 Welcome to Drupal Ladder resources and activities to help meetup groups help their members learn and contribute. So our project our our hope for the Drupal Ladder project here is to get 1% of active Drupal users contributing to Drupal core by 2014 by getting meetup groups to organize learn sprints and issue sprints at meetups and camps and conferences. My name is Brian Hirsch I work for Acquia. Come on in. My name is Brian Hirsch I work for Acquia. I was the coordinator of the Boston based Boston based pilot of this project back in the fall and since then since DrupalCon Denver in March I've been working with folks like Karen and Addie and Brock to spread the project to other meetup groups. Okay so before we dive in here if anyone's in the wrong room now is a good time to find wherever you meant to be and if people are still moving around I'm just gonna go ahead and ask you guys some questions so we can get a sense of who's in the room here with us. So can I just see by a show of hands how many people here have been to their local meetup? How many people are regulars at their local meetup? Nice how many people have led their local meetup? How many people here had heard of the Drupal Ladder before they came to DrupalCommunic? Yes. How many people have participated in a Learn Sprinter and Issue Sprint or a Drupal Ladder activity? Nice. How many people have contributed to CORE? Right on. How many people would like to contribute to CORE? Come on really? All hands should go up on that one. Okay great so during this session I'm gonna give an overview of the Drupal Ladder project. I'll catch you all up on where we've been, report back on the goals that we set for the project at DrupalCon Denver and then I'll propose some ideas about where we're going and then introduce you guys to some new members of our new steering committee who will talk to you about work that they're gonna be leading between now and DrupalCon Portland. So with that overview the problem is we need more people. As Dries said in his keynote back in Denver, the talent pool is too small. This is one of the three biggest challenges that Drupal faces right now. The demand for Drupal talent outstrips the supply. If we look at this through the lens of the issue queue, here are some graphs that I shared with the Boston user group that Jess actually prepared which I got off her blog after DrupalCon London last summer. So the rate of people contributing to CORE is going up. The number of people contributing to CORE is going up year after year, release after release. But as a percentage of total users on Drupal.org, the number is going way down. And so as Drupal's popularity skyrockets, there are more users creating more tickets, suggesting more ideas, and it's impossible for contributors to keep up. So last summer, eight months after Drupal 7 was released, there were 9,000 open issues in the CORE issue queue. This tiny green sliver represents issues that were reviewed and tested by the community out of that 9,000. The 17% the big yellow section represents 1,600 tickets sitting in the issue queue waiting to be reviewed. So people have written patches and they're waiting to be reviewed in the queue. So as a result, people who were involved in the Drupal 7 development process were feeling really exhausted. And if you step into the shoes of a site owner or a business owner or an NGO or a government agency who runs a Drupal site, this can be really frustrating too. And not just because of the rate at which we're closing or not closing issues in the issue queue. How many people here have tried to hire a Drupalist for your own organization and have found it difficult to find someone with the Drupal chops you needed for whatever your project was? How many people have tried to train people to learn Drupal in-house and found that to be a daunting or challenging task? So if we, for Drupal to continue to thrive and continue on the extraordinary trajectory that it's on right now, we really need to solve this problem. We need to figure out how we can grow the developer community and keep pace with the rate of growth of the user community. We need to figure out how we can get 100 people on Drupal.org, 100 active people on Drupal.org to be contributing to the project. So maybe that sounds ambitious, but here's why I think it's not crazy. If you look at this chart again of the decreasing percentage of users contributing to core, it looks to me like we've dipped from around 0.5% during Drupal 4 down to around 0.1% today. So we can't know exactly what's happened here, but I think we can make some educated guesses. So let's just take a quick straw poll. How many people in this room think that there were a higher percentage of people contributing in Drupal 4 than there are now in Drupal 7? Because Drupal 4 was more interesting. Laughable, right? How many people think that there were more people contributing back in Drupal 4 than there are now, sorry, a higher rate of people contributing because Drupal has become less useful? How many people think maybe there was a higher rate of contribution back in Drupal 4 because working with Drupal has gotten less relevant or less profitable? So Drupal is clearly more profitable, more popular, more useful, more relevant than ever before. We know this because the Obama White House is powering White House.gov with Drupal. The bleeding edge federal government's open government initiative is essentially all powered by Drupal. Warner Music launched dozens of websites with Drupal earlier this year, including kidrock.com and brunomars.com. I'd actually even go a step further and argue that people are trying harder than ever to learn about and to contribute to Drupal. I think there's lots of good anecdotal evidence for this. So look around us. Look at all the people spending time and money on trainings, on conferences. The rate of the number of camps, the number of Drupal cons is increasing, meetup attendance is increasing, all arrows point toward more people want to be involved. So the more you really think about it and look at this slide, the crazier this should seem. So what's going on? I think there's two things. First is that as Drupal gets more complex, as Drupal's code base becomes more complex, it becomes harder to contribute. So here's an image that has made its way around the interwebs that depicts Drupal's learning curve like a cliff, like this black line. So as Drupal gets more complex, we need to find ways to make it easier for people to learn about and contribute to Drupal if we want people to keep contributing. So the second thing is just that we haven't, we're just not as a community, we haven't been as effective at recruiting people into our developer community as we have been at recruiting people into our user community. So the solution we want to throw on the table, or one of the solutions, a part of the solution, is Drupal ladder activities. So there are a lot of people who want to contribute to core, but they don't either, they don't feel like they know how, they don't feel qualified, the time commitment feels prohibitive, or maybe they've just never been asked. So to try and lower these barriers and bring more people into the core project, the idea we came up with was what if we come up with all the different ways that people contribute to core and organize those things like a ladder. And the first few steps should be easy for anyone to take. Each consecutive step should be within reach if you've taken the previous steps. Ideally, we'd come up with instructions that correspond with each run on the ladder so that we can easily coach someone through taking the next step on the ladder or moving some issue forward somewhere in the issue queue. And the idea with the ladder activities is that they should also be things that you can do in a single sitting. So they are perfect Drupal user group meetup activities. So there are Drupal user groups around the world that meet regularly. And if we could get every meetup group to dedicate some amount of time to working with their members, helping people climb the ladder and helping people contribute, together we could move tons of issues in the issue queue forward and we could, you know, build more capacity, help people, you know, participating in the project and contributing at higher levels. So great, it would be great for everybody all around. So for the pilot project that we did last fall in Boston, we started with a single 14 run ladder which is still the main Drupal ladder on Drupal ladder.org. And the general idea was that for any part of Drupal core, for any part of Drupal that is included in what you download when you download Drupal from Drupal.org, you could take all 14 of these steps for any different component in core. So like the node system or the theme system. So this main ladder is like nuts and bolts stuff, getting started in the issue queue, writing a patch, testing a patch, things that you would do to contribute to any different part of Drupal core. So the first steps on the ladder have very clear instructions beginning with installing Drupal locally, then finding your way around the queue. Anyone can start at step one and then by following all the instructions reasonably work their way up through step five. And if you make it to step three or four or five, you've got some pretty powerful tools in your toolbox to start contributing to Drupal. So if you want to contribute user experience and usability ideas or design ideas, all you need to know is how to write a good issue and how and feel confident posting something in the issue queue. If you don't know any PHP but you know how to apply a patch, you can peer review someone else's proposed solution to some problem in the issue queue. That's the big yellow section of stuff that we were looking at earlier, or for a chunk of the yellow stuff. That's sort of where it begins. If you know some PHP, you know JavaScript, you know CSS, you can write your own patches. So then this next group of steps on the ladder corresponds with, if you've made it through those first set of steps and you want to contribute, but you don't necessarily want to make a big time commitment or you're not wanting to commit to a particular subsystem or component of Drupal core, there's a set of things you can do, you could reasonably do in like a two hour sitting to sort of help an issue that's in the queue move forward and contribute to that issue. So these two sections on the ladder correspond with the two most successful activities that we've come up with, learn sprints and issue sprints. And the idea is that these are activities you do at a meetup. A learn sprint is a one hour activity where we get people to identify where they are on the ladder or now there are many ladders where they are on some ladder and then get people to pair up in the two person teams and then work their way through the lesson that corresponds with that run on the ladder to take the next step in climbing the ladder. An issue sprint is a two hour activity, also a great meetup activity and the idea there is to pair people up in the two person teams to work on some issue in the issue queue and move that issue forward. And then up at the top of the ladder in the main Drupal ladder we've got helping to maintain or working to be a maintainer. This is obviously not actually a meetup activity, but you know the skills you build along the way are the kinds of things you need to be able to get there and if you want to take on that level of responsibility there's sort of a roadmap to get to get there we hope. So getting ready for Drupal Condenver where the Boston group wanted to share this idea and get other groups involved in this initiative, there were a few things we needed to reorganize. So first of all we had outgrown our Google Doc version of the ladder. So people wanted to create more ladders, people wanted to create more specialized ladders. We also needed to in order to make this project more shareable we needed to come up with a central place where people could go to to find lessons and materials for their meetups, give people a way to keep track of which lessons they've completed and where they are on the different ladders, give people a way to contribute lessons and contribute their own ladders to the project and a way to package up well-prepared lessons and materials. So we put together a proof-of-concept type website at Drupal Ladder.org and we had some meetings in Denver to talk about what is the minimum the minimum viable product for a Drupal Ladder.org type site look like with the goal of relaunching that site this week in Drupal at Drupal Communic. So here's what we came up with. Now I'm actually gonna, I'll bear with me, change my display. Okay, so this might not all fit anymore. Sorry about that. Bummer. Maybe I can hide the doc. I think that basically gives us what we need. Okay. Okay, so this shows you how you can keep track of lessons you've completed. So here I've done the first two lessons. Now I'm gonna work on the getting started in the issue queue lesson. I follow this lesson and then when I'm done with it I check it completed and if I go back to the main Drupal Ladder it shows, you know, it checks the next box and you can also go to the Drupal Ladder and you can sort of work your way up checking off items. So that's how the Drupal Ladder works. We've also set it up such that people can contribute lessons. So down at the bottom of the screen if you're an authenticated user you can click create a new lesson. I'm actually gonna fast forward us to lesson number two. It's a little more interesting. Take my word for it. We're creating three lessons here. Okay, so scroll down, click create a new lesson. So anyone can create a user account, create their own lesson, give it a little description and then under draft status you can mark your lesson a work in progress if it's not finished and ready for maintenance. I'm gonna go ahead and make Brock my co-maintenor for this lesson so that he can also edit this lesson and help to keep it up to date. Under lesson information project name, I can use project name to associate it with a particular module, a particular project on d.o. I can mark it as a core lesson or a contrib lesson. I can say this type of, this is a lesson about code, this is a lesson that corresponds with Drupal 7. Under prerequisites this is where you write, here are the kinds of things that you should do before you do this lesson. So for example you should have completed lesson number one of the Loram Ipsum lesson series before you work on lesson number two. Or you'll want to have Drupal installed locally, go follow the installed Drupal instructions before you do this lesson. So that's the kind of things you'd put in prerequisites like you see here. So then in overview you give a piffy meaningful overview of your lesson and then down in steps this is like the meat of the lesson the format we've been following is just numbered steps, one, two, three, four here's how you follow this lesson. So people can contribute lessons. So fast forward we've created three lessons, people can also contribute their own ladders. So here's what that looks like. So we've made three Loram Ipsum lessons in addition to this Drupal ladder. I can create my own curriculum. So curriculum is a group of lessons and curriculums can be displayed as ladders. So scroll down to the bottom, click create new curriculum, give it a name give it an overview and then these are just node references to the lesson node types that we've created. So it's making a reference to lesson one and then a reference to lesson two and then lesson three after we've added all the lessons that we want to include in our ladder or our curriculum we save it and then back on the curriculums page if you click the curriculums tab you can see it gets added to that curriculums listing and there's a link to take you to your new ladder that you've contributed where people can now come follow the ladder keep track of what lessons they've completed I'm excited to see smiles and nods in that one. Okay yes please question what kind of competence do you have to add? No this is not for developers this is for contributing and I know everybody says contributing to core and then they run away because they're like I'm not a developer but you can contribute to core in a lot of ways and many of them have nothing to do with coding. So the first step on the ladder is to install a copy of Drupal locally. So if you know how to install Drupal and you even get walked through that in the first lesson you can contribute. On the Drupal Ladder step one is really for everyone step one people have expressed interest in being able to create their own ladders for more specialized things and for ladders like that that's the idea is that under prerequisites you should sort of let people know here's what your starting point should be. So there's certainly a place for very technical ladders but the main Drupal Ladder and a number of these ladders are you know the starting point is just follow these instructions to install Drupal and anyone can do it. So I'm going to go ahead and show you guys another lesson I've sort of lost track of which lessons I'm showing but which parts I'm showing. Oh right okay so pretend we've been working on the LORM lesson for a while it was marked draft work in progress it's got this red notice to let people know this is a work in progress it says awaiting peer review because it hasn't been peer reviewed when I'm satisfied with this lesson and I want the world to see it I can mark it ready for review and then when I click save it turns orange and says ready for review. So this lets brave participants and learn sprints know I think this is ready for someone to follow it please come check my lesson out and then peer review it and let us know if this is ready for other people to use. So now in the next lesson we'll see how peer reviewing works. So people who are participating in learn sprints are following lessons, come read a lesson at the end they can leave a comment anyone with a user on learndrupal.org can post a comment so they can say this is a great lesson really easy to follow they can set the status to this is final and up to date letting people know I've reviewed this is ready for action when it's marked final and they save it save their comment it turns green and now you can see at the top in addition to saying final up to date it also says last peer reviewed on August 20th 2012. So if you fast forward in time lessons go stale right new modules come out maybe no one updated the lesson so someone later down the line can come back and post a comment saying hey I think this lesson is out of date something doesn't make sense here so this is out of date hopefully if they're saying that they'll leave some specific feedback for some lesson maintainer to now come and tidy it up so this lesson was difficult to understand I think maybe it's referencing an older version of module X or something like that and then they can change the status in the same way we changed it a second ago they can change it to this lesson needs revision so everyone see how that works so then when someone saves their comment and says needs revision it turns yellow now it says needs revision at the top and you can again see an updated last peer reviewed time stamp date stamp couple other small bells and whistles in addition to being able to check something completed you can star lessons so when you start something you're marking it recommended so that gets reflected in two places one is in the listing of lessons you can see a count of how many people have recommended this lesson I'm going to pause it for a second wait stop going stop going so in the lessons listing you can see how many people have recommended something hopefully that helps steer you toward good useful lessons additionally you can see people's listings of recommendations so for example if I know Addie's a Lullabot and I just trust her judgment I might want to go follow her recommended lessons because she's got a bunch of recommendations on Drupaladder.org so that's recommendations last but not least we have bookmarks and that's really just you can click the little book icon and then you have your own personal listing of my bookmarks that you can use and that's for anything you want a bookmark for whatever reason you want a bookmark thanks okay I'm going to flip the display again back to PowerPoint cross cross see how it goes nice okay okay so with these pieces in place with these pieces in place with these pieces in place we hope that we can help user groups make lessons contribute lessons learn sprints and issue sprints and our hope is that seven months into the Drupal 8 release cycle so at a comparable moment in time to the Drupal 7 release cycle when we hatched this idea our hope is that we can increase the rate of contributions to 1% of active users on Drupal.org contributing to Drupal 8 so that's what we're shooting for so there's an overview and let's just take a quick minute to review where we've been review our goals and then to talk about where we're going and how we're going to get there and hand it over so where we've been between October and March of last year we did our Boston experiment sort of proof of concept came up with this idea of learn sprints and issue sprints came up with a couple proof of concept lessons at Drupal Condenver in March we pitched this to other user groups and we said we want to get 10 more groups outside of Boston involved in this initiative to sort of prove other groups think this is useful too and we have a fighting chance of increasing contribution to 1% we want to relaunch Drupal.org with something usable to support this initiative launch a 1.0 distro so that's the codebase for Drupal.org that would have lessons packaged up in it thank you Drupaladder.org we changed the name of the initiative and then item 4 which wasn't a goal in March but I think is an important milestone at this point starting a steering committee to get more people involved in spreading the work around to get more and more people involved so checking in on our goals the goal of 10 user groups involved we have nailed that goal I'm proud to report so I can tell you at least 10 user groups that I know by name and I think that there are more so those include Washington DC, Alexandria, Virginia Baltimore, Maryland and Columbia I think that's four but Brock actually counts them as one so we'll call that one Boulder, Colorado, Cleveland, Ohio Houston, Texas, Brighton, UK Copenhagen, Denmark somewhere in Singapore I think two cities in Florida definitely one city in Florida the US federal government Drupalists have just started their own Drupalforgov Drupaladder meetup last week and they've got another event coming up at the end of the month bringing us to 10 we have an online Drupaladder meetup that TechGirlGeek started in a Drupal hangout and honorable mention even though it's not a learn sprinter issue sprint type meetup we have a presence now in Lullabotlandia with Drupalizme videos for the Drupaladder project so I feel really good about having blown goal number one out of the water for this project yeah give yourselves a hand on that one so to the goals of relaunchingdrupaladder.org with distro release we are really really really close to the minimum viable product outline that we established at Drupalcon Denver I'm not 100% satisfied yet with the downloadable distro I think that we need to polish up some rough edges to make the lessons the code lessons that people download easier to use but I feel optimistic that we can have this ready by the end of sprint day on Friday so at the end of the session you'll see opportunities to get involved if you want to be involved in that I think we'll have this done by the end of Drupalcon Munich and then last but not least we're launching a steering committee here to get more people involved in leading the project so here's a timeline that we pitched to Drupalcon Denver that we're still working towards I think so these are the first set of goals between Drupalcon Denver and Drupalcon Munich that I just walked everyone through then next we've got between now and Drupalcon Portland in May we've had 30 more user groups to our numbers 30 more user groups doing learn sprints and issue sprints and we want to get curriculums developed for major Drupal 8 initiatives so we can start sort of priming the pumps with learn sprints with people who are able to contribute to Drupal 8 we want to between Drupalcon Portland and the next Drupalcon Europe which is when we're targeting the Drupal 8 release we want to have every active user group running a issue sprint we want to have one out of 100 active users on Drupal.org as potential contributors they haven't contributed yet but we've identified them as potential contributors and then between the release of Drupal 8 and the following Drupalcon sometime in 2014 in the United States we want to have one out of 100 active users on Drupal.org have contributed to Drupal 8 so that is what we're shooting for I think so with that I'm going to hand it over to Brock where we're going with issue sprints Hi guys I'm Brock so yeah issue sprints are the two hour meetups where you actually get a group together pair up and start working on issues I see it as where like this initiative really where the clause really dig in I suppose because that's when people actually start writing code start reviewing patches start getting involved and contributing back to these issues so the goal is to get 30 more groups hosting these events on a regular basis so toward that end I have a few things I want to work on to make make it easier for people to run these events my biggest concern is making it easy for people to facilitate these events and get the support they need to make it happen and not have to worry too much about doing so I guess because it's daunting to say I'm going to lead a sprint without ever having done so so to that end yes we have some documentation on Drupalata.org I want to beef that up some more and make it easy to read right now right now it's just kind of a jumble of things that we've learned along the way so it could use some organization we have a new issue tracking tool thanks to the core mentoring folks Jess and Tim are here they have built an awesome task tracking tool that they use for the core mentoring hours each week and they have graciously allowed us to make use of it for these issue sprints as well so that we can kind of keep track of for example I'm from Washington D.C. so we have a set of issues that our group is kind of working on and we can keep track of where they are and where they stand and who's working on it so that we're not all stepping on toes trying to do the same thing at the same time that tool is super handy could use a little work there are some bugs and stuff that I'm going to help out with and hopefully there's one last time I looked but most of those were feature requests so it's I can help out with that as much as I can and hopefully get a sort of a separate instance set up so that we can kind of manage our own version of this task tracker and not have to bother them too much to do things like promote users to higher levels and things like that and finally I want to I haven't figured out how to do this yet but I would like to help set something up to mentor people in between issue sprints what I found is that when people come to these issue sprints they start working on an issue and then they keep working on it for the next couple of weeks someone else will review their patch and they'll come back with a new version and things like that so people come to the issue sprint they get excited about what they're working on and they keep working on it so I want to make sure that somebody is there to kind of help those people out in the in between when they're not actually in a room with a group of people working on stuff so I would love to talk to you about where you're from what you'd like to do why you haven't already what you might be worried about I want to make like I said I want to make it easy for people to run these events it's really not that difficult they've just kind of winged it in Boston Brian kind of told me how they had been doing it and I did the same thing in DC more or less but we just kind of made it up as we went along so anyone can really do it you don't need to know a whole lot but I'd love to talk to you if you're interested in doing that and we can talk check with me afterward and we'll chat I guess but next Addy would like to talk about lessons I would like to talk about lessons like no no that's fine I'm good I got bullet points all in my head before so we're talking about lessons content we're talking about like when you actually go to like Drupal Ladder.org and you're looking at lessons like how do I get started where do I go what are my next steps that's what we're talking about with that and before I start to talk about like the future plans like I want to do around organized I just want to sort of explain like my involvement and where I'm coming from with this is that so I attended Brian's session in Denver and I got really excited about this concept and so I went back to I live in Copenhagen and we didn't actually have any meetups going on but I thought this was a great thing to create a meetup around so we started doing regular meetups and again I just I found somebody who was willing to give us some space in their office on an evening and I just posted hey come meet and let's work this thing out together and people showed up it was pretty awesome and we did learn sprints where we started on those bottom steps of the ladder and people were having problems with the lessons and so they would come to me and be like I don't understand what's this and we would work it out and figure it out and I told them leave a comment on the lesson and then later on I went back and I cleaned it all up and I actually added that to lesson and then when we had the future we learned sprints we didn't have those problems and questions and so it just really we were really actually improving things and making things better not just for us in our little community but for anybody else who wanted to learn how to install Drupal locally or learn how to install Git and I also tangentially one of the guys who attended one of those very first sprints was actually from Singapore and he's the one who started the Singapore meetup that's going on so that was pretty awesome but so that's I've been really excited about it and I've seen it like working for my local community our local meetup like people are very excited about it and it's really easy for people to I mean these are people who are sitting down and installing Drupal or installing Git for the first time and contributing back and making it better for everybody and that kind of stuff just gets me excited so I'm excited about the lesson stuff and I really want to make it better and smoother so I've kind of chunked my general goals around what we want to do with lessons and priorities in two periods one is now between now and December which is feature freeze for Drupal 8 so that's when they're going to stop putting lots of new features into the Drupal 8 codebase and start to smooth things out and then another period of time from that until Drupal Khan, Portland and so in this first stage between now and December I feel like we need to get the existing stuff we have in order so that we have a good base to work from to add new material so we need to go through and review the existing lessons a lot of the existing lessons are sort of in a needs review state and we need to go through and review those some of them need revision, there are comments and we need to look at those comments and figure out how do we improve the lesson to address those comments, clean that stuff up and do that kind of stuff so that's the first thing that really just needs to get done we also have some lessons on the existing ladder that say stuff goes here so we need to actually fill some of these lessons out as well and then I also want to start outlining what new lessons and ladders we need we have this core kind of ladder which starts with installing Drupal and works your way up but if I want to actually get involved in the user or something like that, a file system and actually sort of try and drill in a bit more we don't have lessons around that we don't even really have much information about where to go to get started in that so I want to outline, if I want to know more about how the file system works and really get involved in helping it what information do I need to know like what's the first questions you ask let's outline what those questions are let's figure out who in the Drupal community knows the answer to these questions and have it all sort of outlined and ready to go so we know what information we're actually looking for so that's to get us prepared up till December and before like to take that on or make that easier I have two tasks that I have listed up here that I want to do this week and I want to finish that up by Friday and that is one I want to create some standards for writing our lessons you know how, because a lot of people like I have information in my head I can't really explain it to other people or you know when we have stuff, different instructions we have steps, but there are different ways of doing steps and explaining how to click things and when someone is trying to learn something and read something, having a consistent presentation for that makes things a lot easier for everybody so, and I've I've written a couple of books two editions of Using Drupal which has a lot of step by step instructions and we found when we were writing the book we have our own internal standards that we used every single time, so in every chapter even if different authors, we have co-authors on the book, we all were using the same standard so the book was consistent and I think that's also a really important thing to bring to this project so I want to nail down what our standards are or at least the first draft of that by the end of the day on Friday so that's number one and then number two is having larger meta discussions around how we integrate with other documentation that already exists so I'm going to put out our handbooks but other stuff on the web like things around like Git and things like that like there's a lot of information out there and I don't want us to duplicate effort I want us to make the best use of what's out there but also still provide people with this really clear path on how to get where they need to go and that's a larger discussion I'm going to be having all week if anybody has thoughts around that or wants to talk about that kind of stuff feel free to find me and I'll definitely be having conversations on Friday as well because I want us to get some clarity around that before we start going off and writing a million things that we may not need to so that's a lot to get done between now and December but I feel pretty confident a lot of this base stuff is already there it's just a matter of finishing it off sort of crossing the T's and dotting the I's and then once we have that starting in December once we have feature freeze let's do belate just start working through it start finding people in the community who know these things and can answer the questions to write a lesson you don't have to know everything but you need to be willing to learn you need to be willing to say okay I don't understand how this whole what's going on here in the file system I know how to use it in the UI and I can write those instructions but now I need to dive further who knows that information let me go talk to them and I can bring that back and write a lesson on that a lot of contributors to core those like hardcore developers they would love for people to understand what they do and to help them and they will do all kinds of things like trust me they'll talk to you about what it is especially if they know that that's going to go back and help spread the word and spread the knowledge of how this is working and come back to help them so you can do a lot of things without actually understanding the code yourself so that's my plan and that's the stuff I'm excited about I will be sprinting on Friday as well all day and I will also say if you come to the sprint we have these limited edition pink pony stickers they have a pretzel on the butt well as ponies are what to do you know the pony wanted a pretzel but anyway these are limited edition stickers we're trying to give those out to contributors so if you show up at the sprint instant contributor that's my pitch and I will now pass it on to Karen who's going to talk about learn sprints I guess I have to come closer here we go shimmy shimmy so I'm Karen Cassio tech girl geek on well everything and I've been dubbed now the learn sprint captain and what does that really mean well I too got really excited endeavor I went to the Drupal ladder sessions and I was like wow this is such a great idea and I was running Drupal chicks meetups and it wasn't really getting a lot of life into it I thought this is a great way to pull some life into it not only do I not have to present every time come up with something new and exciting to present but gives an opportunity for more people to learn how to contribute to core get some more involvement so now the Drupal chicks have in the Boulder Denver area have opened it up to the whole community and we now have learned sprints and after we've gone through this rate it's going to be a few more learned sprints we're going to start opening up issue sprints too so what does being the captain mean well not sure still we're still growing that idea but what it will mean as Brian said we want to get more like over at least 30 groups together in the next year right by the by May by Portland right this is the Europe one sorry wow time flies so how are we going to do this well getting the word out getting people interested I was saying someone came to hers and then went to Singapore and started one I had someone who he was temporarily in Denver and so he came into a couple of mine and he said this is such a great idea he pinged me a couple days ago how do I start one at a boff at a camp that he's in Connecticut and so that's one thing let's get boffs going so we can do small learned sprints I want to get the resources ready for everybody so I'm going to be building a kit online there's some very basic instructions on how to get a learned sprint started I'm going to elaborate on those and build a kit also part of that kit will be a registration form so you can register your groups and the registration is a couple of different reasons so I can stay in contact with you so we can keep talk get the conversation going I can help you in any way you need we can also have a count towards our group count total so we know when we get the 30 or more more 30 is a minimum that is not the maximum it's also I can help you with planning and some of those ideas will go online as I was saying I've done one out of necessity actually one of my second or third learned sprint I think it was we didn't have a lot of attendees physical attendees so I did a Drupal Hangout so it was both we had two actually besides myself in house in the office or in the location and we had another three or four online which was kind of neat this last one my husband is now working out of state and so I didn't really want to get a babysitter to do my meetup I have to admit so I decided to do the whole entire Drupal Ladder on Google Hangouts and I got a lot of really good feedback I got a lot of people who said I can really only go to one meetup a month so this gives me an opportunity to go to a second one learn some more of how to contribute but I don't have to leave my house I can still be home or at the coffee shop or wherever you were able to do it how to get people more interested one of the things feedback I got was demo of Rung so I started demoing so that Hangout I actually demoed how to install Drupal next time I'll do how to install Git and so if that person is still on there we can do it together or they can move ahead and we can work together so some ideas I plan to put that in the kit we can have a call feel like I really want to get this done but I don't know how to get started I'm happy to talk to you and give you some ideas and we can talk some of these guys did that with me we did a lot of IRC chatting mostly which I can do that too we have an IRC channel which Brian will bring up in here in a minute and we can chat on IRC and it's like how do I get this started and Brock and Addy and I are also doing another session tomorrow evening pretty much and how to get sessions how to make your meetups great and one of the things is just do it if you have this desire to do this just do it start it up and we'll help you get successful whatever you need to do pretty much so I'm the point of contact it's really much anything else I can do for you have any feedback this is something we're growing this is your ladder as everything in Drupal it's not going to work without people contributing back so if you do something and you realize hey this is not working this is really working for us let us know and I can add it to the kit and we'll keep this going and let's make it happen because this is so awesome that's it so with that we'll just make a few announcements about the end of the week and open it up for questions here so Friday we have a conference we have a conference so Friday we have a code sprint from 9am to 5pm so whether you want to help sprint on lesson writing or on code projects contributing to core we're collaborating with the core office hours folks on that one we are working on the distro that we want to make releaseable we'll be working on DrupalAdder.org so there are lots of opportunities for people at all different levels to be involved on Friday at the code sprint at the encoders lounge if anyone wants to sprint on any of this stuff I will certainly be spending time there and so follow DrupalAdder hashtag DrupalAdder on Twitter if you want to get involved in that we're on so please go to DrupalAdder.org and make yourself a user account and start getting involved we've got a group on groups.drupal.org slash DrupalAdder we're on Twitter DrupalAdder and here's the rest of our contact info and Addy fell off this amount so I'll edit that sorry I'll add you right now Questions? for the sake of the recording there is a DrupalAdder Twitter account as well well he's sorting that out anyone else have any other questions or feedback or ideas? if you could please they are recording all this stuff no pressure let's have a look at you okay you may gather from the t-shirt for the recording it's a gentleman in a jumlah shirt so so you may gather I'm the jumlah guy and I'm speaking tomorrow about jumlah so we have exactly the same issues there were just two questions I wanted to ask one was the vast majority of people actually don't live near a meetup so have you any thoughts about how to address that and the second question because I always like to get two in is it's all in English do you have any plans to make the material available in other languages? do you want to speak to the first? you can do the first one so yeah so I guess you might have missed up I've been doing a couple of them with Google Hangouts which has been working but that works or you can do like a Skype so I've been doing that and I've gotten people from so far it's been US because of time zones but I've had a couple people say I would have joined you if I was awake so that really works so you can do Skype and you can still share your screen and see the other people unless you have the upgraded version of Skype now but Google Hangouts you can so I have been doing that and I would also say people can start meetups and even if it's only two people start a meetup that's just a big thing generally whether you're doing ladder stuff or not I can speak to question two because I live in Denmark I'm not Danish wow Danish is hard but I do live in Denmark and so I started the meetup group specifically around the Drupal Ladder this was not our existing meetup our existing one was just a beer meetup we live in Denmark what but I asked them because this is something I was really curious about we were very curious about in terms of the language stuff and part of it of course is going to depend where you are so I live in Denmark and I would say 95% of the population speaks English and but when I asked them how would you guys feel about having this stuff in Danish how much of a pain in the ass is it to have this all in English and a lot of them said we prefer it in English because that's how we encounter things generally in other communities right if you go further south down to France and stuff like that people are going to want to obviously translate it but at the end of the day this community does communicate in English and as you go further into community involvement inevitably you end up needing to use English because that's how everything is written so there's a certain point where a lot of people end up needing to use English depending on what level they go to right yes totally there's a cut off absolutely yes when you get to the top level you need a common language you're saying by now that the entry level well on Drupal.org yeah it's true I don't understand to me at all this is definitely people can contribute in their local communities in their language but to communicate on Drupal.org in the issue queue you have to use English and so we do have that barrier and it's very low in the chain and that's simply the native yeah it is very much so I'd like to just chime in quickly too with alpha one of this distribution we've had a translations directory in the code base that runs the website that people can download with lessons and no one's contributed a translation yet so I mean we've been open since day one for people I speak English but I welcome people to post lessons in the language they want to start in I think we're ready for the next question I would put in that Drupal does have a very broad multi-lingual community so the translations directory that he's talking about isn't just Drupal Ladder like that functionality is part of Drupal core so we have a multi-lingual international community there are a lot of things but yeah I was going to address was the first question that you asked so in addition to what the Ladder people have been doing we had sort of a parallel effort that started around the same time last summer interestingly enough my nickname is XJM and Tim Plunkett and I do these office hours in IRC there's this core mentoring time that we have so we have a scheduled time twice a week where anyone can drop in and we just like pair them up with an issue they can work on based on their skills and experience and so forth so there's a number of us that volunteer like to donate that time once or twice a week and we go through we go through our issue queue and find issues that have like low hanging fruit in them you know we need someone to correct this comment to our standards or this issue needs automated tests and so we do a lot of the same stuff that the lessons on the Ladder cover but it's more like piecemeal, grab your own, pick your own one piece and that has worked really really well for engaging people in a lot of different time zones we get I think we get like it usually ranges but there's one time slot in the evenings where we get like two or three people at a time and then the one that's during the North American day we'll often get as many as 20 people at a time who are working on issues with the number of mentors so that's another thing you can do that sort of takes some of the physical part out of it is using that text based communication and that's worked really well for us and if you're interested in hearing more about that you can talk to me about it. We're also we also do in-person sprints for the core mentoring and there will be one this Friday like Addy mentioned earlier and so if you want you could come and see what we do there so that was all I was going to say and that which leads me into the reason that I'm Mike which is I would invite you if you're interested in actually experiencing some of the kinds of tasks they're talking about the kinds of issues they work on the issue sprints all the people I actually haven't talked to tech girl geek about it yet but everyone else sitting up at that table there is also in contact with us about the sprint that we're doing this coming Friday which will be here in the big room so if you want if you're interested in contributing to core yourself you haven't started yet but you think you might want to this is a really great chance to come and like have someone standing next to you who will help you find an issue to work on and maybe you can get your first core patch in yeah we're actually also planning on doing a workshop the Drupalize Me team is going to do a workshop at the beginning of the sprint day so for people who really are like I don't know what I'm doing and I'm not going to show up we're going to have a three hour workshop to handhold you through what is the issue queue what is this IRC thing people talk about how do you install a local version of Drupal using the Drupal Ladder lessons so you can sort of see it in action as well and then also getting you all the way up to installing Git if that's what you want to do so we'll be providing that in the morning on Friday and then you can like be set loose upon the world of issues if you if you feel like you want to sort of have like a real like starting at zero start to the day I think we need to go soon so we should probably take one more question and also I want to make sure people know we've got Drupal Aquia shirts up here for anyone who has participated in the Drupal Ladder activity or we'll bring one back to their meetup so I think the Drupal Ladder is a great initiative so good on you for that I can also attest to the fact that the in-person sprints are really useful we actually had an event down in Australia earlier this year where we actually sponsored one of the people to actually come and he was able to actually get his first core commit and had never actually been to Drupal at all before so and we did that through a lot of the same types of activities that the Drupal Ladder is all that being said my question actually is because I also run a Drupal group in Sydney and I'm planning on actually taking the Drupal Ladder back to it but the difficulty I have is actually that most of the people that are in our community are they're not motivated to actually contribute to core because of the fact that they're still trying to actually overcome their problems of getting their own sites done so I've been trying to put together resources that are similar in nature to put together kind of a step-by-step process for them to actually do tasks to get site building stuff done and theming stuff done to actually get their own things done and I'd be kind of curious to get your guys comments on I think getting more people into core is great but I think we also need to be able to kind of the learning curve is also more about people getting their own sites done to core so I think that that is totally right on we obviously need to meet people where they're at and the first step is obviously just making it easier to learn Drupal so in Washington DC we just started a federal government Drupal Forgov Meetup and so the idea there is it's really a niche specific Meetup and the idea is climb the Drupal Forgov Ladder and you know at the top of the ladder there is a community of interest that is interested in sort of a subset of things that they'd like to influence in core time we got to go