 Hi So I guess I'll get this started My name is Greg Dunlap and this is painting the bike shed lessons from a droop late initiative owner I Run the configuration management initiative, but if you're interested in hearing about configuration management That's not what I'm here to talk about so I'm here more to talk about the process of navigating our community and getting things done within the community and How we can work together and all of those sorts of things so if that's what you're interested in then you're absolutely in the right place and Welcome so Who the hell am I so my name is Greg Dunlap as I said I've been in the Drupal community for about five years Actually, my five-year birthday is this week. I Thanks And I wanted and I started using Drupal at the Seattle Times in Seattle and we while I was there we We ran into a lot of problems doing deployment and configuration management stuff at the Seattle Times And that was sort of where what I started working on some a module called deploy and getting involved and Blogging about this topic and talking at Drupal cons about it and sort of made it my little niche in the Drupal community I also maintained the services module for a while and then I was working at Palantir net and At node one in Stockholm, Sweden for the last year and a half At the moment. I'm currently I call it fun employed. I am unemployed by choice living in Portland, Oregon Kind of trying I tell people that I'm trying to get a company off the ground But what I'm really doing is working on core patches and watching a lot of Battlestar Galactica so and So last year at Drupal con in Chicago I gave a core conversation about how the way that we've been approaching the configuration management problem in Drupal is completely wrong and out of whack and it was a very feisty session and I got into lots of fights with core Developers and I was super nervous about it, but it went really well and afterwards Dries approached me about taking some of my ideas and applying them for these initiatives that he was Envisioning for a Drupal late and he wanted me to run the configuration management initiative And I was really nervous about it because at first I was thinking that You know, I'm a developer and and you know to to run an initiative like this You're really good. It's much more of a project management position when it comes down to it it's much more of a cat herding and developer management position and I was a little nervous about it But I also thought it would be really cool challenge and really interesting and kind of a step up for me and so I decided to do it and And so this talk is about some of my experiences in doing that Over the last nine months if you ever want to find me I am a hay rocker on every social networking site in existence So if you want to follow me on that on the Twitter's or whatever and that's how you can do it So I'm with the show. So what's a Drupal initiative first? well so Dries saw a problem in Drupal core development, which was that the Drupal community has grown very very large and for certain for certain aspects of Drupal development that involve really serious reworking of parts of Drupal core or Managing changes that may be somewhat controversial or things like this It was becoming harder and harder to work just as a community of individuals I mean basically what Dries saw was the nest was the necessity to put some structure in place for Drupal And so he created these initiatives and he formalized them around projects that he thought were really important for Drupal's future and he and he appointed these leads to Push them forward and to make sure that they could happen and so I was the first Drupal initiative lead and when we started I really had no no idea what this was going to mean We really have been making this up as we go along and so that's been part of the challenge and part of the interesting part but it's also been part of it that's been really scary and One of the one of the things and also all of the initiatives have been running very differently an initiative like The HMO 5 initiative which is really about going out and doing tons and tons of cleanup issues and new patches for core that are all really Discrete are very different than the initiative that I'm running are the one that like Larry Garfield is running where he wants to rewrite all of core from scratch and So I mean they're all running very differently. And so this has been a real Learning experience for everybody. So that's that's part of what you know Lessons from a jubilee initiative owner. So that's what initiative is but I don't know how many people here are Unfamiliar with the concept of the bike shed okay, so The bike shed is a sort of computer science representation of what is called Parkinson's law of triviality Here we go I Am going to leave that in anyways But the basic concept behind it is that people are much more likely to comment Or to offer opinions and get involved in things that they can understand rather than the things that they can't and so a Classic example of this is that you write up a presentation to build a nuclear power plant and it costs $800 billion to build and you've got a stack of things this big and you walk into a conference room And you give an hour-long presentation and they sign it and you go and build it But if you walk in with a one-page piece of paper with a plan to build a bike shed Then all of a sudden everybody in the room will start fighting over what color it is Because this is something that they can understand a nuclear power plant is so big and so Massive that everybody thinks I can't I can't understand this even though It's mind bogglingly more important than what color a bike shed is this is something that people can wrap their minds around and and a big part of this is actually that You know people people when they comment and when they speak up in public They want to they want to speak up about something that they can sound authoritative on having an opinion on you know people don't want to look stupid and That's then so part of bike shedding is really it's about The fact that we tend to fight the longest and the hardest and the most over the most trivial parts of all of our Project, but the hugest parts the parts that are super important. We tend to just ignore or let fly The the side effect of that is you know I talked about how people don't want to look dumb in public There's this concept called the Dunning Kruger Kruger syndrome And what it what it basically states is that the more skilled that you are at something the The less likely you are to think that you're good at it and the less likely the less skilled you are at something The more likely you are to think that you're awesome because you don't know any better than to think that you're no good And and if but if you're really skilled You know all of these people around you who are like so much better than you are and you feel really Self-conscious about it and I actually think that plays into a lot of what happens in Drupal and bike shedding Is that then we have a lot of tons and tons of like the smartest engineers in the world? But but we're all really just nerds and we lack a lot of self-confidence And we lack a lot of like ability to get in on these big issues that we feel kind of dumb about so That's sort of the basic overview of bike shedding and and one of the things about you know It's like bike shedding is bad But people really do need to have their voices heard you can't just like shut down Discussions you really need to have these these community oversight about things There have been several examples in the Drupal community in the past where big things have been designed and pushed into core With almost no community discussion at all and there's a lot of back There's a lot of backlash against that because the community the community feels like they didn't have their say they feel Like a lot of the decisions that get made weren't weren't positive or weren't weren't working well for a lot of the use cases that we need and And An example is for instance There was a lot of feeling about that about how the field system went into Drupal core that it was kind of designed by this group of People and pushed in without a lot of the necessary community feedback and embedded in every but but embedded in every bike shed also is Really important topics. I mean a really important things like when we when we did our first Code sprint around the configuration system. We had this idea that for the reasons of security So we were gonna do we were gonna have configuration stored in jason files But jason files had to be stored in a directory that was readable and it could contain sensitive information So we we thought well, why don't we make jason php hybrid files, right? They're like p they're dot php files So they can't be read by the web server and we just put a die at the top of them and then when we read them in And then when we read them in Drupal We just stripped the header off of it and then you've got a jason file and you go and so while While posting that started while posting these ideas started an enormous bike shed about what the file format should be There was also a huge community blowback about the concept of doing this hybrid file That was really important to listen to because it was it was loud in volume and everybody hated it so People need their voices heard and discussions need to happen But we need to figure out ways to do it without without dragging them on and making them horrible because the fact is that left alone Bike shedding is completely toxic to the community It makes really important issues seem trivial because it focuses everything on things that don't matter and a lot of issues In the community are inherently insoluble through discussion and consensus building I mean the file format discussion was a it was a huge example of that because we were considering five file formats for Configuration and every one had pros and cons There was not like any clear one that was definitely better than all of the others and and at some point I finally realized after months of fighting over this that attempting to find consensus in this discussion was futile It would never ever happen and so just continuing the but but continuing those bike sheds It's just soul-sucking for the people who are participating in them because they never go anywhere The same fights get rehashed over and over people are really passionate about certain things like file formats that in the end Don't really matter in the concept of a huge system That's gonna touch every part of Drupal and that nobody's ever really gonna see Because they're gonna be communicating through this API which nobody had any comments about at all another example of that is We were recently having discussions about Implementing a path structure for PSR zero implementations in modules And I won't go into the technical explanation of what all that is about But basically it was if I have a class Implemented by my module. What path do I store it under and it was like 500 comments long of people like whining and complaining about the fact that they were gonna be nested three directories instead of two and all of this kind of stuff But you know We do need to come up with it We do we need to come up with standards and we do need to come up with decisions And I'm sure that in that discussion there were important points that came out too So all of these things need to be worked out and these discussions need to be happened But they need to happen in a way. That's not toxic or horrible for everybody involved so I was thrown into this job about a year ago and I was the first initiative owner and I had never Led a project like this and I had never been in a management position or anything like that And so I just started working and trying to get things done And so One of the things that and you know one of the things as I've been talking about that happened early was we had this horrible bike shed about file formats that like shattered my drive and wasted like three months of my time and Got me into fights with like the same people that I wanted to strangle day after day And it was really it was really bad But I also had some discussions that went out really well and did some things that really worked And so I wanted to talk about some of the things that will allow you to focus these discussions and make them not spiral out of Control and some of the things that will help in community management for those of you that maybe Maintain modules or interested in getting more active in the community and core development. So Lesson one. This is define your MVP. This sounds for those who don't know an MVP is a minimum reliable product which I really Didn't want to put in here because it's like one of those things that like project managers scrum people say all the time And it's like it's like got this really bad association in it But it's actually really useful because what it does is it allows you to focus the minimum amount that you want to get Done in any project and anything beyond that is gravy and so once you've focused on that It's like a sword that you can use to strip away Everything that people might fight about so it's like people start asking me about stuff with the initiative all the time And I'm just like well I'm not gonna worry about that because it's not it's not vital to the to the mission of the initiative And if we get to it we'll talk about it But if you try and bring it up now I'm just gonna shut you down because it's not what we're working on now So having that well-defined upfront and justifiable is really useful a good example of that in my initiative Is that very early on we talked about how we're gonna implement? multilingual information configuration and a natural add-on to that it becomes well multilingual information is Contextual information that we get from the site that we're going to change configuration based on well There's other contextual information that we might get from the site that we would want to change configuration on We might want to change configuration on the time of day or you like anybody who's been building Drupal websites for any length of time Can come up with all sorts of wacky examples of different ways that people might want to dynamically change configuration Actually a really popular one is the domain access module which changes your configuration based on the domain that you're visiting at any given time on the fly and As we discussed this more and more I realized that a it was a horribly complicated problem and be that we already have a Way to implement this in Drupal right now And we can just continue using it and not drag this into my initiative at all and only do the thing that we really have to do Which is language specific stuff? And so I basically said in this thing, you know, we are not going to turn the language thing into a a Gradual contextual Overview thing for Drupal core. It's going to be too complicated and we're gonna spend too much time on it And so just know forget about it. It's not what we need to do So that was one that's like a good example of how you can use a very tightly and focus product description to just you know Wipe away a lot of these arguments This is this was kind of interesting to me when I had my first talk with Dries about about getting the initiative going I He recommended to me that I go look at a lot of the ways that other content management systems implement Configuration and he called it. He said that we should we need to get off the island once in a while We need to go and look at what other systems are doing and and in some ways like a lot of people in the Drupal community really bristle at that and we've seen some of that in the Talk about implementing symphony components in Drupal and stuff like this like you know Like we're smart we can build this and stuff like that But on the other hand getting off the island defines like what these are these are proven Implementations that are in real use in the real world and even if we don't use them directly They can provide a basis and a baseline for you to work off of and you know As we'll see in a little bit having something to start with is really important for Avoiding decisions because if you just say hey, we want file based configuration. What are we going to do and throw it out? There it's just not going to go anywhere and so this was another place where we Where for the language discussion one of the things that we looked into is how other systems implemented internationalization and we found that the way that actually they implement internationalization in Android is really interesting and they have a lot of the similar use cases that we want to do and so a lot of the Proposal that we have around that is based on a Implementation that's in the field and is being used and so that's really useful and we can steal a lot of their Ideas because they've done it and solved all the big problems and we can just solve the Drupal problems on top of that And and if again focus the discussion Take away the stuff that people will argue about because this is stuff that we know will work And you can always say things like well, we know this will work So let's get this done and if we have better ideas later We can work them in and we can iterate on it and I mean it's hard to do that in the Drupal community sometimes because We are really cycles tend to be so long that people really hate like getting stuff in And and you know they've been burned a lot of the times about getting stuff that they consider half done in Because they have to live with it for five or six years But on the other hand being able to work iteratively like that is super important for us Especially as we grow and we want to as Dries was saying this morning We want to stay really innovative and continue moving forward because you know we need to be able to get stuff done We can't just sit around and argue about what perfect implementations are for the next six years I Would say that this is probably the most important thing that I came out of from these discussions which is that Without a set deadline for how long things are going to be talked about they will be talked about forever and this is really kind of a You know one of the most toxic Aspects of these bike shed discussions is that they never end right and if you've got an inherently insoluble Insoluble problem to get consensus around and you don't have any like deadline for Tying things off and figuring out what decision you're gonna make it will go on forever, especially when people are passionate about it so a Solution to this is you start setting limits on how long these discussions will go and you know for people who are super passionate about it They will fight this all the time because they want to be able to be the loudest voice and fight it on And so it's great to have this because they're the ones that you want to stop talking about it because they're repeating themselves all The time they're making the same points over and over they're rehashing the same arguments all the time and You know it's interesting because just putting a time on a discussion Can help focus it because it's like you know a lot of times you might say well We've gone two weeks, but this discussion is progressing nicely, and I don't really think we've reached a solution yet So let's see where we are in two more weeks right because the point of the time box is to be able to give you a Way an excuse to stop things when they're dying when they're not going anywhere anymore, but it doesn't mean that it's a rule It doesn't mean you have to stop talking after two weeks. It's just it's just a tool that you can use We've we've I've started doing this in issues now in Drupal core and I haven't had a lot of blowback on it But a lot of the issues that I'm doing right now aren't that controversial I noticed with interest this morning that Dries in his keynote basically has started putting time boxes around discussions around the UX for Drupal 8 and I mean I think that's super smart of him because the kind of things that he's talking About like UX decisions are the kinds of things that passionate people can argue about what's best and what's worst forever And it's again the kind of thing where none of them are necessarily all right or all wrong It's just at some point you have to say well given the pros and cons We're going to go with this decision because it's the it's the best that we have right? It's not perfect, but it's the best that we have. I think that as the Drupal community grows. We're going to have to Accept that you know This is this is part of life going forward if we want to get things done And I actually was really happy to see Drew's Drew's kind of lay that out in his keynote today Because I've started doing that too and while I haven't received a lot of blowback for it. I assume that that's going to start happening So This is definitely the biggest lesson that I learned in my file format bike shed when we were talking about that in the Configuration management thing because I let that thing go for like a month and a half And then I went on vacation for a month and it's like that was a really bad idea on my part So if there is one thing that you can really do to keep your things under control, this is the thing that I would recommend Another thing and this is sort of related to the getting off the island point is that when you start a discussion You put a stake in the ground you don't just say we need internationalization for config What are your ideas you say we need internationalization for config? Here's a proposal What will work in it and what won't because again focusing the discussion getting people talking if somebody doesn't like what you're Doing you can say well why won't it work and if they say well it won't work because I don't like XML and they're like Well, that's not why it won't work. You can keep keep getting on them. What is broken about this? What is not functional? What will make triple die if we do this? again, you know Focusing the conversation getting things in Because when you have too many competing discussions and too many competing ideas things just go out of control Really badly This is really important to you know People online are just they are not the same way that they are in person. It's very I think it's very well documented at this point that online discussions dehumanize the participants and As a corollary to that I would add that our tools for managing long complicated discussions leave a lot to be desired You know, basically we have the issue queue which nobody outside of Hardcore developers even knows about and as the issues get longer and longer they become completely impossible to follow Or we have groups that triple dot org which is kind of like this wasteland that most core developers ignore and That while it has threaded discussions It's it's put together in a way that's still kind of hard to follow the UI While better now because the theme has been upgraded is still not the greatest I Think both of those places have really big issues When the when the comment threads get too long like if you go past 300 issues on a d.o. Discussion Which happens a sad amount of the time? You can't directly link to the comments on the second page anymore, you know And then I'll have to go to Greg Madison and say can we increase the limit to 500 for my discussion so that we can Actually link to individual discussions and stuff like that So we have bad tools and our membership is scattered because the tools don't solve a use case. That's generalized They're they're specified towards our audiences getting people together Rehumanizes discussions and allows people to focus and talk in a way that's much better than online And when I was doing this initiative I was living in Sweden But I actually traveled back to the US five times in the nine months that I was doing this initiative Because I realized that getting together face-to-face with these other developers that were passionate about these topics was so Important to getting anything done and those face-to-face meetings were by far where all of the most productive Discussions came out of the code sprint that me and David and Angie and Larry ran Built the whole architecture of the config thing in three days basically much of which remains unchanged right now The in bad camp we had a huge discussion in person in the code sprint room about all of the complications of What of getting? Configure reloaded and how modules can respond to it and how what kind of changes they have to make that was completely Successful largely because of the present the presentation the presence of white shed who maintains the field system And it's one of the only people who really understands what works and is one of the most complicated Systems of configuration that we're going to have to implement it It can be really hard because our community is so distributed and worldwide But I've also increasingly found that when you're a knowledge expert on really important topics It's become actually much easier for companies to In more common anyways for companies to step up and say you know especially if you can make an ROI case to them about you know Configuration management is something that our clients are constantly telling us is their biggest problem And I will get so much done if we can bring these three people into our Drupal camp for a week And then you know it's good marketing for the company and we're good community scout You know members and all of this kind of thing and you know when you look at like the cost of a plane ticket and hotel From Europe to America you know it's like you know you're looking at $1,500 to $2,000 and as an investment in the community I mean that's not even like two days of developer time. You know, I mean as an investment in the community It's such a tiny thing And you know all of those I got I got sponsored for all of those trips that I came over here because I was able to make The case to company looks like chapter 3 or aquear or whatever that this was important So I think that's something that we can There's another example Dries when he saw all that was going on with the conflict in the in Larry's web services initiative Gathered to gathered finally decided what we need to do is get everybody in a room and hash this out and aquear put together All the money to bring all of the 15 people You saw some of those photos in his keynote today together to talk everything out And it was so it was so nice and so productive and everybody came out of it feeling so much better about everything FaceTime is hugely important. It's worth making happen if possible And as sort of a bonus lesson You know, it's really really easy to get discouraged when these discussions are spiraling out of control And people are telling you that if you implement what you're doing It's going to be the death of Drupal or that it's the most horrible thing that they've ever seen in their entire lives And that it's bastardized and all of this thing But at some point all of these things work out Even if it's through just plain old attrition and people getting tired of arguing and giving up they do work out And there's always something there's always good things that come out of it My favorite story about this in the in the cycle of my initiative is I'm going to call out an individual here Who's not present at Drupal Khan, but I don't think he'd mind because he's not gonna I think argue with anything. I'm about to stay here so there's this guy in France and his name is Pierre Renault and his online handle is Palinard and So Early in my initiative and Larry's initiative This this very gruff and very very very opinionated Frenchman with a lot of time on his hands Was spending a lot of time in all of our issues Complaining about Drupal and he has very very very specific ideas about the way that Drupal should be in the way that Drupal should Be implemented from a software architecture standpoint and he would just constantly post to our issues and like any time Responded he would respond like four times to every issue and then it was like You know there's like add-on things that come out of that from our tools that like he could never post anything without editing it Five times and every time you edit a comment on g. Oh, it sends out an email update to everybody so he would post like 15 times a day and then you would get 60 emails out of it and and you know a Lot he was really wearing down me and Larry and Earl and a lot of other people that were working on these Problems, but what happened was that a Couple of people I know Angie and I think some other people kind of took him aside and started talking to him about How about what he was doing and about how it was affecting everybody and he's the kind of guy where it's like he kind of He kind of has enough self-awareness to realize that that he grates on people and that he gets on and that he gets Maybe gets on people's nerves and it's just sort of how he is but over time He's actually become like like with some with some community handling and hurting He's actually turned into a really productive Contributor to Larry's to Larry's initiative actually one of the most active and productive contributors to Larry's initiative that there is probably and And you know I'm starting to get to the point where I see notifications from him on issues and that feeling of my heart Sinking is starting to finally wear off and go away, right? you know Very early on Angie told me that people who? People who you know come at you with these really aggressive Attitudes and aggressive opinions about things aren't doing it because they're jerks. They're doing it out of passion They're doing it because they care a lot about Drupal and looking at it that way and trying to Work at it from that from from that angle no matter how hard it may be at the given time Is really important to keep in mind and to keep in touch with because you know We are all a big community and we have to figure out ways to work together and you know it if all else fails and you can't figure out how to deal with somebody or you can't figure out how to Sort this issue out or you can't You can't You know get get to the end of where you want to be because everybody's just Wailing at you with their fists and throwing rocks and everything we do have one last resort option now Which is that web chick knows how to use a gun? I definitely am going to keep that in my back pocket going forward As a follow-up to this Randy Faye is giving to talk a talk tomorrow in this room. Oh In the core conversations room right about Governance in Drupal which touches on a lot of these issues about how we work together and what our processes are and Should we have more structured process? Should we have more formalized? Structure in terms of who can work issues and who makes decisions and how decisions are made and he's actually been posting a lot of blog posts about this at that URL there And so I would I would recommend if you're interested in these issues that you go to his discussion and talk more about these topics And so that's what I've got if anybody has any questions Then I would feel free you can come to the mic in the middle of the room and ask them So, you know as you talk a couple of things come to mind one is something that Angie has Said over and over again, and that is that every time we have a serious bike shed We lose contributors, and that's one of the really serious problems with that whole mode is that People are wandering off all of us have wandered off Yeah, and you what did you say the other day is smoking crater of an issue? That whole smoking crater thing that everybody just leaves and hopes that they didn't get burned by is horribly destructive to us and that's one That the techniques that you make it enough that stuff at our jobs Well, actually sometimes this stuff's worse than our jobs because our jobs know how to sort it out Well, yeah, because our jobs have somebody who's in charge who will come up and say this is what we're gonna do And if you don't like somebody you'll finally say this is what we're gonna do. Yeah, exactly The second thing that you remind me of is that every important issue is important for us to actually deal with and the bike shed mentality is willing to Allow passive Leaving that issue instead of solving it and in every issue that's important enough to bike shed is important is Critical to solve and so every time we come to Either when we come to a pass or when people walk off we have failed Hugely because it means that we have not done Something which was obviously important to be done I mean a bike shed every bike shed should be resolved with a constructive solution It wouldn't have been a bike shed if it wasn't important enough to do that Yeah, and I mean, um, you know, especially in these things that are like sort of insoluble to get consensus on I think it's important. You know, I did this big thing about how we're gonna name configuration files It's like rampant for bike shedding and I knew it would be and so I put I said Let's talk about it for two weeks and then we'll come to a decision But at the end I knew it would be my decision to make but I would also have to justify it, you know You can't just say oh, we're gonna do this and that's it now get to work You you know if you listen to the pros and cons of all of them and lay them out and say that based on The things that we've laid out as important to the initiative This is the decision. We're going to make and it's not perfect But it's what we're going to go forward with and see how it goes. That's really important for solving these discussions and I think one of the nice things about the initiatives that we probably that the leads Probably haven't taken enough advantage of is that we're supposed to you know step up and make these decisions And if we get grief about it, then we can pass them up the ladder to trees And I've never had trees like not be willing to back me up on any of those things So I think that's something that's a hammer that we should be willing to wield a lot more often Huh? Oh Yeah, and Angie's gone. Yes So there's no one else talking so I have a couple of questions that I could fill time with Please come up if you have questions So well one thing I just wanted to say is in addition to me having a knowing how to use an assault rifle, which is pretty cool and a shotgun and An AK-47 so but in addition to those skills Another option that has just recently come up is Assigning an issue to trees so anybody who's in maintainers that text has access to the assigned to field if if something Is heading in that direction ideally this would happen before we hit smoking crater like right, right? You know, but if it looks like this is starting to get heated up and people are starting to get emotional assign it to trees Because trees is our benevolent dictator for life our BDFL And he is happy to go in there and decide on things or else appoint someone to decide on things and also time box the decision Right, however, he needs to know about it right and I can inform him about it But my problem is I don't have a good sense of when these are just angry French people or when it's like Okay, this is actually like I do have a sense, but usually not until it's way too late So if you are in an issue where it feels like it's heading in that direction Please either if you are in maintainers that text do it yourself or ping someone who's in maintainers of text and ask them to Take a look and like let's get those cleared out because I totally agree with everything Randy said These are like destructive to our community and it's absolutely not okay for us today, and it's about stupid stuff It's about directories, right? We almost came to fists over directories. It's like ridiculous You know it's like to keep the big picture guys You know it's like and I definitely think that us as the leads because is this is because we've never had these formal Procedures before and it's something that because we our normal mode of operation has been to just beat our fists against the wall Until everybody gets too tired to fight anymore and we need to kind of force ourselves out of that attitude And so I mean, you know, I think that's on that's on us to actually implement these things that we know about Sooner rather than waiting until we're ready to jump off of buildings and stuff exactly then We're gonna need to lay off the French people a little bit as we get more symphony developers in our community Yeah, I think that's probably right on that note I just want to say one other thing about the the pound art situation is You know in addition to me saying like yeah They're really passionate about Drupal the really critical thing that we did with that situation is we said you seem to be really pissed off Because this thing isn't getting done Here's how you do that because a lot of people from outside think that the community is this like clothes little click group And you have to be somebody to be in it and don't realize that no actually Like anybody can do this and here's the process for doing that because after that discussion happened That's when things got a lot better because he thought he was sort of that victim of what all of these big smart initiative owners were doing And that that was really the thing that brought him around as realizing He had the power to actually like see his changes forward and connecting him with people who could do that That was a huge thing and it's interesting because I know that for me anyways And I'm sure that for Larry one of the problems with that situation is we are wasting so much time on somebody who had never really Contributed to Drupal that much at all I mean he had some modules and I think he had like five core patches in triple seven or something like that But this is somebody who was like Trying to get the attention of a son who had never really done much and so it's like it like goes both ways He gets more he feels more productive because he does stuff And then when we see him actually doing stuff rather than complaining We're more sympathetic to his to his thing because we have this whole duocracy thing going on here And so that that whole thing just spirals into betterness all the way down the line There's still no so I'm gonna keep talking okay one question. I have is one of the big Controversies with Drupal 8 was this whole thing of creating initiatives right because in Drupal 7 it was essentially 1,000 people all working on whatever they were working on and then interfacing directly with Dries and I And Dries made a deliberate decision in Drupal 8 to appoint specific people to go after Strategically important initiatives for Drupal and say you are gonna figure this out You're gonna figure this out and we'll support you however we can but you're you're the man And it sort of elevated initiative owners above the rest of the people and there was some contention around that Like do you have anything to say about that? Like do you feel like that move to move to initiatives was a good thing Do you feel like that could be done better in Drupal 9? Do you think initiatives are a terrible idea? What is your your opinion from your standpoint on how that went I think that we well we definitely need some way of Focusing these issues and having people to lead them especially big stuff But there definitely have been some community drawbacks to that and I don't have a ton of ideas about how to fix them I mean one of the things that Dries always said from the beginning is that the best initiative lead isn't going to be the best Coder or even the best architect necessarily they're going to be the best person who can lead right who can cat herd who can You know issue queue farm who can get people together and make things happen But that's that's not been a role that we have traditionally as a community valued now I can say that that's for the worse and that we should value it a lot more and I think I'm right And I think a lot of people think I'm right, but it's still as a cultural shift a big deal for our community Especially for people who are much more down in the dirt coder Architects who have always really been the drivers of Drupal to sort of have that taken away from them, right? And I think a lot of the conflict has centered around that and I think as we have reached out to those people more things have calmed down a lot and so and you know So that part I think I think maybe because you know when the initiatives were announced We were kind of figuring out as we went along We never really formalized what they were or what their role was or how they were going to integrate in the community and maybe I mean part of me feels like formalizing that would be better But part of that me feels like formalizing that is going to make people hate it more Because there's a lot of there's a lot of feeling in the Drupal community that formalizing thing is sort of corporatizing Drupal or something like this and so I as far as that I don't have a lot of ideas But definitely one thing that I think we have to do is that there was this idea that if you weren't an initiative you weren't important to core and that you your stuff wasn't worth working on or that like anybody who needed to do Something that spanned more than five issues had to have an initiative to get it paid attention to or something like that Or that the initiatives were absolutely going to go into core Which I never had any illusions about right? I mean and I wouldn't want that if the community thought that my that that my project was crap I don't want it getting committed, you know because then I'm gonna be the one who's getting rocks thrown at me at the next Drupal con right but no I mean because and I think get making that more a lot of the communication around that more formally stated You know because I always just thought that was understood and when people were coming up to me like months later Saying well your stuff's just gonna get in I was like what the hell are you talking about, you know or that you know Well, I can't I can't focus on media for Drupal because it's not an initiative I'm like why the hell not what's stopping you just make issues and write blog posts about them and basically do the same things that I'm doing and I bet that if you made a decision in that issue as the recognized community leader Dries would say yes I agree with what Larry or Dave reader whoever said just like you know has always happened I think I think the only reason he wanted to formalize these things is because he really thought they were vital to the future of Drupal and so I think a lot more formal I mean a lot more communication around that would happen I think you know in Drupal 9 we're gonna have to do something like this to keep these big initiatives going forward But we're definitely gonna have to figure out a way to make them sort of mesh with the community a little better too And then the last question I'll get off the stage Sorry, I know So are we running? What time am I supposed to get out of here? You still have like 20 minutes, okay? So the last question is would you do it again? it was it was interesting because I I Think I'm sure I would because it was really important to Drupal I felt that I had the knowledge in the background to do it And I thought that I could do a really good job of it in my snarky moments I'll say that I only did it because I didn't want anybody else to screw it up But I mean I know that there are lots of people in our community who had been more than capable to run this But I had the time and I had the interest and I had the desire I've had a desire for a long time to sort of get out of day-to-day coding and cranking away I've been doing that for 20 years of my life back before the internet existed, you know and and and so I've had a lot I've been wanting to figure out a way to get into positions where I can have a little more Influence and saying what's going on and not be just cranking out sites all day long And you know this was an opportunity for me to learn about how to do that too So for me that was really that was a really good experience, and I've gotten a lot out of it, too that said it's definitely not for everyone and And and you know, I think people should really think about what they're getting into if they're going to volunteer For such a thing as I've said before I did my core conversation in Chicago last year and then when Dries asked me I was like oh shit, what have I done? Yeah, I Just wanted to say like I am not highly involved in any particular Sprints or issues or anything like that But as somebody who does like to jump in and help with some little issues somewhere Or even from time to time picking up a couple novice issues One of the things that's helped me the most is having you know a blog post on the planet feed Webchik does great summaries all the time a lot of I've noticed a few of the issues or a few of the Initiatives have done a better job at that and I feel like those are the initiatives that are gonna get a lot of a lot more of their Features complete by the time Drupalates released and I just want to encourage the people who are running the initiatives Make sure you spend the time to keep summarizing what's going on where specifically help is needed because you know Otherwise, you're just kind of plumbing through issue queues trying to find where something is and like for configuration management There's like 20 something issues in there and it's like some of these look like they haven't been touched in weeks Where's the activity? Where's something somebody that's not deeply involved can help out and where something that someone is deeply involved Can help out because I you know I and I know a lot of other people do have some time to help with small issues But when we look at the issues that have all the discussions and bike shedding, of course It's like I can't I'm not gonna be able to wrap my head around the code in the patch That's 200 kilobytes in a day, but I would be able to do it for you know three kilobyte little thing That's really good feedback and you know I You know web chick will hammer that on all of us all the time that you know You don't we don't have one place to point you to learn about this or to do status updates on this or the community Feels like they're in the dark or we're keeping secrets or having where this private cabal that meets in secret and is deciding the future of Drupal and And and that's and you know having that open communication is really super important We haven't been the best at it and you know I think it's really similar You know too when we look at the communication problems in the DA It's not out of any any you know sense of malice or trying to hide what we're doing It's just a matter of time and disorganization really in the end You know because we just need to prioritize it because it's super important And it's so easy to just get wrapped up in the issue queues and patches and stuff like that All right, and before I before I go. I wanted to point out that Jenny kill her from my planet. It's her birthday today So if anybody wants to come over here and wish her a happy birthday Please feel free to do so and we're We if you if you enjoyed my session or if you have any feedback I've been I've been on I've been the I've been a track chair for four Drupal cons now and and this This these feedback is so hugely important for us when we do selections for the next Drupal con When we're trying to prioritize speakers when we're trying to figure out whose sessions we should choose You know, I mean, I mean, you know We get like 300 session submissions for like 80 slots and filling out these things honestly is really really great for us So I would encourage everyone to do it and tell much tell me how bad I was so that maybe then I won't have to Speak again in any more. No, I'm just kidding Yeah, thanks a lot