 Hello, everyone. Welcome to the session. My name is Raki Mithanya and I'm going to talk about how to contribute to Drupal minus code. I currently work as a project manager at QVD 42 in Pune, India. And there are lots and lots of reasons why I chose this topic, but we'll not get into detailed reasoning of all of that, but I just quickly like to get started. Now, before we begin on how to actually contribute, it is more important to find out why is it so important to contribute. Any suggestions from you all or any ideas as to why we think it's important to contribute and why we should really give back? Come on, Drupal is great. We should just use it. Why give back? Because it's super fun. Okay. Because it wouldn't exist if nobody contributed. Awesome. Yes, of course. So there are plenty of reasons why it is so important to contribute. I think one of the most important reasons is to maintain the health of Drupal. Drupal has become one of the largest open source projects in the world, and especially in terms of number of contributors. And we still need more. In fact, the people who are code contributors, they know more that we need more and more contributors and not necessarily code. In fact, it's really weird to think that in a Drupal project, there are contributions other than code which are valued so much. But believe me, all the people I have spoken to in the past couple of months just to find out how much you appreciate when somebody does a non-code contribution. I have been amazed to find out their responses, and I'm going to show some of them here as well. Now, I think at the time of Drupal 4, probably none of us imagined what Drupal 8 would look like. And not because we were not far-sighted, but because user adoption decides to a great extent what we want next and how to make it better and better. And because we want to make it better for our own usage, we have to make sure that we contribute in better ways and come up with new ideas every now and then. Not necessarily every idea is going to be appreciated, but I'm sure it's always great to come up with an idea. Now, the most important aspect is that we are all part of the community. Just you being present here at DrupalCon makes you part of the community. So congratulations to all. Now, there are three important things that we need to know before we can start contributing. If you actually go to Drupal.org, I don't know if all of you have your user accounts set up, but if you go to Drupal.org, there's a community page on the top and the second tab of that is getting involved. So something caught my attention and it was mentioned by Dries that it's really the Drupal community and not so much the software that makes the Drupal project what it is. So fostering the Drupal community is actually more important than just managing the code base. And undoubtedly, a huge thanks to the awesome code contributors. Without them, we couldn't have been using such a brilliant project altogether and we wouldn't have been here without them. So definitely code contributors make awesome contributions every day. Now, being a project manager, code wasn't my obvious choice of contribution, but I still wanted to be involved. And that is what led to foundation of ways in which we can contribute where we don't really need to have the skill sets of being an amazing coder or an amazing developer or a theme or none of that required. So Drupal is so loved and used because of a lot of other aspects which are non-code and that's where we can contribute. So the first step which I think you all have already taken is by being present here, I think you all have a will to contribute. So you have that willingness where you want to give back something you just want to know how and that's why you're here. Some of you must be thinking, I'm not a developer. Why can't I contribute? Or how to start? And I think these are just the right questions to start with. When you have the perfect questions in place, which we'll come back to in a while, I think you're just good to start on your journey. And what you have to remember is it's going to be a journey, it's going to have ups and downs, and it's not a race. Contributions, big or small, doesn't really matter. Now, how do I know who all can contribute where? I'm probably meeting you for the first time or maybe the second time, but definitely not more. So I don't know you all personally, and all of us come from different geographic locations, different backgrounds, different skill sets. So it's going to be slightly difficult to find the perfect match, but we'll try to do that in today's session as much as we can. Now, I just have a quick show of hands to make sure I cover everyone's user profile or the role they come from. So let's just start with directors, founders, CEOs, CTOs, anybody? Okay, great. Evangelists, entrepreneurs? Wow, great. Managers, crumb masters, product owners? Okay, me too. UX experts, designers? Wow, great. System admins, technical architects? Nice. Developers, themers, QA engineers? Wow. I never knew you wanted to find out non-code phase of contribution as well. Great. Marketing and sales? Media professionals, writers, professors and students? Community builders? Okay, and users? I think all of us. Okay, the roles that I missed? Like, anybody has a role other than these or something that these do not cover that I missed? Okay, great. So we have everyone, I guess everyone who uses Drupal here in the room today. Okay, now all you have to do is find the perfect match, and it's really simple. We first need to know what options to explore, and where can we actually put our hands into it. So the fun fact about Drupal is, it is a box of chocolates, and you get to choose which flavor you want. So you have so many options to choose from, and the skill set. I mean, the minimum requirement that you need to have is just that willingness to contribute. The skill set to contribute in non-code ways just develops on its own. You don't really have to do anything to develop those. So let's have a look at the options, documentation, and I'll say why I came here first. We have translations, Drupal UX, community building, trainings and workshops, and testing. I've only picked a few, which I think will be possible to cover with all the user roles we have today in this room. There are obviously more ways of contribution, but I think these should cover almost all of them. And we'll go one by one so that you can make your choice on which direction you want to head into. Okay, so starting with documentation. In the last month, I spoke to a lot of people in India, and some of my clients were Drupal end users. And it just turns out that whether somebody contributes or not, everybody knows that documentation is one space where you really need a lot of contributors. And especially when Drupal 7 to Drupal 8 and Drupal 8 multiple versions coming in, documentation is going to play a very, very, very important part. And this is why. I think where non-developers can contribute the most today, or that's the most impactful, I would say, is documentation. Documentation helps new people get started with Drupal 8, which would be great. So I think everybody wants to use Drupal 8, and we are all ready to see how Drupal 8 explores and how we can use the best out of it. But we don't have enough documentation in place, and there is a lot of scope for contribution. So when you actually go to Drupal.org, and in fact, just a simple Google search of ways to contribute to Drupal, the first results that would be returned will be ways to get involved, the direct page of Drupal.org. And the first set of contribution tasks that you would find out will be almost all related to documentation. There will be other sectors as well in which you can contribute, but documentation is definitely going to be the key. And post this, I also checked out the Drupal.org documentation page, and it just gives you everything you need. I mean, the simplest guide to start is already there. Probably one of the issues that a lot of people find, which I've just come to know via that survey, is that you find Drupal.org a little hard to navigate or not necessarily know where exactly to go. And I reached out to Drupal Association banging their doors. Why people have difficulties in accessing the website or what's the issue? And they're doing such a great job in revamping Drupal.org. I think parts of it must already be visible, but it's a huge website. It's not going to change overnight. And your contributions are probably going to make a lot of difference because all the places which Drupal.org is going to revamp into, they're going to be a lot of documentation work that you can get involved into. And the plus points of documentation is that it's a great way of learning. So we want to use Drupal 8, but do we really know how to use it? Or we think it's going to be super simple the way Dries portrayed in his keynote. It's already there. Probably we need to learn a bit and how to make the best out of it. And with documentation, because we are going to do some reading, I'm sure we're going to make some learnings out of it as well. This is very simple to contribute. You don't really need anything. You just need a laptop and lots of help needed here. Now, when I reached out to Drupal Association to find out what are the documentation initiatives or what are the problems that they are facing and where we can help, I spoke to Tim. One of the places that we could use help especially right now is in documentation. We're doing a migration from an old documentation system to our new system right now. So if you see old documentation that has a message at the top that says we need to migrate this, you can go ahead and do that and you can help us to move into the new system. We're also trying to separate mixed documentation for different versions of Drupal into separated documentation for Drupal 7 and Drupal 8. So that's the way you can help as well. And finally, contrib modules really need their documentation updated, so we really appreciate that. Okay. So documentation is one aspect where a lot of help is needed and we can all contribute. Next we have translation. And that's another skill set that we don't really need to develop. We all come from different geographic locations. I'll again do a quick raise of hands just to see that we have people from diverse geographic locations. So people from U.S. Okay. Drup, okay. Asia, okay. Africa, okay. I'm just saying out loud. Any places I have missed, like I'm sure these covered a lot and there are lots and lots of languages that these places have. So our geographic locations make us fluent in our native languages and Drupal, I mean, one of the great initiatives that's like recently circling around is that a lot of people in the remote areas where English doesn't work that well are using Drupal and most of them are end users. So for end users, we also need to make sure that we have a platform in place that's translated to the language we need so that they could be the content managers or administrators and that's where translation comes into picture. When you go to Drupal.org and there's a separate website called localize.drupal.org and I just checked out the Drupal 8 page and I found out that we're doing great. That's the latest status of Drupal 8 translation, but there's more. So there's a lot of help needed, lots and lots of work that we can put together. And I mean, again, this is just translation, you can simply get started. It's as simple as translating strings to do the complexities you want to get into via code. You can choose whatever level of contribution you want to give, but everything is valuable here. And so these were the statistics that I got from Drupal 8. And when I spoke to Gabor, I also found out that a lot of people are reaching out asking when Drupal 8 translations are going to be ready. But the main point is who's going to prepare them or who is going to make them make it ready. And with all of it developing so fast, I think we really need to make a move and make sure that translations are also available real quick. Moving ahead, so that's where you need to contribute. Drupal UX. So what we need is what we get. The Drupal UX team is doing so great that when I just checked out Twitter and went to the Twitter page, Drupal UX, I found out that they post their meeting videos, their meeting notes, and all of it on Twitter for everybody to access it. I mean, who does that? And did we ever take an initiative to actually go and check out what work they're doing? Probably not. But we do say that I wish this was this way or I wish it was done that way. Probably this would have made things simpler or it would have been more usable. But that usability part where we know what we need, we probably don't go ahead and report that. We don't tell them what we need. And all of their conversations happen only on feedback. So you have to make sure that you give the right feedback. So the most important step is generating an idea. And I think a lot of that comes from experiencing the software, like how you use and what you want to use. So you have ideas as to this is not really how it should work. But had it been this way, I would have loved it. So those kind of ideas, they're going to be lots and lots of weird ideas which may not be compatible right away. But there must be something relevant that can go into the UX part. So we have to make sure that it's usable and not just for us, but for everyone. So we have to think on that scale. And then we need to work like a team. So the Drupal UX team was pretty, pretty cool. And once you meet the UX guys, you'll know what great work they're doing. But we have to make sure that we help them build it the way they want to by working together as a team and generating ideas that are really perfect and good enough to be developed. So I think we can, all we need to do is think and give our suggestions. We just need to reproduce things. And we end up getting better things. So if you go to the Drupal UX Twitter to your page, this was the recent one that they had. Pages directly post their videos. So you can see what they have been discussing, what's going on and what's coming up next. And if you want to get involved, there were also people who did not know on how to actually reach out or how should I start. I mean, it's really difficult for me to get started without knowing where to get started. And I think we'll come to that as well on how you can reach everyone. Next is community building. Now here I want a lot of enthusiasm from you guys because I feel that the roles we have in this room, a lot of you are already doing community building, whether you know it or not. So what do you all understand by community building? Yes, Drupal Gams, Meetups, Garns, what else? Blogs, right? Global training days. Anything else? Raising money. Raising money, yes. I mean, donation is also one kind of contribution that I did not put up in the slides. But I would really want that you try contributing this way as well. If you want to, you can do donations as well. There's a Drupal page for that as well, which mentions donations. But yes, that is also important. Okay. So community building not just covers whatever initiatives we take or how we organize events. That's definitely a part of it. It covers anything you do in order to make sure that you work as a community and you give something back to the community. So organizing meetups and camps and global training days and different sorts of workshops, these are all really important parts. The kind of problems that different user groups are facing today is attendance, the biggest problem of all, because it takes a lot of perseverance for you to be available on a good frequency so that you, I mean, if you just lose momentum and you attend one meeting and then you don't go again, you're probably not going to know what's going on and you're probably not helping in the progress. So what we need to do just is to make sure that we also contribute by, because we are already leaders. So what we can do is we can make sure that we contribute by organizing these events, by taking part in these events, if at all we're not organizing them. And all of these training days and meetups and workshops, they just not only build the community but also spreads Drupal, like the world of Drupal. And people get to know about it. So one such initiative that I'm really close to in India is Drupal Campus Ambassador Program. And the program started with the need of more talent in the Drupal industry. And it was so weird that when you go to colleges, people don't really know about Drupal. I mean, I'm just telling you about the situation of Drupal in India, where people haven't heard about Drupal. So you just pick students randomly based on their programming skills of C, C++ and Java. And you bring them into your company and then you spend a year in training them. And a lot of them find out that they don't really want to get involved into Drupal. And a lot of them lose that entire year. I mean, they did learn something, but they could have probably learned it earlier. So they spent a year learning. And that is when they start becoming productive for the company and for themselves. So there was a huge gap which we wanted to reduce. And we came up with the idea of Drupal Campus Ambassador Program, where we reached out to colleges and told them that there is a Drupal community in place where we could bridge the gap and we could connect you to the community. And all you have to do is spread the word of Drupal in your college, make a small user group and make sure that they start learning Drupal. So the ambassadors who get appointed, they're responsible for making sure that the word of Drupal is known and there are no difficulties in learning and adapting Drupal in the colleges. That way, not only colleges, but also the staff and the professors, they get to know more and more about Drupal. And some of college websites have also moved on to Drupal after the program, which was like a big thing for us. And getting the colleges onboarded is also really difficult because some of them have opinions like, Drupal has been going on for such a long time. Is it still brand new? That is because not everybody is involved into it or you just decide by the age of the software or the platform. And so the Drupal Campus Ambassador Program is also a community-building initiative. There are lots and lots of other initiatives which are also going on, which we all don't know about because we don't go and read blogs or we don't want to find out or we probably don't even want to stay aware because we are really busy doing our things. But even if we are busy, our things, I think we can make a difference by just spreading the word. That's the simplest thing that we can do in order to make sure that the community is strengthening with this. I'm just repeating the same slide here about community because it's really important that you understand the value of Drupal community and how important it is that we contribute to fostering it. Trainings and workshops. Now, this is one probably a non-code way of contributing for coders where you actually become mentors and you guide students or newbies and make sure that they learn and they find a real joy in contributing. So you teach them the whole essence of contributing via code but you're actually not really doing the code contributions. What you're doing is you're mentoring. So these are also really, really important. Now, the last and the most important and easy one is testing. We all use Drupal. We all know what issues we face. We just don't take that step of going to Drupal.org and reporting an issue or just trying to reproduce what somebody else has mentioned because we think that somebody is there to fix it. But for somebody to fix it, they really need to know what's going on. So testing is something that almost everybody can do. Everybody can contribute to Drupal. All you really need is a computer, I would say. So the easiest or simplest way to contribute is probably by installing Drupal and looking for bugs and reporting these bugs or trying to reproduce bugs that others have reported. So just one example of something that I think almost everyone can do. And I'm sure everybody present in this room can do this as well. It's really simple and probably takes really the least amount of time that you need and no skill set again. Now, the most important question is how to get started. Again, I spoke to a lot of people and when I asked Kathy on how to get started she had really valuable inputs to share on how you can really get started on to this. Somebody thinks they might want to contribute is to make a Drupal.org account and then sometimes people feel like how to contribute is hard to know but once you make a Drupal.org account on your dashboard you get a block which is contributor links. And one of the links in there is to a getting started handbook section and that's currently under the process of being revamped with the DA's assistance and I think that's going to even get better as we go on. Post this, we heard what contributors have to say but I also wanted to speak to the non-contributors and know what difficulties they feel. Some of them are newbies who want to contribute via code but they don't really know how to get started or more importantly how to reach out to people. When I further spoke to Tim I found out that Drupal.org has 1.8 million user profiles and none of these are blogged accounts, they're actual active accounts on Drupal.org and in the last 30 days in Drupal.org we've had 3,700 new user accounts out of which only 402 are active users. When I say active user it means any kinds of activity it doesn't really mean contribution but even if you edited your own profile that's a user activity you did so you've been an active user. If I actually, I'm just thinking in my head if 402 were the active users probably the number of contributors would be 10% or 20% even if half it's still less so we need to increase this number. A lot of people are end users or consumers we do create Drupal.org accounts, we download modules, we use them we build our websites but we don't think of contributing back which is why in spite of having so many user accounts there there's such less number of contributors every month. Do you have accounts for the 420 of all of the accounts? No, so this is just for the 30 days out of the new accounts. So yes, sorry the 402 was of all. Of all accounts on Drupal.org like all million of them? So the 402 active users were for one day yesterday when we had the Drupal Khan going on so this was about the one day and 3700 new user accounts were created in the last 30 days. In one day? Yeah, in one day. I'm sure it's correct because Tim had the entire database. So I also did a survey where I asked people who want to contribute on have you ever tried out to reaching to contributors or mentors? Did you find it easy or have you find it difficult or did you never try at all? And the result was 17% of them said it's really easy to connect to somebody in the community. 83% said never tried. Nobody said that it's difficult. Wow. This is awesome and nobody said it's difficult. So I then asked Kathy again. Wait, wait, wait, wait. How many people actually reach out to you on a daily basis or on a monthly basis? Do you get contacted a lot? Because I'm sure all the contributors must be super busy doing their code part and contributing so you don't really have that time of getting back to people. But what I found out was shocking. I don't get contacted that very much. Maybe zero to one people a month might use my contact form on Drupal.org or contact me on Twitter. So it's not that many. See, so we don't really try to reach out. I mean, I'm not saying that you all go to Kathy or you all go to Angie. Please don't do that. But one good place to get started is your own local community. I mean, that's the best way to get started. So there are lots and lots of communication channels. The first would be local communities because that's where you find a team, people you can connect with. And you know what initiatives are going on on the local level to contribute there first and maybe then go global. Then there is IRC and Slack. And all of these contact information is already there on Drupal.org on how to reach out. It's just that we need to make that move. And if you want to reach out to specific people, there are contact forms, the personal contact forms on Drupal.org, via which you can reach out. And the other way, if you're already involved and you want to make sure that somebody checks what you're doing, there's way of commenting and getting involved in the issue queues that you can do. So there are many and many mediums of contribution. Probably all you need to do is just go out and shout hi. And there's going to be somebody responding to you, definitely. So now the time to find the perfect match. Or probably not because you have more and more and more and more and more and more and more. So there's not going to be one perfect match. It's not a one-to-one or a one-to-many relationship. It's an end-to-end relationship where a lot of you can contribute to a lot of options available. And you just need to make sure that you either pick one or you pick more than one, but you contribute. You just have to contribute. That's all that needs to be done. You don't really need to find one perfect dimension in which you can. Although it's always good to be like if there's a dearth of time, you can probably have one segment where you want to contribute and you think it's going to take the least amount of time. So that's completely on your choice. I'm not going to do the mapping for you, but I'll let you choose. The six aspects which I'm just going to repeat one time where you can really contribute is documentation, translations, the Drupal UX, and trainings and workshops, community building, and testing. The reason for picking these is because it came from a lot of people and a lot of places that these are the segments which need the most attention and where we can contribute in some way or the other. And over here we have managers and CTOs and CEOs. So I think Drupal.org is doing great. Drupal Association is doing great. They have a lot of initiatives, but funding is also very important. So donations is also one way of contributing. If not anything else, you should really think of that as well. So anybody who appreciates Drupal can contribute. And I wanted to mention one new user who's probably just started and liked the contribution. And I wanted to do that in the documentation space or a non-code person getting into code. And luckily I found Megan yesterday who mentioned in her keynote that she did it. So our new whom you all know, on her first attempt, it's definitely not going to be very simple and straightforward. You need to do a little bit of brainstorming. But in the end, you turn out to be all happy and smiles. So all you need to do is get started. Really, just get started. Sorry, it just goes right. It's worth it. Okay, so when I asked people who can contribute, there was only one common word that almost everybody used which you'll find out in these set of videos. Pretty much anyone can contribute to Drupal.org. Even if you're new to the community, you can look at the documentation on the things that you're learning and if you find something that can be more clear, you can leave a comment or even edit it yourself to clarify. You don't have to be a long-time contributor or an expert. You can use anybody's help. I know that you have something to share with the community that we're going to value. And we're going to help you find that place. So come on in. If I can contribute, then anyone can contribute. Probably just perfect. I mean, I say the same thing. If I can do it, anybody can. And if anyone can contribute, actually any new contributor can. So all you need to do is have that willingness to contribute and get started. In some way or the other, you'll get guided. In fact, DrupalCon is probably the perfect place to find somebody's help if you need and get started. So all you need to do after this session is start now. So exciting to have so many of you here. The very fact that you're here today shows that you want to contribute back to Drupal. There is no better time than now. Start contributing. And last person say the same thing to you because it has a huge impact when people tell you contribute, contribute, and contribute. So... Please contribute. You can all start by contributing now. So I hope you find this session helpful. Thank you so much for listening. It's a huge topic and there are lots and lots of things in which we can contribute. And I would like to get on with the question-answer session soon so that I can help you in any specifics that you need. And special thanks to all the people who helped me put together this presentation. There's one special mention for this prince. So now that you know, you don't really need to contribute. You can still come on Friday and contribute. Speak to the documentation people. I mean, they're doing a great job. And they're so... You feel at home when you actually talk to them because they're all so nice people. You just walk up to them and ask them the stupidest question you think you may have, and they're still going to have a perfect response for you. So just come on Fridays and attend the sprints. And I hope you find this session helpful. Come on Fridays and attend the sprints. And do not forget to evaluate the session. That's really important. So please, after the session, do that. Okay, so questions? Okay, I have a question. When are you going to post all of the videos that you got individually? Because I know that they're going to be so awesome. And I think the short little pieces of that format could really go out in a lot of different ways. So the short videos, I'm actually going to tweet them out. And the slides, I'm going to put it right after this session. I'm going to put it on the website itself. So do we get to see everybody's videos? Yes, yes, of course. Yes, that's going to be so great. This is super high quality stuff and you're just going to flood everybody with these short videos and it's just going to be something nobody's ever done before. So it's going to be really, really cool. I hope we actually end up having a lot and a lot of contributors and everybody just starts. What hashtag are you going to use? Get started. Get started? Yeah, that sounds good. We have to check it first. That's a good one. Okay, so the first tweet I'll probably do at the rate with the hashtag, at the rate triple con and with the hashtag. And then you all know the hashtag. Nice. Good job. So do you want to share how much of your time you spend contributing so people know how do they manage their time to contribute? I think that is the most important part. And again, I'll speak specifics to what I do because the work culture in India is very different from the work culture in other places and I would say I enjoy what I do, which takes a lot of time. And I end up working 10 to 12 hours a day, almost every day. I manage your actual work. On my actual work. Yeah. So I find really less time to contribute. And again, like I mentioned, code isn't my choice of contribution. So I try to get involved by organizing meetups and camps. So Drupal Camp Pune happens once every year, which I help in organizing, but that doesn't take a lot of time. It's probably just one month or two months around the Drupal Camp time. Other than that, we have monthly Pune meetups, which was an idea that we discussed and we started on. And the idea was to have it in different companies so that other people who are working on Drupal but not really promoted by the company to contribute get that platform and know that it's important and valued and they start contribution as well. It didn't turn out too well. Not many companies invited us for the meetups. So we ended up having it again and again at QD42. But we did enjoy a lot and learned a lot. There were sessions delivered in the meetups so that boosted the community members' confidence to go and present a session in a camp or a con. Because usually it's only when you speak out and how people react to it, you feel like speaking more. So that helped. And other than that, Drupal Campus Ambassador Program is something that I'm currently actively working on. So we have had Symbiosis College that's in Pune on board. And there are five other colleges which are to be on board by the end of this year. So there's a lot of work going on. We are revamping the website. There are a lot of meetings that happen which we just end up taking midnight or early mornings. But we really want to get this started before people forget it. Because it's important to pick up momentum now and then keep it going on so that others can take it up and we can just let people do the job after that. Everybody can do it. Anybody can contribute. Any other questions? Is anybody having difficulty in finding where to contribute now? Or what can I do? I don't find any of these informative but I want to find some other segment in which I want to contribute based on my interest or skill set. I think all are going to pick from here. Okay, great. Thank you so much for being a wonderful audience.