reason because I'm an idiot I decided to install Linux on my laptop in a Windows XP environment trying to print this for this website because in your first year of teaching it's also the deepest darkest terrible in your life also that's just the way it's going to be thank goodness for this website because it took me through when my audio stopped working thank goodness I had this website but they have a system on the side of all of your forum posts there's plenty of forums that have a similar thing that has these little images that represent how long a person has been on the site how many times they've posted to the site so this UCLA geek here at the top this is the first time he or she has ever posted two beans at once slightly ground coffee bean slightly roasted coffee bean here for much much longer has really advanced coffee cups and chaffel who knows why and I bet that this person raised it in or something I bet they don't really care at this point what kind of coffee cups they have but maybe in the beginning when they first signed up for the site they saw these people who were helping everybody else and those coffee cups gave them a little motivation to get started Stack Overflow another site that I have so many questions for because it's the answer to all of my problems I assume you guys have seen this site too this is the same idea except instead of just posting to get your points people upvote you and they say yes that's correct but I'm going to kind of there's a community curating the P-mark to say that answer is correct and move to get 30 extra points or whatever the number is people upvote your answer and they say that's the right one and you get more points so this is kind of like the look on karma system where it's a social system and you get more status within the community and I think that that could be really powerful to your people as well there's also for the designers out there there's a site called Dribble it's got three B's just saying it's a design oriented community it's very sort of open source design community basically people post up their photoshop files their templates UI kits stuff like that things that they want to give back give or ask that anybody can use there's also some special tools on this site there's this concept of favorite or likes or whatever there's also this concept of buckets so as I'm going around I like that I can click like on that tools or the contributions that get the most likes will bubble up to the front page of the site there's also this concept of a bucket where I can gather up all the different things that I like into my own personal buckets I can come back to them later it also has the concept of a follower like Twitter style where I can follow another designer it's kind of a concept something we can also really use on Dribble.org I think if you could follow a core contributor and see the work that they're doing I think that'd be awesome if you could follow individual issues but can you see what other issues can you see what other people are following what issues they are following can you pull a bunch of issues into a bucket of some kind and share that out is there are there better tools that we can have to create a little bit more social community around all of tools from a bunch of other different communities that we can think about ways to attach to the Dribble core development experience to Dribble.org to increase the social tools that we have there I think that would be really great so given that as I said in the beginning as the number of files in core continues to grow as the number of concepts and complexity in core continues to grow as the number of people using Dribble continues to grow I think we also need to continue to grow our systems around educating people actually I think really really good tools for mentoring new people we've got core office hours lots of great documentation lots of people video sites and all kinds of really good ways to teach people Dribble but we haven't at all really touched the idea of motivating them to learn it to contribute to it for the first time I think that's a separate issue and I think it's something that we really need to think about what kind of tools can we build I think we need to start folding stuff like that not specifically competitiveness into Dribble.org itself and I'll talk a little bit about that in a second so one of the big things I think we need is more motivational tools on Dribble.org I think the same kind of thing that you see on Stack Overflow Dribble the indicators of longevity and their contribution levels should be on Dribble.org itself we have certified to rock which can tell you how much contribution somebody has made I think it'd be great if that sort of stuff was on Dribble.org itself we have to just be careful about doing it in a way that doesn't stop people from points in social status to get in the way of people contributing just for the sake of doing it I think it can be done in a really smart way I also think some of the tools I was just talking about from Dribble to help people kind of grow an online social community a little bit we need to have the tools on Dribble.org itself for helping contribution that's a separate issue for more fun competition and the Dribble Club is a nice start I think it needs to grow if it's going to have more of an effect but I think that these kinds of competitions that there's other ones out there in the world there's one called JS1K where people put together these JavaScript applications that have to be less than 1K in size and people are really important that we can you know keep the food and also to encourage Dribble vendors to get involved I think it's a really nice way to kind of encourage people to push the product forwards without specifically sponsoring a piece of functionality within Dribble so a vendor can be really interested in this to happen in Dribble and people may reject that idea they don't want to feel like there's any corporate control over Dribble itself but if they want to push Dribble forward in general sponsoring a challenge like this getting the community around kind of fun activities that spread the word about Dribble who would tell a brief story about the summer it's up in Maine, it's called Puerto Bego it's with boys we have a league that we play a softball league that we play that has 13, 14 and 50 year olds and it also casts them so you can imagine when I'm playing in that game if there's a tag play at home and there's a 13 year old I used to be a physics teacher the same kind of so what we do at camp is we're playing softball to have fun it's the same kind of mentality about it if we have that kind of program or mentality where everybody's kind of flexing their muscles and just competing with each other to show how awesome they are and not for the sake of the fun and the gentle competitiveness this is going to hurt us but having some fun competitions where people are doing it as a contribution and just to play around with each other I think can actually help with important profanity before I click next to the next slide so you can put ear buffs on or something I think the absolute best way to motivate contributors though is to make sure that Drupal kicks ass because like I said before the number one way to motivate people to work on Drupal is to use intrinsic motivators and to make it so if I'm going to contribute to core or learn Drupal I'm going to do it because Drupal is so awesome but I wouldn't be a part of that so that same woo-hoo moment that I had in the beginning on that tweet is something that everybody can share because when they contribute to core or they learn something about Drupal they feel great about it because Drupal is so awesome and there's so many people using it that they feel like their contribution is value you know what I mean? Intrinsic motivation is the most powerful tool that we have and the people are only going to be intrinsically motivated to contribute to Drupal if they feel like Drupal is valuable and the community values the work that they're doing so the number one way that is to make sure that Drupal can be cast 22 is to motivate people to contribute to core motivational tools in addition to our education tools and the tool of Drupal itself cool I want to thank you guys so much for listening what I have to say I really encourage you to check out Moduloff.com we're going to start another challenge in a day or two it's going to be a theming only challenge so if you're not a deep developer and you just like CSS this is the purpose challenge for you it's just going to be a CSS only challenge so I really appreciate it thank you so much for coming and we're going to do questions if you have any things yeah so not sure if anybody has questions but if you do just pop over to the mic fund center hey Mike how's it going good job with Moduloff it's a great innovation with how Drupal is using the environment and I build startups myself and when I build startups I learn from successes and from failures and every time you do something you get more what I call data points that help you make better decisions so since you've run Moduloff I've solved like 10 competitions on there with a varied amount of prizes a varied amount of people participating what do you think worked the best to get into this earlier and the next thing that I've done that doesn't really change anything was to change the style of the challenge itself I think that's important some of the original challenges were very specific click on this link and have it change a date field using the AJAX that was like the very first challenge and I tried to generalize the actual work that they're doing so the course months have been like create a views plugin create a trust extension not create a trust extension that does x but just create a trust extension and it's going to work the other thing that I think has worked well is I changed I added a little bit more Twitter integration into it I think the social component this is more important after you submit something there's a little you know you get to a page and it says thanks so much for submitting here's a link to tweet about what you just did it's not going to give you any bonus points but it really increased your overall content so and I've seen the traffic coming from Twitter and Twitter's the number one place on the Drupal plan that I get traffic from it's been a really interesting ride there's a lot that I've been able to apply to also there's no one else behind me at one other follow up question sure so you mentioned a bunch of different gamification techniques from the perspective there's comments you're plus plus certified to ROG I'm sure you've talked with many core developers as well what have you seen as like just reason why what gives them that little extra hype I've seen a couple of times just to ask core developers the answer to that question to say what is the number one reason that motivates you and they always give me the same answer it just says the community that's all they say and I try to press them but that doesn't really, there has to be another step there it's like okay you're a part of that that actually motivates you to contribute you do something, if you're part of this community it gives you that real motivation that's like well I'm going to do this and it's not just going to be because it's going to make my life easier it's going to make a lot of people's lives easier and so really I think that's the biggest thing I think terrible stuff and giving this bodice to and you're going to appreciate that work a lot more for yourself if you do it on the one side I think that's the answer I don't know my name is Sir Fitchie he's German response but the short answer is that you can pull lower weights right to the top so he considers himself the best I was kind of curious about the two week timeline and if there's any notions of like how that affects people submitting and obviously plays into that's totally arbitrary decision on my part I just came up with it because I thought that seemed like the right level for the original you know it's an interesting idea to play with that a little bit more really I haven't heard from people and maybe that's some feedback that usually the challenges are not super complex I used to ask people to also make a screencast and I've dropped off that and that it certainly takes time to practice and then submit and upload to YouTube and so on but yeah maybe I should play with that maybe shorter ones as this started to progress somebody suggested to me to take suggestions for the challenges from nonprofits or charitable organizations that are actually having need for the not sure that I want to do it where it's something great to make something happen although that's an interesting idea but I had thought about the idea of having the challenges not just be for the sake of doing it but actually get some benefits I appreciate the question that's a good idea yeah just me there's a button on the side of the site that says propose a challenge so anybody can email me and come up with it send an idea and I've had a couple really good ones this next one this CSS only one was a suggestion from somebody else mostly a backend developer I don't do a lot of CSS I have a very working man I'll just CSS including some themers just as important so I also want to thank all the vendors which I should have put a list out here of all the vendors but if you go to moduleoff.com and look back at the prizes you can see the vendors that have supported the site I really appreciate all the work they've done so thank you all so much for coming I really appreciate it