 Okay, good morning everyone. Thanks for coming to an important presentation at least from my perspective. So we are gonna have a little talk together about contribution burnout. So we are first gonna give a very brief presentation just to make sure that everyone is on the same page what we want to discuss today. So that we are talking about the same topic can understand each other maybe a little bit better and we also will provide a brief tips from ourself that if you fail right now that you are burned out something that might help you get through that. So who we are, that's probably interesting for you. We are just gonna briefly introduce ourself by name. I'm Laureus Klein, Drupal's team system maintainer and I come from Finland. And my name is Michael or people also know me on schnitzel. I work at the Meese Labs and sometimes I work a lot. So I had to find solutions, how to work around that and I'm happy to share them. So here is the topics that we are gonna discuss today. This is like, so the three first are what we are gonna cover in the presentation and then we are gonna discuss how we could make the community more sustainable and not make people inside the community feel burned out. So I'd like to first just to make sure tell everyone what burnout is in the terms of, in the eyes of medical professionals. So there's two different medical reference books and they don't align at all in terms of defining burnout. So the SM-5, which is the reference book for mental health professionals and is provided by the American Psychiatric Association doesn't recognize burnout as a medical disorder at all. Then there is the ICD-10, which is international statistical classification of diseases and related health problems provided by the World Health Organization has a topic about burnout. But it's, so the ICD-10 defines burnout as a life management difficulty and defines that the symptoms of burnout are similar to the person. So for this reason burnout is quite complicated because even the medical professionals can define what burnout actually is. It's something that is very personal and depends of the person's personal opinion and view. So the most common symptoms of burnout is that every day is a bad day, nothing is feeling good. It's a little bit like their person. You are exhausted all the time and caring about your work or home and life. Seems like a total waste of energy. It might be hard to focus on any tasks. It might be hard to get anything done. And it's mostly about that you don't feel like doing anything or you don't feel like that you wanna work on something. One of the most common misunderstandings I see people are making is that burnout is being mistaken with the stress. Because of stress, like burnout, in order to be burned out, something has to be burning to burn out. So I would define stress as the pace where something is burning. And then when the fire is going down, then you are burned out. So when you're stressed, usually people have over-engagement to their work, which means that they want to work a lot. They wanna try hard. But when you are burned out, then you actually feel disengagement and you don't wanna work anymore. And the problem in this is that in the stress, you feel like you don't have the energy to do that, but you want to do something. But when you are burned out, instead you might have the energy to do all the things, but you don't have the motivation, ideals, or hope to work on the things. Also, stress is something that may kill you prematurely. In some countries, there is even a definition for a debt that is being caused by stress. Burnout, instead, doesn't kill anyone, but it might, may, life seem not worth living. So burnout is even more a mental problem, instead of stress being a physical problem. We did a community survey, few weeks ago, where we figured out that 76 out of 100 contributors have felt burnout at some point. Around 100 people felt the survey. It doesn't fully, the survey didn't define if the reason is open source contributions, because it's very hard for people to tell what is the exact reason for the burnout. So we didn't even wanna, we didn't even want to try to ask them for that. Also, there is the common misunderstanding of what is burnout, if it's stress or burnout. So what is causing burnout in Drupal community? We tried to ask people different kinds of mindsets that people are having that has felt burnout. And we found out that definitely the most common and only thing that popped up very clearly was that they are being expected to be too many things to too many people. And 65% of all the responses for the survey told us that they have been expected to be too many things, too many people. Which actually kind of makes sense, because at some point when I was feeling burnout, I felt like I'm being expected to be too much. And then I had to try to figure out a way to not feel like that. Drupal is also a meritocracy, which creates its own problems. 75% of the responses said that the reason why they work to do open source contributions is that they wanna achieve something. And it's like there is a rainbow and you are trying to go towards the goal in the end of the rainbow. But then at some point, there is just a dust. So what I'm trying to say that people think that when they work harder, they think that they can achieve something more. And then they try to work all the time, even harder to reach another levels. But at some point, it is just not possible to reach new levels. And people should understand that it might not be at some point, because people are doing crazy things towards the open source contributions. Then there was one very interesting note we made on the survey that 55% of the people didn't feel like they have enough control over their work while doing open source contributions, which is very interesting note, because when you're working on open source contributions, there should be no one controlling your work. So personally, I don't have any reason why someone would say that they don't have control over their work while they are doing open source contributions. But this is definitely something that is notable because of the fact that it's so weird, at least for me. Maybe someone else has a reason. We can discuss this later. And then there was the bonus, which was a positive thing we found out, that we are very good at giving recognition and rewards for good work, which is positive from our side. And 63% of the people say that they feel like given enough recognition and rewards for their good work. One thing we also did during the survey, we asked people if they actually do something against feeling burned out. And not everybody answered it was just a free text field, but a lot of people just said no. It was a plain no, a sad smiley face sometimes. And I feel that's a help shout from people that they don't know what to do. They are in the situation if they're now stressed out or burned out or whatever. And I think we are really good in sharing, but we're all in code. We're really good in sharing other things, but we're not really good in sharing about our personal lives or things that really worked. So what I'm trying to do, I'm just giving things that really worked well for me on how to even prevent to get to a point that you feel burned out. And we can go through them. I think the first important thing for me is that there is no shame in working a lot. A lot of people feel that they're not allowed to talk about it because everybody can do it. So just work a bit more, just work two hours more. I mean, where's the problem? And I feel that we maybe as a Drupal, maybe as a whole society are really bad in like or making it a shame. So I feel myself, I don't feel ashamed if I work more, but the other part is also no pride in it. And I feel also a lot of people, they pride with saying like I worked a lot and I can handle all these things. And I think that's also bad. So it's just a problem. Everybody has to find its own level of how much he wants to do, how much he can do. And as long as he's happy with that, everything is good. If he's not happy, then we should help each other. So let's go through the things that worked for me. First of all, drink a lot. Why? Interestingly, there is a lot of these tools that or apps for the app for Macs and PCs that tell you like you should get up now. They never worked out for me at all because I installed them after two days because I hate them. The problem is, or the good thing is when you drink a lot, you have to pee. And you cannot really stop doing that. So it forces you to get up, to walk around. You move your body, you give your eyes a rest. And a lot of the things like when I'm stuck, I walk around and then suddenly you walk two steps and you have the solution. So it also gives you, with moving your body, you give your brain a change and that helps a lot. So I do it with having a water bottle on the table and that's really important. If you have water somewhere else, you don't get up to get that water. You need it on the table. And another really interesting thing that works for us, we have a slack bot that tells each other to drink water. I just started, I had the small curls and every time I drink water, I press the button and in the slack channel, it tells everybody the friendly water, but it reminds you to drink water and it worked. People started to drink more water, Peter felt more happy. So that's how my desk looks when it's cleaned up. So there's a water bottle there. We have personalized water bottle in the office. People can have it with gas, without gas, but it's there all the time and because just it's there, you take it and you drink it. So it's really easy. The only thing you have to do, you have to fill it up when it's empty. So that you have to get into some routine and that's hard, but that actually works really well. The next thing I do, I try to relax in any somehow once per day and it really depends what it is. Everybody has something different, but I really try to keep it as a ritual that something that relaxes me and for myself, it's actually showering in the morning. I shower every morning ritually. If I only get six hours sleep, I only sleep five and a half hours to at least shower in the morning. And it's a ritual that gets you up that lets me think about what I'm doing today, what is the plan, what is good, what should I work and we'll see later on, there's more things to think about today and I do that during shower. It doesn't mean that this works for everybody. Some other people, I talked to other people that do sports, some other people watch their favorite TV show, some other people do whatever, it doesn't matter, but I think everybody should have something that he can also go back and relax at least once per day to have some sand time in their day. The next thing that really worked well for me is divide your day. If you look at the day, at least for me, I have a lot of time that I need to focus, that I need to focus without distraction and distraction can either be the IRC channel, it can be an email, it can be coworkers, it can be clients, it can be my phone, it can be basically everything, but I need to focus. I need to focus at least two to three hours per day to work on some things. And what I found is that it helped me a lot if I find time during the day where there is not distraction. So there's one possibility to just go offline for work. To be honest, it didn't work for me at all because I feel really stressed while being offline because I could miss something. And so that didn't work, like just turning off everything doesn't work for me at all, I'm more stressed during that time. And so therefore what I found, I just work while others are not. Myself, I get up at 5.30 in the morning and work for two hours from six to eight where nobody really is in the office. And it's crazy to get up that early, but it's the only thing that actually helped me to be in the time because during these two hours there is not a lot of people are online, my clients are not calling me yet, the coworkers are not there, and it made me happier, it made me happier to have that focused time to work during that time. And the other thing that is also important at least for me that I saw worked really well is try to divide your day into fun and not fun stuff. Everybody does fun stuff and everybody does not so fun stuff. So in the morning I think about while showering what is the not fun stuff I have to do today and I'm trying to do it as fast as possible in the morning so I have it done. But at one point I feel stressed a bit, I feel stressed about it and I feel okay now, that's not like it's not gonna work. And then I switch to the fun stuff which is maybe not the most fun you can do but whatever it is maybe it's things that you like to do more. And then you do that but you give you a specific amount of time because it's dangerous because you could end up in doing the fun stuff all day long. So you just give yourself let's say an hour to whatever depends on you really things what you do to do these fun things and then switch back. And this back and forth helps me to do the things because if I'm just pushing the not fun in front of me I gonna do it in the evening because I have to because in the next day there is something or there is a patch or whatever there somebody people are waiting on and it just stresses yourself out. The next is find a coach. What do we all do? And I feel that's not specifically to Troopol that's not specifically to open source. We all do high like we deliver things or we do things like sport like people in the Olympics. They train a lot, we do a lot, we work a lot and they all have coaches. It's perfectly fine to somebody in sports to have a coach, everybody has a coach. So why don't we need a coach that just supports you and I have on myself, I have friends that are in same situation that we talk about. And there's one really, really important thing don't judge each other. It's not about judging. It's not about telling each other you're doing wrong or right, it's just about what works for you exchanging, telling each other how did you handle these specific things? It's just a person that you can talk to maybe it's a group that helps you because with saying the things that you do a lot of the times you realize if it's good or bad for yourself. Because if you just do it, you never think about it but when you have to explain it to somebody else it's suddenly you're in a different mindset in your brain and that helps. And then sometimes you see the other people completely freaking out. Like they look at you and say like wow, you're a zombie. And then maybe that reflects to you and you think about okay, what do I do wrong? So I think it's also important to discuss about what doesn't work in terms of like that's what I'm doing and maybe somebody else has another idea. So talking about it just helps and also reduces the level of that everybody thinks that only I have that problem. And what I really like to do is a sanity check. So I said that before about the zombies like I tell myself I do as much work per week that I still after the weekend say okay, I'm still overall happy with it. Of course I do things that I don't so much like and I do things that a lot of like. But at the end I'm trying to sanity check myself and maybe also with others to just to ask the question are you still happy with your situation? And if you say no, you have to change something. If you say yes, you can go on. And that's not about working and it's not about specifically working. That's about any way in life with the Drupal community with anything that we do that we give to others. The easy thing that everybody tells and there to be honest, it's not that easy is if the slides work is delegating. So one thing that I really took me a lot of time is if we delegate, we already know that maybe the person that we delegate it to will not do it perfectly. So we do it ourselves. And that's really dangerous. What I read and what I also feel if somebody else can do it by 70% that you can do it, that's good enough because you can fill in the last 30%. But you can do now two things or even three things at the same time while others are doing it for you. So delegating is not about giving it to somebody else and that person does it completely. It's about giving it to somebody else and supporting that person and maybe checking it and together as a team, do more. So it's about controlling and steering and not executing. It doesn't mean you give it to somebody and you never talk to that person anymore. You give it to somebody and you check with that person to fill in the rest of the 30%. And in the Drupal community, we have a really great thing and it's called the novice tag. So we can tag something with the novice tag and it means that somebody that maybe did not or cannot do the 100% as you do can take it on. And in the end, teamwork is more fun. It's more fun to work together and it helps others also to learn. So that person will learn from you and will maybe be next time on 80% on maybe 90% and then maybe at one point you can actually delegate also the delegating or the responsibility to that person. So it's a process that we have to work and I think that is really important that we understand that just putting a novice tag on something doesn't mean that now it's gone forever. That person still needs time. Or even if we give it to somebody on IRC, that person maybe wants to have information about us. What I do to know if I delegate enough or not, I time track my work. So I time track all the work that I do on specific things and a week later I look at what I worked on and I review saying, okay, well here I spent a lot of time or that I could have delegated. So it's about the reviewing process that I realize because while you're in it, it's really hard to realize in what should I do now because it's really important and I'm the only person that can do it right now. In that situation, yes, that's maybe the truth for yourself. But afterwards, a couple of days later, if you review it again, you realize, okay, maybe that wasn't really the case. So that's how I use time tracking so I can go back later and I know what I worked on and also how much time did I work on each things. Next one is saying no. If people ask you to do something, they ask you, they're not demanding. Most people or we as a Drupal community we're really good in asking each other. We're not demanding from each other. We're not saying you need to help me that. We say, can you help me? And that also means we can say no. Or if you feel you cannot say no, you can say yes but not now. We don't have to say yes all the time. And a no isn't offending. It's not something that you say like no, that's a dumb question or anything. It's just us saying I don't have time right now and that's perfectly fine. And what I try a lot is I also encourage when people come to me and say, can you help me with that? When I maybe have time instead of just taking over it and doing it completely for them, I encourage them to try it themselves. So they can then learn and the next time they maybe don't have to ask anymore. So it's all the time about teaching each other and trying to get people better so that we don't have to do the handling all the time. One of the really important things for me is listen to your body. Your body talks to you constantly. And I think sometimes we forget about that. And I think if you just listen and if you listen carefully enough, he tells us or it tells us when to stop. So myself, it's about if I have any kind of vision issues. So sometimes you're sitting in front of the desk, you don't look at your watch and I feel like, okay, my eyes are strange. And then you look at your watch and you realize it's three o'clock in the morning. So your inner watch doesn't tell you it's three o'clock but your body tries to talk to you or any other strange. I talk to other people and everybody has some other way that their body tells, hey, okay, now it's time to do. So there's a lot of different ways. And I can't tell you exactly what it is for you but it can be out there or it can be that your body tries to talk to you. The next thing is headaches. I'm just like, don't work at all, that doesn't matter. So headaches is a bit of hard thing of myself because they come quite fast. So for me, it's not only headache, like if you have a headache, it's not for me the time to stop, it's just to be careful. It's to be careful, maybe I forgot to drink water, maybe I should eat something but it's not yet the time to stop. So there's different levels and you really have to find out yourself how it is for you. And then the next one, sleeping, obviously. I myself tried to give myself at least six hours of sleep every day. And if that is not possible, I really try to do more later on but to get six hours. There's a lot of ways of how to fall asleep faster and I won't cover them all now but if you're interested, if you research a bit, there's a lot of ways of how to fall asleep faster and it's astonishing how good they work. So if you have problems with falling asleep, there is a lot, talk to me or there's a lot of things online. The next one is about expectations. I try to tell my people when I know and my people means friends, my girlfriend, whatever, people around me that work with me that I will be working a lot because I will be more stressed. They will feel that I work more and if when I pre-informed them, they know that these things are there. So with telling them, it makes it much easier for them. And what I learned is if I give any time estimations that's no matter in work, no matter if my girlfriend asks me, okay, how long do you have to work today or how long are you doing it? Multiply it at least by two. Maybe she will be upset because whatever, you're gonna miss something or whatever but you will be less upset if you actually show up on time that you said than if she waits there and you're not done. And I think that's one thing, it's just try it out, maybe it's 1.5, maybe it's 2.5, maybe it's five times, it doesn't matter but just find it out what it is for you. We are really bad in estimation. One other thing that everybody tells you when you feel stressed, just start another hobby. Just start something else. For me, completely didn't work out at all. Why? Because you feel stressed. You feel stressed to now have another thing. I have to do that now because I'm so stressed in the other so I have to do that. And now suddenly you have two things that you put yourself on. So really only do them if you really, really like them. Don't start one just because somebody told you you should. It can be that it really, really helps you. It can be, but it doesn't mean that just because it works for somebody else, it works for you. But don't give up too early. If you start something, don't give up after one day. Don't give up after two days. Give it at least two weeks or whatever depends on what it is, what you do. Give it some time to get into your schedule but review it and say, okay, that maybe works or it doesn't work. It's a challenge. We never stop improving. So I think it's about that. So overall, I think, and it doesn't work at all, I feel we shouldn't fight working a lot or situations where we have to work a lot. It doesn't help at all to fight against it. We have to accept it that the situation is there and we have to find solutions. And you will maybe not find a solution immediately. It will maybe take you two, three, four months to reiterate over it and find the good solutions. But they are out there and we all can do it. So, and I think we should try to more talk with each other about it. I guess then we are ready to talk about what we could as a community do to make our community more sustainable and make Drupal something that doesn't burn people out. Even though it depends a lot on the person's personal things they select and what they choose to do. But we should still try to, as a community, find solutions how we could help those people and is there some things that are burning out people more than other things? So if you have an idea. So if you have an idea, there is a mic. Please introduce your by name, at least. Hey, this is Angie, we're WebChick. Thanks for the talk. I think that was really good to kind of get this problem out there. One insight I maybe have to the, to the why did people say they had no control when this is open source and it should be for fun? I think that has a lot to do with that there are people nowadays who do get paid to work on Drupal. So there's probably some of that. I think also we as a community have directed that effort in a lot more way. Like right now, if what really makes you happy is working on features, we say no, you can't because we're fixing bugs, right? So I think as a community we do direct people based on the position of the release cycle. And I think because we've been in bug fix mode for the past however long, three years, that probably has a lot to do with why people feel like they're sort of trapped and they have no control over what they're doing. Because if they like contributing to core but the thing they like to work on is not there, they can't. Yeah, in terms of ideas, I mean one thing that Dries and I tried to do with the improved governance process, which this was kind of recently, this was like say in the last six months. We tried to make it way more explicit. Like what we saw, the catalyst for that was what we saw in core committers. They were basically, like I was the release manager for Drupal 7, which meant that single-handedly, well me and Dries, but I did more of the work, had to handle constant pinging from 1,000 people on everything and then even in Drupal 8 for a while there we only had like three committers and now it's grown to six. But we basically it was like in order to fulfill this role of core committer, we have to basically find this unicorn is super power person who not only has an unbelievable amount of time they can dedicate to community is also pleasant to talk to and has leadership qualities and technical qualities to all of these things. So we started splitting up those roles. So we said from now on, we're gonna fill core committers as product managers, framework managers or release managers who have a specific focus. And similarly, we tried to do a different thing with the subsystem maintainers, where it's like identifying usability topic coordinator, documentation topic coordinator, subsystem maintainer. The idea is defining the roles better so we don't feel the need to be Superman and take on everything that everyone asked of us and also to make it explicit what's expected of people so they can know, oh, I definitely don't want that job. Like, you know what I mean? I might think I want to be that person but when I find out what that person actually has to do I don't actually want it. So I think one thing that that was a really long story, I'm sorry. I think one thing that can help though is where people tend to spread themselves out too thin, you know, kind of talking to those people and finding out what do you think your role is in this project and why do you tend to do that? And I think you hit on a lot of things. I think a lot of it is I don't trust other people to do this as well as I do or this kind of thing. And I think talking to them a little bit about like what would make you comfortable delegating that? Like if we defined a role, that was that person and you got to recommend some of that role or if we said that's just something we're not gonna do anymore or whatever. I think a lot of people, to your point they don't have a coach, they don't ever get out of their bubble and they just work, work, work, work, work and then don't ever stop to reflect on what they're doing and whether that makes sense. So maybe it's monthly meetings or we all get together and talk about how we're feeling. I mean, it sounds a little hippie-dippy but you know, get on IRCE and the Drupal Vent Channel and just whatever, I don't know but I think you've hit on a lot of really great things here so just thanks. So one thing I want to say, it was very nice, good to hear that the bus factor in terms of the commuters has been made to be a little bit lower but I think there is, in other places the bus factor should be also made a little bit lower. Like we have maintainers and we are not updating the maintainers that constantly and is there anything anyone could think of how we could maybe make that process a little bit easier because what I personally think at least what we do in the team system and with the frontend people is we try to have good maintainers in all the subsystems so because having a new maintainer that hasn't been around for very long is still better than having someone who is not active and who is not committed to do the work and also there shouldn't be a shame to be taken out of the maintainers at TXT and what I've talked to a few of the people who has been taken out from there and what they say is they feel bad because they are the maintainers. They are being expected to be maintainers but they can't commit to be a maintainer and feeling taken out from the maintainers at TXT feels horrible but after it has happened they feel very good. So somehow we should find a way how we could make the bad feeling of getting out from there or the bad feeling of not getting out there little bit lower. Yeah, so this is Gabo Hoici. I'm leading the multilingual initiative in Drupal 8 and I have a talk tomorrow on what we did in the multilingual initiative and one of my slides literally says praise people for hard work and praise people for taking time off because they would, I mean, if people wanna take time off they will take time off anyway if you don't accept that and if you don't praise them for that it just sets up, it just breaks the good will and they will not come back anymore because the whole trust system is broken up. So you just need to accept that that people need to take time off and that's a good thing and you should let them do it and if you keep a team as to Schnitzel's point if you keep a team working on things then you have others who can take on that work and do it for a while and then if the person that took time off comes back then they will see, oh, you moved it forward and you took care of my baby how nice is that of you and they will be nice to you again and now if they have time and they took some relaxed vacation or if they took care of their family issues or whatever it was the reason they took time off they will feel good that they have the opportunity being reintegrated into the place they were. So that's one of my points and I have a lot of other interesting points in my talk tomorrow. Somebody's interested. Open Source Project Management in the Drupal community and I, yeah, sorry, I wanted to reflect. Just a question, thank you for a, that was very interesting and I think you made it. You've done a great job in the Multilingual Initiative and it would be great if we could actually copy it into other pieces of Drupal Core also and I think I will come to your presentation to take a look how it's done there. Yeah, I'd love to mentor people on the things I did right. I did a lot of things wrong and other people who managed to develop things wrong and we tried a lot of things and failed in some but there have been successful stuff that I'm trying to share and I had some personal ideas so since Burnout comes a lot of the times out of lack of control, what I try to do is I try to do a variety of things and then I have things that I have control over and if I feel stuck in something then I put that away and do something else I have control over. So for example, I help with event organization that's totally different from writing patches or arguing with people in the issue queue. So when I'm stuck in there, I just move over to helping with an event, the Drupal Dev Days, whatever or a SPINT organization or something where I have control over because I know my role there much more well defined. It's limited, it's focused and I can make a difference there and I have success. So that's possible if you mix different responsibilities. If you don't wanna take on different responsibilities on that scale, then you can scale this down and say you wanna have quick wins. Like one thing I did is I argued with my wife for a while on who does the dishes because I can do the dishes and you get the sense of completion at the end because the dishes are done and you're not at your computer and stressing out about all those things and feeling helpless because you went somewhere else and you completed something and then you're happy and now we have a dishwasher. Unfortunately, we're not doing dishes anymore. So I'm doing the laundry now and so I go do the laundry and then I put them out and stuff and then I get this sense of completion and then I got the bonus points in my mind and then I can go back and use those bonus points to go back and argue and issue queue. Thanks, Gavir. No, I know who is gonna do my laundry. But I mean, one thing I wanted to add there and I had that myself, at one point you feel not a novice anymore and I had people arguing to me like why did you do now that novice? So if you as a person that creates the novice tax and now if you work on one just because you want to do like, okay, I wanna, on that sprint, I wanna at least see my name in the commit log because if you work on it for three months, I mean, it's not gonna happen, but that's okay. But then sometimes you take one and you just do it and it's done and it's in. Just make a new one then. Just make a new one, correct. That's a good point, yes. So I think it maybe happened wrong to me that then you feel suddenly bad that you take that quick win to take it away from somebody else but for yourself you feel good because it's like plus one and then I can go back to that. So you make a new one then, isn't it? Correct, yes. Tobias. Yeah, hi, I'm Tobias T. Stuckler. So just to sort of follow up on what Gabor said because I've been part of the multilingual initiative so I've been basically at the other end of what he just said and I, as a member of the team, I feel there was like it was a really successful initiative and we really did a lot of things right and I don't really know what Gabor did to make it that way so I'm definitely gonna go to your session as well to find out maybe. But the thing you mentioned, I really think I just want to highlight that again because that was something that was very important and very successful for me personally because I've been, during some periods I've been very involved in writing a lot of patches and doing a lot of stuff but then other times I just have not been doing anything or not very much just for like general personal life issues and so then I always, or I often had that feeling of like guilt that I should have really done more and I should have invested more time in everything but Gabor would like never, like he said he would always focus on praising like at the next event where I would come and then I would be like, Gabor I'm so sorry that I didn't come to the meeting the last few weeks or whatever and Gabor would never say like, you're bad but he would instead like literally focus on, well it's really awesome that you came and we should like here's this issue that we could use your insight on and you know so he would like totally have that ability to like just remove my guilt and turn that into something positive and I think that was for me personally something that like in terms of the multilingual initiative I didn't feel any burnout at all during the initiative so that was like that was the one thing I wanted to say. The other thing I wanted to say regarding maintainers I think that just like Gabor said as well I think one problem or one thing that causes burnout or frustration is the lack of control. So I think I really think it's great that we now have the new governance structure and I think that's a step in the right direction but I think we should still give more power to our subsystem maintainers like I think even though we've talked about this for years and there have been a lot of arguments pro and con I still very strongly feel that we should give commit access to our subsystem maintainers because like I think the one example we have is with Jennifer Hodgson that's only allowed to commit documentation patches even though like we can't literally control that like she could commit like a complete subsystem rewrite like in terms of the actual get access but like she wouldn't ever do that like she's never done that and it's like a very I mean we have a very good record with that and I think in general we also have a very good record with like trusting people with stuff even though we can't like actually prevent them from doing it so I think we should actually just go ahead and take that step and let people like module maintainers just commit to like I mean there are certain modules I mean maybe we could like introduce it step by step but there are certain modules like forum module or something that no one really cares about and I mean it's just a fact so I'm not sure it's really a good investment of our time if like Alex Pott or WebChick or Catch spend time reviewing patches for forum module like why can't the maintainers of forum module just so that's one point and the third point as a follow-up to what WebChick said I think the release cycle is very important to burn out like as she said like cause we're now in bug fix mode but I also think that in general like bringing out new versions of Drupal is really sort of rewarding it's like a positive feedback loop cause you have like a problem in your Drupal 7 site like on a client site then you open an issue and fix the bug and then when Drupal 8 comes out you're like you have a Drupal 8 site and you're like wow I don't have this bug anymore cause I fixed it so it's a really positive feedback loop but the problem is that like since it took five years to get Drupal 8 out that's a really long feedback loop like that's not a loop anymore so I think what would really be positive is if we could somehow actually manage to get shorter release cycles that I think that in itself would greatly decrease burn out So what I hear is that for like people that are not maintainers getting a commit in Drupal core is already a success but for the maintainers the success is not each single commit it's the actual release and that takes like five years and I completely agree that's not a loop anymore so I think with the changes that we already started to or will now come that's a lot of the things you address but I completely agree with you and it also matches the things that we heard from Dries yesterday with the feature branches which could lead into sub maintainer or subsystem maintainers to having commit but I agree we should maybe just try it like it's good if something bad happened you can go back anyway so it's yeah I would agree. Hi my name is Christopher Wiglund and about this question and what we could do to make Drupal more substantial for community I'm part of another association in a locally and there we have this kind of notion that people before activity so even though the activity is really important for the association it's kind of the branding it should not go over the people in that case we put down the activity it's not that important it's more important with the people and I think that mentality should go into Drupal also people before features so if we see that Drupal 9 should have this video on demand function and we don't have people we should be saying that people before function we skip it and it should be kind of a mantra in people so they know that people before features because they could because it's much easier for people that feeling I'm almost burning out because I have too much pressure to just take a step back and to realize it's better for me to be a person than to be some committer so that's I think is a really important things to get to notion and then to people to know that people before features because if a customer or a company needs a feature they can pay for it they can put developers we are an open source community so for us our value is the people Thank you So I guess you are saying that we should first make sure that we have resources before we commit to do something Yeah to see that are we able to do it like a Drupal camp in Sweden should we do it just for the course to have one or should we see it the people and in that case we don't do a Drupal camp in Sweden because we don't have the people and it's okay it should not seems as a failure and we need to raise that up to say it's not a failure because we prioritize people that's a win That's a very good point and actually the events organizers were also very active on the survey so there was a lot of event organizers and what I've heard also is that organizing events can be very very stressful and it can burn out people One positive thing I've heard from Drupal Camp Vienna organizers is that they try to organize Drupal Camp only every other year if they feel so so if they don't feel organizing a Drupal Camp they just don't do it and they don't take pressure for not organizing the event and that's a well I think that is a very healthy mindset because you don't commit to do something every year because of the fact that something needs to be done just when people feel like they want to do something they do do it Does anyone else has something to say? I want to share a trick so my personal trick is to never take the bus never ever take the bus that basically leads I mean I need to work like at least 30 minutes to get to anywhere and this is my best trick since I started that like two months ago and since then my life completely changed Seriously? Yeah, I have to work everywhere I mean I'll take like my bicycle but yeah just a small trick I mean it's obviously not that easy like in the US where everything is spread out like hell but at least like in Europe it's doable if you live in the city Well but you could like put your car a couple of hundred feet away from your office and then you walk the last part I mean there's a lot of ways of doing it Yeah it's certainly quality time and also like you can also do the plus one thing afterwards Any other thoughts? So one thing I was wondering if and it's more an idea but I mean we have people at like Drupal cons that are defined as if you have a problem you can go to these like the Drupal conduct define these but I'm not really sure if we have something like that inside of the community as a whole so if there maybe should have something that if people feel burned out that they can go to somebody to I don't know find help is there anything like that? Yeah this is a web check again we do actually have something like that which is called the community working group and the community working group predominantly these days handles conflict resolution so when people disagree strongly in an issue we will never make a technical call like we can't tell you whether the function should be named or whatever but we can help deal with the people problems and so we have done things like either appointed a third party to sort of mediate between like a trusted third party sometimes we take on issues ourselves if it's a really nuclear issue and it's burning out lots of people we've collectively worked to make sure that in our code of conduct our conflict resolution is not at to do anymore there's an actual process that involves predominantly people solving their own problems but failing that escalating to us and we can provide mediation or in a worst case scenario reject someone from the community if they're a real big problem fortunately we haven't had to do that yet but yes and the community working group though has a more holistic mission than that so for example we did the award the Aaron Windborn award to recognize a really great community member I think that would be the ideal group through which to funnel something like this and the community working group I know is planning to kind of create a sort of a working group team relationship so in other words it's not just the four really super busy people that run everything but instead it would be sort of an equivalent between say the documentation working group and the documentation team where we could have like a community team and I think that would be a really great thing for this kind of process where if people were feeling burnt out there would sort of be identified people in the community who were really safe people to talk to about that and that sort of thing so I would say talk to Donna Benjamin about that idea because I think the community working group is the ideal place for that to take place because like what I feel about I mean in conflicts it's pretty clear that there is a conflict because you can read it but the problem is of being stressed or burnt out it happens somebody himself at home and maybe some of the maintainers realize that a person doesn't come to IRC channels anymore so it could maybe it's more subtle to figure that out but then definitely let's do it Well it's interesting because every burnout case we deal or every conflict case we deal with 99% of the time it's really burnt out and so we end up working with that person to try and resolve it but ideally we could intervene way sooner because once it manifests itself as yelling at each other in the issue queue now we're burning out other people so it's like a ripple effect so ideally when someone starts to feel themselves going down that path it would be a way for early intervention and healing and stuff Just one other thing I want to add to that just to remember that there is a lot of local things happening so it would be especially for me the local local contributions I was doing was the part that was burning me out because it might be a less active contributor and it's a little bit like away from the global community and you are afraid to do almost anything out there and if no one is saying anything there people can just mess around as much as they want to and it can create its own problems I mean in the issue queues there is so many eyes that can see what's happening but when it's happening in someone's local community it can be very hard to try to see what's happening and not all the communities are working that transparently at the places so it can happen in some obscure places Hi my name is Joel Patets and I'm one of the theme comb system maintainers I really like some of those suggestions and they really kind of show how you get to the burnout and a lot of things come from like you have stress to start and then it goes to burnout at the start I'm not sure if I have a total solution for this yet and I'm not very good at it so don't try to follow me if you see me doing this but I find that some of the times I'm most stressed is because I haven't eaten properly and if I haven't eaten I get angry and I yell at somebody for something stupid and then it kind of gets bigger and bigger and bigger and then it turns into like this really bad thing and if I remember like I have eaten I actually feel like way better and I feel more helpful to people and I feel like I have a little more control over things so it's like a starting point for me I mean there is a sentence hangry and it's definitely something that we have in our team that we look at each other and then sometimes you feel like okay you should eat now and then we force each others to eat because yeah eating is a big part of that Hi my name is Valentin I work for Sukuri we are a security company and somebody talked about conflicts and how they rose from virtually nothing so we are a distributed team we are in 16 countries so everybody works remote and talks on Slack right so you have all these internal channels and there is a random channel like anything that doesn't go into a specific channel you just throw in there usually nobody looks at it but at times so like last week somebody maybe you know the Albanian virus like there is a snapshot with the virus saying please install me because I am from a poor country which at first you smile about it but the person actually posting it on the channel forgot that we have two members of our team from Albania so one of them really took it personally like why do you say something like that he didn't invent the drawing himself he just found it somewhere online but the actual issue was not the drawing itself but the problem that you know a poorer country compared to whatever other country and from all of that management kind of really nicely intervened and like hey why don't you all of you start doing videos about your country like where do you live what's your surrounding like what do you see out your window right now because you work remotely so maybe somebody is in a cafe somebody is at home and people start in producing all this internal content that is still going on and everybody is like well maybe self praising his country his surrounding but something like you see more than just a nickname on Slack or just a username on the system you see the person you see where he lives where he goes to eat what does he usually do and another advice for the burnout sleep it's okay if you don't eat sometimes but you have to sleep really so it's like if you work at 1, 2 a.m. that's not production that's just killing yourself thank you one really interesting point on knowing that there are actual humans behind usernames on Drupal.org is that what I see is that more and more teams start to have hangout channels rather than just IRC meetings which for some people can be intimidating to actually be on a video but I think it helps to also be able to communicate on another level than just actual writing it's also helping the ones that maybe get to be selected to speak somewhere any kind of small big conferences to actually practice that when you practice in front of mirror it's just like seeing yourself but when you actually talk to 3, 4, 5, 10 other people actually maximum 10 on the hangouts then you can practice you know practice, thank you hello Lewis Nyman I'm interested in talking about how we identify burnout especially when we don't really see each other I think it's really hard to just look at someone's work or their output and identify burnout if you don't really understand what their life is like the kind of person they are the other the other responsibilities they have in their life if you have loads of kids and stuff and you're being asked to do a lot it's very different so I think something we do in Wonder Crowd because we're all distributed and we don't have the ability to look someone in the eye and see if they're stressed we have like enforced social time where we actually hang out and we don't talk about work we just talk about what we're doing at the weekend what's going on in our personal lives and stuff because otherwise we never do it because we always talk about work all the time and that's something that we have that same problem in the Drupal community is we only talk about like work all the time unless we're at events like this but when we're not together then all we do is talk about when we're going to get this done how's this going to work something else we do at Wonder Crowd as well is we have a buddy system so you always have someone who you know you can talk to if you have any problems and it's really important and I think something like that for maintainers at least would be really good because I've spoken to maintainers before who struggle with that role and what they think is required of them and how they're unsure about how they act I really like the buddy system I think that's definitely something that could work to even maybe enforce it or I don't know how exactly but to just have somebody that I can go to and also a person that is a bit responsible of the other person to make sure that person is still happy especially in an environment right now where we are where it's really like the last couple of things just that the end is the hardest part no matter if it's now in releasing a website or finishing a major update in Drupal so I think that's a really cool thing that we could take over just to add very like even though we don't have a buddy system right now in the Drupal community I feel like I don't know how I could manage all the situation I have to face at some point if I couldn't talk to someone so sometimes I get a little bit afraid how the people who can't talk to anyone who don't feel like talking to anyone how are they managing then yeah I think that's also really important de-stigmatizing these kind of conversations I think Mike Bell's Kino, tomorrow will be a really good presentation to talk about mental health and try and get people to talk about it more openly I think we need to figure out how we do that as well just in the community hi Scott, Kotzer thank you very much for this yeah I agree with I mean a lot of what everyone said really I've experienced burnout before and I felt like it was something I had to keep a secret basically as being like also one of the theme system maintainers and I mean there's some good aspects like in the theme system I feel like we do sort of have like a buddy system where like we're able to kind of lean on each other a bit when like some people have more time some people have less time but there's also things like even in the new community governance thing which I think is improved or maybe not community governance but the governance thing for core I think there's even a line in there where it's like there's certain if issues need like feedback from the maintainers it's like you need to check that within five days or something like that so like I feel like a lot of at least in my opinion like a lot of or in my experience anyway a lot of this kind of stems from feelings of like guilt or shame so just the fact that we kind of need to be that available as maintainers is a little bit can be a little bit scary because like you know maybe you have something personal come up like with your family or with your health maybe you just want to go on vacation and it's like you may even feel worried that like something might happen if you just go away for a little while so I just think like if we can somehow structure our community how we work a little bit better so that we're not just counting on like small groups of people like just to so it kind of echoes like what I think Laurie was saying earlier where if we could have just more maintainers even if they're not as active I think that would be helpful even if they're like supporting so yeah but yeah thank you very much for doing this so I think this is the last one we can take so I just to follow up on what Scott said I think that the theme system maintainers is a really good example of having a good team of people there's four or five maintainers or something who really support each other and I think that I've struggled in the CSS Maintainership role being the only one technically there's two but I'm the only active one and how we maintain maintainers.txt is another thing but I think maybe like trying to enforce a rule where we have always more than one maintainer it means that someone doesn't feel like the like the entire pressure of everything is on them thanks JavaScript is another really good example yeah I do want to point out the five days rule is only that there's a response some kind so it can say hey I'm on vacation and I'm not going to get to this for three weeks and that's fine it's just a set expectation because we're trying to solve the other end of the burnout spectrum which is I made something and no one gave a shit and it's sad it needs review for 700 years but the thing I would point out in terms of adding more maintainers we do have the concept of provisional maintainers so everyone in this room or everyone listening to this who is a maintainer of a thing if there's someone who helps you or someone who you see is like they could be good I don't know for sure we can make them a provisional maintainer and that would help with that you know the because I agree we want as many maintainers as possible well not too many because you've got to be able to make a decision but we definitely want as many maintainers as possible so people can get you know feedback or support or that kind of thing and if there's any doubt about whether this person is really a maintainer or not we can make them a provisional maintainer and then move them to full maintainership in like a couple months so that's one way to help with that especially for CSS and JavaScript it seems like we could easily find people who know enough about that to at least be trusted with provisional maintainership so that's one thought there anyway yes so as we discussed we have to eat and we all need food so that's time now let's do that now thank you thank you hey thank you