 Alright, so we're going to get started with D8 Lessons Learned and how I can make Drupal 8 or Drupal 9 better. I don't know why I can't say the title of my own session, it's special. So basically what we want to do today is get to know each other a little bit, talk about Drupal 8, how are things working, what's going on. And I invite you all to disagree with me, to share your comments. This is a real conversation. This is not Shannon presenting how things should go. That's not how this works. This is an exchange. So please, please, please participate because otherwise this is a waste of all of our time. So I'm Shannon, I work for Commerce Guys. I am working on two programs with them right now. The first one is technology partnerships. So we have a ton of really cool modules and a ton of really cool technology, things that we're creating to integrate into Drupal Commerce and I highly recommend you guys check out the marketplace, check out our booths, we've got a couple of our partners with us today, well for the next few days and several of them are kind of interspersed. So go and check out our technology partners. The second program that I'm working on with Commerce Guys is actually delivery partnerships. So anyone who's basically running their own shop or working on Drupal, you can come talk to me. I want to find out what you're doing with Commerce. I want to know how you're working with e-commerce in general, if you're using other systems, if you have ideas, if there are specific things that you need locally, we want to know about that stuff. We also want to partner with you. We want to work with you building better sites. We want to work with you growing business. We're really expanding in Europe. This is the time to come talk to me if you're interested in partnership with Commerce Guys. I will be at the booth almost 24-7. So I highly invite you to come and see me in that second role. So the other things that we are going to talk about. So basically, why do we care about all this crap? What are we talking about? What are we dealing with? How is Drupal 8 working right now? What are the things that we like? What don't we like? And obviously, I'm inviting you to share comments while I'm talking if you want to. What are we supposed to do about it, I think, is the real question that I want to discuss with you guys today. What are our options? How can we make this better? What can we change? And finally, what difference might that make? And then what other ideas do you have? Because I'm going to put some ideas out to you, but I also really, really want your feedback. If you have ideas on core that you think should be implemented, let's talk about them. So what won't we talk about? Your specific technical beef, like, oh, I hate the way Panels does this. I'm sorry. Can you just take that to the sprint on Friday and go fix it? Go do something about it? That's what that's for. I'm putting up a slide at the end that'll give you all that information. Just save that little beef and take it, pack it up, bring it to Friday, and go do something. So why are you here, basically? I have to answer this question right now. No, it is not too soon. I feel sad that people are like, why are we talking about Drupal 9? Drupal 8? It's not even like, wow. Yeah? Like, why are you doing this? Because we live in procrastination land. Everyone's still building Drupal 8. Nobody's thinking about how we're supposed to do the next one, and, well, Larry just raised his hand. He is. So what we need to do is focus on what we can change while we can still change it. This is the time right now when we can make these decisions and actually do something about it. That's why I want to have this conversation. So we started talking about this actually before Munich, but in Munich a bunch of us were sitting in the lobby for like five hours going, oh, it'd be so cool if we could do this. And, you know, Addy was there, and we were talking about ladders, and Gebber was there. And it felt kind of like, this is a little scary. We should be doing this now. We should be making this happen. So it's kind of, for me, like, orange alert. I was like, there's a problem that we're not solving. We're all aware of it, but it's not so on fire that we shouldn't do something about it. And Portland, for me, was more of a red alert. I was kind of like, holy crap, we should be funding, we should be doing this, people should be getting organized, and, you know, I should probably help with that. But then I decided to grow a baby, and that slowed me down a little bit. So now I feel like we're at brown alert. I mean, nobody knows really, so aliens, we really need to sit down and think about this. And I feel like we are definitely at, you know, Mr. O'Shitts has come to visit us. He's knocking on our door. You guys need to really get involved now. And this is the mascot for how I feel about what we're doing in core development process. Like, there's a lot of people doing things, but we can actually have a conversation and do this. So I made a mascot for us. This needs to stay in your mind. This is how I feel. So the current status, I feel like, is, you know, is there a unicorn with James Vanderbeek's face crying on it somewhere? This is how I think we're sitting right now. There's things that we can do because everybody wants to know when the release is coming out. If you don't want to know, you're a weirdo and you need to leave. Basically, because everybody wants to know when is the release coming out. We all want to know what's going on, what's happening. We need a lot more communication. Some of you guys have been awesome about it. Others are just heads down trying to get stuff done and they can't. And I totally know how that feels. People want to know, how do I do this? And I was really psyched to hear that James is going to have a training package when this comes out. I think that is the smartest thing that he's ever done and bravo. That's going to be great. But people still want to know, how do I do this? And then we need help to do that. Behind all of this stuff happening, there are actual human beings who need sleep and food and to grow babies. So they actually need rest. And this is a problem. It's a really huge problem across the board. And it's a huge source of all kinds of other problems, notably stability. I mean, how can we plan anything? How can we work on this stuff? If we don't have the human being support, we're not all robots. Like Larry, AKA The Vest. So we need more people. We need better organization. We need more communication. We need infrastructure. We need funding. We need this stuff to happen. And that's why I'm up here talking about this right now and why I'm trying to get you guys to talk about this right now. This needs to be discussed because otherwise, shark octopus, bear shark octopus is going to come bite us on the ass. We need to avoid burnout. We need to make sure that things get finished when they get started. We need to make sure that things get converted. There's a whole crap ton of work to be done. And without that stuff, it's going to slow things down. We're not going to know what's going on as well. We're going to have a harder time learning this stuff. This is critical that we figure out how we want to lead these initiatives so that we can get stuff done. So let's talk a little bit about how it's organized today. And then let's have a discussion about how it could be tomorrow. So who's involved? Right now, we've got lots of levels of people. I want to start with people not doing anything in Drupal Core. There we go. So those would be the abstainers. For me, these are the people who are using Drupal. And they're like, yay, Drupal. I love it. It's so awesome. Yeah, they're great. We love their enthusiasm. We love what they're doing. We love that they're using Drupal. What we really want them to do is actually start helping and committing to Core. This is how they're going to make a difference. But they're not doing it right now for reasons which are not entirely known to us. They need to do their thing. They need to build their sites. OK, maybe their business is brand new. They have their reasons. But they need training. And they need to get a clue. The next level, as I see it, are novices. These are people who have developed with Drupal, but don't really know what they're doing with Core. They're not totally engaged. And they're like, yeah, Core, I'm going to do it. Because it's a scary thing. So they kind of are sitting there going, oh, I wish I could help. That would be cool. We're going to help you do that. So then you have the beginners. And the beginners are people who are starting out with Core. They're comfortable doing small things, but give them a big task. And they'll be like, whoa, dude, I don't know if I can do this. So they need training. And they need a lot of support to know where to go and what to do. Mostly they just need stuff that they can kind of sharpen their teeth on. Finally, you have the experts. I love these people. They are full of information. They've worked on Core. They just need time and sometimes direction. Sometimes they need to know where to go to, which is why the mentors are my heroes. I'm giving you a love right now. So those people are really involved, but they only have so much time and so much they can do with that time. And that's what's really the challenge at that level, is just finding more people to get at that level so that they can get things done. And finally, you have the initiative owners who are just superheroes, basically. They're working their asses off. They're doing all this stuff. They can't be everywhere, but somehow they are. You guys like spend space and time. I don't know how you do it. So they kind of need help all over the place. They need mentors. They need people doing stuff. They need reviewers. So basically, the two that I feel like will help us the most right now are the experts and the beginners. The people who are just getting started doing stuff and the people who are pretty well set up in core development are comfortable doing it, we're critically missing these two tiers of people because beginners are people who can become experts and experts are people who can train lower levels but beginners can also train lower levels. Beginner people who have done some core development, you can help mentor people who have never done it before, but that's not really known to you in a mass kind of way and that's what we need to change. So that's where I see the danger zone right now. If you could build up those two levels, I think we would have a way to bring more experts into the initiative owner status, which would really help the initiative owners to have a whole group of you instead of just one. And beginners could really become experts and help train lower level people. I actually see beginners as one of the most critical levels where we're missing people right now. So this is how I kind of see the organization that's going on. You have one or maybe a few in some cases like Jess and views. One are a few initiative owners working with a few experts and then there's maybe some people reviewing and helping and doing patches and it's not like you have a team of 20 people per initiative, right? It's a limited group of people that are really sacrificing their lives in order to do this for all of us. So I mean, it's great that they're doing that but we can really use a lot more of them, especially in those middle levels like the beginner and expert levels that I was talking about. Another level of people who are helping are people who are doing commitments, sorry, commits, their commitment is to commits. And project management and UI, front end type of things, they're involved but again, they're limited in their involvement. There's not 20,000 of us, there's maybe five for all of the entire group of initiatives. So seriously, it is a limited group of people doing this stuff regularly. And then the last kind of group of people that I see are other community people. There are people trying to teach, there are people trying to fund, there are people trying to help with design, there are people trying to help in whatever way they can doing a review here, a patch there, and that's great. But they're not as organized and integrated into the process as everyone else is. So it's really hard to put all that manpower together into a machine that just rolls, because we don't know how to coordinate them yet. So there's all these people on the screen doing stuff. And what we talked about is kind of, you know, they're awesome people and they're magical leprechauns doing things and they're building and they're teaching and they're climbing these mountains, but really what we need is some more organization because there's a few things happening that I've seen and my lessons learned or there's a few negative aspects to that, even though I love all of these magical creatures. So I feel like there's a problem with contributors. Basically they're seeing, or being seen sometimes by experts and IOs as what are you talking about? You don't know anything, really. You need to go and read this and learn that. So there's an education problem, I think, going on, which is what I use Serial Man to kind of illustrate. And I feel like that's also a two-way street. I feel like on the initiative owner side, there's a kind of, wait, what are you talking about, Crab Hat? I do not get going on. So I feel like there's some communication issues. There's some training issues. And that really needs to get resolved if we're going to fix the problems that we're having. So that kind of ties into the learning curve consensus issue where everyone's like, dude, this is a little freaky. How do I get started? What do I do? And on the other level, there's people who are just like, what do I have to do with this later? I can't get involved right now. And they're just gonna pick it up when things are more stable. And when it's Thursday, basically. So what should we do about it is really the big question. And when I was in Portland, I was talking about doing a multifaceted team organization where kind of at the top level of people organizing, you have a project manager who's supposed to help coordinate. You have an initiative owner who's going to give a lot of insight into architecture and technical need and really delegate priority in that system of organization because the PM should absolutely not do that. And then finally, front person like lead who would be there to help coordinate all of the visual design UX UI issues around what we're building, which is also a really big reason that Drupal 8 is is because we wanna improve these ability. So under that level, there were lots of experts involved. So people who would teach, commit, fund, communicate, people who would also be experts technically and help lead the force of actually doing things. And finally, people who would theme and design and do UX and all that stuff. And then you have the lower tiers of people who are ramping up to do more of that. So those are the novices and beginners that I was talking about earlier. So this is one way that we could do it. In listening to the session again before I gave this session, I feel like I have another proposal for you that might be a little bit more realistic, which involves more initiative owners at the top level. Because one thing that we've seen is that they get so overwhelmed and so really solicited that there's just not enough of them to go around. So having multiple people, and I really think these are the best example of this, to lead and coordinate is probably the best way to go. Especially because sometimes you get sick, you need to go on vacation, some job thing comes up or whatever. People have lives, they need to be able to delegate and kind of have a team of people to work with. And then I think a second tier of groups of helpers, people like having a PM still coordinate, people who want to teach and communicate and fund, I think is a good thing because then they'll know what's going on in the initiative and they'll be able to say, well, we really need more people learning this because so-and-so is looking for that in the next month or there's a dependency here and we need to ramp up on resources to do this thing. Then they can coordinate that or they can say to someone, I really think that we should focus on funding of this sprint because it's gonna be huge for this initiative. So I think that that kind of coordination is good. Experts I feel like are all kind of on the same level. They need to get their work done but I really see them working closely with initiative owners as they are today. I think that part is still really good. I actually wouldn't change much there except bringing more of you into the fold. And then finally, front end, which I think really needs a coordination effort from a front-end expert but there's multiple layers of that. There's usability, UX, accessibility, design. There's really lots of things involved in front-end and I think it would be great to have someone leading the charge. That's why I have a big PM box and a big front-end box and lots of other people involved because those I see as more coordinators. And then obviously we need fresh meat. We need people in that other tier that are just getting started and this is where I feel like PM front-end experts can serve as mentors, can get involved with the mentorship program, especially since you'll be in a good position to have the information to do that job. So I see them not only leading the people that are involved but also being a driving force to get people going. So basically, what are some of the things that I think we learned? I think in Drupal 8 we learned we're kind of at a meh level. That's how I see it. Compared to the previous releases from what I've heard, the initiatives are helping. They're giving structure. They're giving a purpose to what people are trying to accomplish. And it's making the giant task of building Drupal 8 a little bit more bite-sized, which is awesome. We can sort of plan. I see things coming out. I see sprints happening. People are organizing and that's great. But we still are not a phase where we can say, we think that the release is gonna happen during this month, depending on how fast critical bugs get fixed and whatnot. So we're still not there, but we're getting there sort of. Releases are still long and kind of painful and tiring, but they're getting better. They're definitely not where they were before, where it was really, really, really awful and hard from what people tell me to do a release. And we're getting a lot more in, it seems to me. It feels like Drupal 8 is just breaking every single record of participation and what we're putting into it and what we're getting out of it is gonna be just amazing. And then we also have a kind of training deficit of we wish we could do more of it, but we're not sure really what to do because we need more resources. So I think we're kind of, we're not at awe because we've obviously made a lot of steps to make this better. We're not at yay because there's still things to do. So I'd say we're kind of at meh. And then on D9, I feel like we should be able to plan, train, fund. We should be able to coordinate and organize. And we should be able to do more, better for a lot less stress capital than we've been spending because of those things. So I want Drupal 9 to be sweet in terms of organization and how we're actually going forward with this. And then before I actually go into discussion mode, which is good because I'm at about 20 minutes and I wanted to have a good 40 minute discussion, I really wanna just stress that project management is definitely gonna be a part of that. And I've been leading the charge up until the past few months when I just needed to take a break. But I really strongly am looking for y'all. I want you to come and find me and talk to me about this. I actually am gonna be talking with Jess and several other mentors as soon as I find time about putting together some more core mentoring integration for project management and figuring out how can we structure this because me doing it by myself is not getting the job done. We need to like hook up and do this together. So I wanna put together some sort of mentoring program for project managers. So if you're doing a project management thing and you're interested in working on Drupal 8, if you're working with people who like to coordinate, tell them to come see me, like now-ish. Because I'm gonna be off back to Paris afterwards. So Drew said in the keynote that leaders really make this system work. And especially in the terms of core and what we're doing here, this is completely true. And I feel like everyone in this room is awesome or just for being here and saying, yeah, I'm gonna talk about core. I salute you all. So that said, there's stuff going on Friday. It's gonna be awesome. You should come join us. So Friday there's gonna be a sprint going on. They have tasks for every single skills that I highly, highly, highly recommend you to go down there. Not only are they super nice and super cool, but you'll actually feel really amazing at the end of the day when you know that you made a difference and you did something to help bring core further to its goal. It's an awesome feeling and it's definitely a good way to use your Friday. So come join them and you can go see that online. So let's talk about this a little bit. I've given you a bunch of information about what we're doing, a bunch of information about where I think we should go. We've got a lot of organizational issues that we can discuss. So let's have a chat, basically. Who's got questions? Crickets, crickets. Okay, there's a mic back there. Yeah, thanks. Right, I missed the first five minutes because I got lost in the building, sorry. That was everything important. Well, I was looking at the slides. It looks very, not very, it looks slightly top down and slightly siloed. Am I worried about nothing or? No, I think that that's up to the people who are in those leadership positions to coordinate and they're doing a very, very good job of that right now. Yeah, I mean the second. Which is why I'm not so worried about it because I feel like out of anything that goes on, if there's one thing that's pretty good, these guys all talk to each other and get that job done. So I'm pretty confident that they can keep doing that if the next release is gonna be anything like this one. Yeah, I saw the change between kind of pre-Portland and post-Portland and I was kind of going, yay. Okay, well that's my question really. Well, I mean, what do you think about the silos? Is that, is there another idea brewing? Well, I think, because you said we want to build a machine that grows. Yeah. And like the growth, I fully support. The machine I think is slightly, maybe perhaps older thinking where people are parts of a machine, they're cogs and you organize them like cogs. Whereas they're not, people are people, they have their own motivation, they have their own networking, they have their own, you know, they're more like plants or something. You put them and you shine the light and you step back and you hope that they grow. Well, I think ideally that's what we want to happen. I totally agree with you. At the same time, they still need to know where the light is. That's right, you need to, you know, there's no good, if you're trying to grow potatoes, there's no good in harvesting grass. Okay, all right, it sounds like you've got the, the thing sorted out really. Oh. Let's all go home, let's go. Sweet, more coffee. Thank you. You sit down. Come on. This is my colleague, John. Hi. Hi. This is not a canned question. She didn't ask me to come up here. I asked him to ask this question. No. So you talked a lot about project management. You're a professional project manager. How many other professional project managers are involved in the initiatives to drive them forward? I would categorize every single initiative owner as a project manager, actually. The way that they coordinate people, the way that they do things, I think it takes a lot of project management skills in order to do that kind of work. So I would put that label on all of them, actually. No, but how many of them are actually project managers in there? Oh, and there are actual jobs? Yeah. In title, zero, I think. So. I don't know, Angie, is that a part of your title? I don't know. So. I don't know. Angie is special, unicorn. So you should just make a card with a unicorn on it. Just pass it out. So is that a request? You know, are you gonna, is there a quest out to get more professional project managers involved in this? Definitely. It's a huge request. It's a need. I think if we're going to help coordinate mass groups of people, I think you need, I hate to do this, but I kind of feel as a project manager that you're like a minion. It's a service job. Like, I'm not there to take credit for anything that's going on. I just wanna help make sure that it does happen. I wanna tap people. Are you doing this? Did you get that? How can I help you? I see it as a real kind of public service office, you know? And so I think that we could always use more of those and more people who are willing to go find people or inform people or communicate or coordinate or even, you know, just some sprint happened. I'm gonna write a blog post about it and maybe 200 people will see that and think, oh cool, I should maybe do that too. I mean, there's lots of ways that PMs can get the word out and can help and I think that there's, it's a multi-role type of job so we can always use more of them. Yeah, I guess closing comment. I think a lot of PMs get very hard pushed, as you know, and very busy in their regular job and it's lucky that you're able to do this as well. It would be nice to see more kind of top level management allowing their PMs time to come in and work on initiatives because it's really critical for community and I think actually more professional PMs working within this structure would allow it to work a lot more smoothly. Yeah, I agree with you. I love that comment. More like go ask your bosses to ask your PMs to get involved. That would be amazing. I mean, ask your bosses to get everyone involved but I would love it if there were more PMs involved because then I could help these guys do more. And I can totally understand with the being busy and not having time. I actually had to take a hiatus from doing Drupal 8 stuff and I'd spend the saddest three months of my life. I really am dying to get back into it and I'm determined to absolutely as soon as I possibly can, i.e. next week. I'm doing it because I can't stand not being in there anymore. That's how awesome these people are. Once you get going, you don't wanna leave. Love you too. Are you exposing the unborn child to Drupal in any way? What? Are you exposing the unborn child to Drupal in any way? Are you exposing the unborn child to Drupal? Well, not yet. I think he's probably gonna hear a lot of sessions and a lot of Drupal talk through me. Already, in utero, he's getting some education. Just starting. Okay, so my actual question, can you talk more about the time commitment of a PM in Drupal space and does that change if you've got collaboration between PMs in one vertical? Okay, so I would say that's an excellent question. Time commitment is definitely different depending on the vertical that you're in, on which initiative you're working on. I think that that is partly due to technology. Some of the initiatives are just more technically hard than others and they take more time to learn. And I think some of the initiatives are a little bit, well, maybe they've been around longer, so they've got more organization and more training behind them. So it makes them easier to ramp up on. And having tried to help with blocks and layouts, I can tell you firsthand that it takes someone with an awful lot of technical know-how and more than I have. So there are definitely different levels of PM that we can use if you wanna be really involved. So I would say a time commitment would obviously be helping to coordinate, well, you'd have to do some learning if you wanna take on one of the bigger roles. And I would say a good thing to do is to plan a couple weeks, like half an hour a night, something like that, reading, just trying to find out what's going on or how does this stuff work. If you wanna be really, really involved, that's the maximum level, I would say. And then you probably wanna plan time to offload or get training from your IO, your initiative owner. And you probably wanna plan time to do sprints and organization with them. So that's gonna take time too. So I would say if you really wanna be a maximum level involvement, you should plan at least a few hours a week, minimum. And I think if you want to be less involved and maybe just, I'd say the smallest thing that you could probably do to help an initiative owner would be to go out and get an update. And that, in my experience, can take 15, 20 minutes. So there's all different ranges of what you can do to try and help in the PM role. You can spend hours every single week and really invest and really help coordinate and organize and get things done. And that's an amazing feeling when you can do that. Or you can say, I am just too busy right now. All I can do is give you 15 minutes and I am happy to post an update. Does it play out in the same way that other contributions will where it's obvious where the gaps are and you simply just fill those holes? In terms of planning? In terms of PMing. Or is it much more of a collaborative with the IO? I think it's more collaborative with the IO. I mean, honestly, when you're doing this stuff, I don't think that you, as the PM, are gonna know what's needed next. It's not your role. The initiative owner is the one leading that charge. They're the one making things happen and they need to tell you how to help coordinate. You can't say, well, you should really change this code instead of that code. You're not gonna know that, so unless you're super smart. In which case you're way cooler than I am. Thank you. First of all, I really like your diagrams. I think that was a very helpful and very precise way of analyzing our current situation, so thanks for that. Sure. Yeah, and so I have one, maybe one suggestion in terms of the organization, so I'd like to hear what you think about it. The suggestion would be to make the initiatives smaller in scope in general, because for Drupal 7, just as an example, the whiskey initiative was like huge and then it started and then we figured out, oh, we have to basically rewrite all of core to use a dependency injection before we can even start on the real whiskey stuff. And so that was this whole big thing. And for translation, because we wanna translate configuration, so we have to wait until configuration is done, until we can even know how to translate and what to translate, so it was this huge undertaking and the actual things to do changed so much over the course of the time, because the initiatives were started very early in D8 development and then one and a half years later, so much has changed, but it's still the same initiatives and things like Twig or NADNG and everything, they weren't official initiatives, so they didn't have all the infrastructure quote unquote that the others had, so yeah, that would be like... That sounds like multiple questions to me. So how do we manage scope? How do we keep things contained and can we make them smaller so that we can have more focus? Sounds like your first question. Right, so well, the proposal would be to not have an initiative like turn Drupal into proper web services thing, but try to inject some stuff first so that have that the initiative and then that only takes like three months maybe and then we're sort of done and then we can plan, okay, so we're here now, now the next bigger step would be to actually do the whiskey routing or whatever, just as an example, but not have one initiative over one and a half years and that constantly changing and interacts with like a bunch of different initiatives. Oh, I like that idea. I think what could be really good about that is that your phasing initiatives, which is one thing that I think would have really helped us a lot in a lot of ways. For one of those reasons as we needed to know what the dependencies are and that's also why I think that that might be really hard to do because one of the big challenges that we faced is as a group, I think this applies to everybody, is finding the dependencies between each other's initiatives and finding the dependencies in our own initiative. So I feel like that was a challenge that maybe we didn't know enough about what we were trying to do in order to do that organization. But there's some guys here who are doing it so maybe they should talk too. So I think it's very hard to phase because you do something and then you start using that API and implement that and then you figure out that that was not good and then you rewrite it anyway. So if you try to phase it and then you would need to rewrite them either way. So we need to do it and use it. It's painful, yes. But otherwise we don't find out whether it was actually right or not. Right, so it's like you can inflate the basketball but you won't know if it bounced until you throw it on the ground. Yeah, so yeah. And the other thing is I think the big initiatives, what's good about them is you can have different areas where you can still make progress while you can stop some others. So in multilingual, for example, we didn't work on some things that were so much influx but we could still be active in other areas. So you don't lose the momentum of the initiative because you don't stop, you do something. You just work in another area and then you come back to this area when it becomes available for work. Like you had a lot of low hanging fruit that you were kind of putting people on in the meantime so they're not just sitting around waiting for something and that's another really good idea is to always have someone managing the low hanging fruits that the momentum never dies. Love. Sorry, could I just tip in on the same subject? Well, it's quite normal not to know what you're doing at the beginning of a project, that's exactly right. But why, who decides on what the initiatives are? Can't the initiative itself decide actually, our overall goal is internationalization but now actually we need to rewrite core to make backwards or forwards compatible with this new thing. And then we also need to do this and they fragment, they self-organize. Well, that's kind of how it happens. Like there's some discovery that happens at the beginning of the initiatives. The problem that we're having, I think is that it's not official enough. The first goal of the initiative should be to define the initiative. You know, we set a goal, we wanna do multi-lingual. Then we should spend three months determining what that means and deciding this means we're doing this and not that. And I think some of that happened and I don't wanna discredit anyone in here for not doing that because I think that that did go on just maybe for a really long time. And I would like to see it more time boxed for the next release so that we can try and, once we know that, we can start digging into those dependencies and then trying to phase. And I really feel one of the slides that I actually deleted because I thought I was gonna be too long was I had a whole phases within phases slide that was supposed to like, you know, show how you can have a big project and then it's got three parts and then those three parts have six parts. Right, right. And that is so much easier for people to wrap their heads around but the hard thing is getting there to that level of information where you can do that kind of planning which is why I feel like PMs could really help because that's what we do. We try and look at the shit and go, let's cut that up. And that makes it so much easier to get it done. So I mean, I keep on talking about project management but I feel like it's a missing piece. You know, I haven't done enough of it and I can't do enough of it by myself. So instead of what sort of slide with three verticals what you're actually gonna see is three verticals and then they split and then they split and then they split and you just have this radiating pattern now. That's what we should be aiming for. Okay, okay. Sure, sure. You're still saying something or my turn? No, go ahead, ask your question while I make the splitting graphic that he's talking about. So what I'm saying now, maybe it might not be totally helpful for now of even for 2.9. So I had the idea, maybe wrong that for open source projects that might be like an ideal size both in the amount of code and in the size of the team. And maybe for, if you throw money at it then you can have the team bigger or something, maybe. I don't know. Like in Composer and a lot of Trooper models when I have an idea, I can find an issue and then I immediately get to talk with the boss and this guy can decide if he wants to have that or not. And if I don't like that and then I say, okay, I do it myself. I fork it and it's small enough to do that. And then someone can go and make a distribution and puzzle different pieces together and then it becomes bigger but still the pieces are small and there's teams that are dedicated to one thing and they know about their thing. That's kind of what we want to do. Yeah, you know. Have the small pieces, have little teams distributing it. That Trooper is a bit bigger than this average ideal size core at least. That's just another question, which you're allowed to ask. You're allowed to say, is core not too big or too small? I put the fork up there for a reason that that question could be discussed. And if I fork a small project like a module in Trooper then it doesn't split any community. It just puts an alternative out there. Maybe sometimes it will, maybe. But so where do they want to go with this? Yes, what is the question? Yeah. So, maybe I just wanted to throw out some ideas. So like, I didn't sleep last night, so. Ooh. Microphone. I guess I'm just a small core person, so that's it. I'm going to be the Don Keody Rosetta Stone. I think what he's saying is that right now we have this large project with very few points of contact in order to figure out if something's a good idea or not. I think what you're advocating is a bunch of smaller projects or at least well-defined leaders in all the different areas so that when you want to make improvement to place X, you know how I can ask Bob or Jane and she can tell me yes or no. And then if I don't like the answer then I have the freedom to go do other things or I have the freedom to experiment and see how far I get with it. Is that correct? Yeah, and then the other thing is like, for instance, at one time I thought that endeavor this Cromo thing, it sucks, and I said I do my own and then I made a module which just does that and I could just go ahead and do that and now I'm kind of the boss of this module which no one uses, but anyway. And in Drupal if I want to, I think I have a cool idea, I want to do this and I can write a patch and then maybe no one will notice and it will just, that's kind of discouraging sometimes. What's discouraging about it? No, I mean sometimes it's just more fun to just do something and then it's finished product and has my name on it and it works and instead of having to convince a lot of people. Right, well I think. It's just an observation, I don't know if it really has. I can tell you from observation if you're working in core you're gonna have to be a rallier. You have to be someone who's willing to get people to work on your cause and it's a big part of the job. So if you're not interested in trying to say, hey I need reviewers or hey I need to do this, then you either need to get interested or you should find some other way to contribute, like being one of those occasional reviewers or contributors in that way because people who are taking on leadership roles are gonna need to do a lot of that and it's a lot of their time. Yeah, okay, so that was my idea. Thank you. Hi, I'm Doug Green. This is a conversation, I don't really have a question. I kind of disagree with what you just said there that if you're not gonna be a rallier that you shouldn't be involved in core. Well you shouldn't be a leader in core. Like you should be involved in a different way. But if you're not ready to try and get people involved and to stay involved then I think core leadership is not a role that you're gonna thrive and enjoy like you would maybe just contributing in some other way. So really the conversation I wanted to bring up and I don't have, I feel bad about my commitment to D8 so far. Aw, don't feel bad. I've done very little because I don't have the time and I think dreams. Uh-oh, hugs from Larry make everything better. Now I feel better with Larry. Larry should hug everyone. You get a hug and you get a hug and you get a hug. I think that Drees has brought this up before about the professional development, you know, the funding for Drupal core. You know, and the model that you were bringing out was trying to get as many people involved as possible and how do we coordinate that? Which, you know, is getting away from our roots a little bit. Our roots was open source, scratch your own itch. I write something because it satisfies something I wanna do and as soon as we start organizing the way we're trying to do, I'm just musing out loud that our project has grown so much. I think the Linux model was something Drees has mentioned before, you know, and Acquia by itself is following that model of something. What do you mean by the Linux model? Tell us what your vision of that looks like. My understanding, Red Hat, where you've got a company where people are paid full time to actually improve the core product and funding of it. So I just wanted to throw out as part of this conversation that it's not just organizing people, you know, in project management and getting more workers. And I know we're trying to solve this, but I think we've reached a precipice that you're pointing out that we need to fund more people and I don't know how we do that. You know, Drees specifically mentioned, you know, I wrote Coder module eight years ago or something when I didn't have work for two weeks. You know, well now I've got work every single week and I can't write the D8 upgrade module because I've got too much client work and it's a problem that we're a victim of our own success and I don't know what our solution is right now to get more people involved like Larry does. I don't have the time to commit that Larry does. Well, so I think there's a really good question in there which is we need more people involved, but how do we do that? And I would point to Jess who's at the mic and say core mentors are there to help you. Point at Kathy because I'm kind of like... Well, yeah, both of you. Except I started it. So I'm actually doing something I learned from Kathy which is I was taking notes on my phone this whole time because there was, I would be like interrupting everyone. So I wanted to respond to a couple of things and now there's four because of what Doug said. So the first thing is I want to say that I don't think that we should call AQUIA the red hat of Drupal. Despite internet memes and very awkward emails sent to other project leads, I think that I'm very proud that I have a job where I can work on Drupal full-time. I'm very proud of what AQUIA contributes, but at the same time it's stupid that there aren't more companies supporting. And there are. I think we need to talk more about commerce guys, about the time that Chris Van der Water has had to work on. We need to talk more about, and different ways of doing that, like the way that Pellentier does things. They don't have contribution time during their, as part of their paid time, but at the same time, they're very protective of their employees' schedules so that people like Larry have the energy to give back after the end of the work that they do for their clients. So I think that that's just something I wanted to point out. And there's other models too, like I don't know if I've ever even saw Alex Potts in the keynote this morning. He's not working right now. He's getting some funding weekly from just like random small donors in the community. So that's another model that we can look at. Can we fund people just like $10 at a time if we have enough people that are willing to like, hey, you make my life easier. Have a book, have a coffee, or you know, let me help pay part of your mortgage. It makes sense. Okay, so that's all of that. It's not just on AQUIA people. So then, yeah. Yeah, that's a really, really good point. AQUIA is an amazing contributor to what is going on. I think, in my opinion, the biggest. But you know, there's a lot of stigma around that and how people perceive it. And I think that if it were, if it weren't one big company doing that, if it were like 40 small shops doing that, nobody would be blinking an eye. But I think that the fact that it's one, people do blink and they ask questions about it. And my personal vision of that is thank God that there is one big company willing to do that because we wouldn't have AAA without it. We just wouldn't. So I'm kind of a big thank you AQUIA type of person and not everyone will agree with me on that but I'm really grateful. But there are others doing it and if everybody did it, it would make the hugest difference in the world. But then there's also the big question of how do we handle that? And that raises a thousand other questions which maybe we should talk about it. We have time in the next 10 minutes. So I'm gonna go through my two other things that were responses to other people and then I have a plea. So the two other things was in response to the question about whether the initiative structure was too top-down and whether the siloing was a problem. First of all, with regard to the siloing, I think that Shannon helped us fix that a lot. We have these calls every two weeks with the initiative leads where we talk to each other. I mean, we talk to each other all the time on IRC and the issue queue but this is like a block of time specifically set up for initiative owners who say to each other, hey, I'm blocked on this. Hey, I need help with this. Hey, I've got this thing and Gabor, do I need to worry about the multilingual part of this because I have no idea what to do here. So I think that we've already made a start at addressing that, like nipping that problem in the bud. It's always gonna be a challenge but with regard to the top-down part of it, I actually think the opposite is true. I think that having good leaders who will like say, hey, you're awesome, you can help me. You're doing a really great job with this. Please take this off my plate. Like that gets people more involved and more excited. I think being a leader, like in the squares at the top, it's not about saying, do this. It's about saying, you're great. You could be even greater, come help me and it's about empowering people and encouraging them to get more involved and do what they care about and are passionate about. So that, I think they were. Woo! You guys all need to be cheerleaders. I wanna make you skirts. I wouldn't know. That doesn't work. And then about the scoping of initiatives. I think that we learned from whiskey which became two initiatives which could have become 10 initiatives. But on the other hand, I also think that having big inspiring ideas is important because it's like one thing to say like, hey, we wanna make core more unit testable and that's awesome and that's cool but that doesn't really like bring in the passion, that doesn't bring in the money because funding is always a problem. That doesn't bring in the sort of like inspiration. So I think that we definitely need to have, I think a better way of organizing those sort of like small projects. Maybe we can call them just individual projects would be great but I think that the big initiatives are still a good idea. Though maybe not quite rewrite all of Drupalinscope. Larry, love you. And then the third thing I wanted to say. I'm gonna be whiskey. That's true, that's true. It's, well. Anyway, Larry. Then, so then just my plea. I wanted to like underscore everything Shannon's saying about people who are going to organize other people, people who have some sort of project management or communication skill. It is, I've been kind of in this situation where it's like, because I'm like the most verbal of the technical people in my initiative, I kind of ended up shoehorned into this role and I'm bad at it. I'm an introvert. It exhausts me. Oh, you're not. Oh, I so am, honey. Like after this, after talking like this, I'll go and like hide under my covers for hours. So if it is so, so, so helpful to just be able to say, there are these like things that I need to do and I don't know, just like being available for an initiative owner to just brain dump at you and like take those pieces of information and you're like, oh, here's a task. I'll take that off your plate is huge. So if you have any of that kind of skill, please talk to Shannon, talk to me, like think about the triple nine cycle and say, could I spare two hours a week to do this for someone? And just like say, hmm, I'll help you find people to do the tasks you need that would be amazing. I really think that every initiative team should have the project manager and someone who's in charge of finding people to mentor other people and take the care of that part. And experts can really help with that too, not just PMs. If you're working in the core queues, chances are that you've seen someone do something or say something that you're like, whoa, that dude's smart. And that is nice for you to be able to escalate that up to the next group of people, whether it's that block of four or five or however many initiative owners and say, hey, I saw so and so do this, I see potential there. And then maybe you just put them next to a core mentor or a PM for a little while and get them working on stuff and then they become an expert and then they tell two friends and they tell two friends. That's what I think ultimately would be really amazing if that happened. And what would be even better is if those experts are not just learning the stuff but then writing down and helping create training material for people that come after them, hence Ladder's initiative, would be so, so, so, so my dream come true. Because then not only are people within the system helping to bring other people up, but we're also helping to make sure that there's an infrastructure and a way for people to keep learning and going on and doing this stuff instead of, wow, I just spent, you know, the last month working on core, I feel like I've learned so much, I feel so good about myself, but I can't help anybody else without being like, where do I start? When you're learning this stuff is a great way for you to kind of journal your experience. This is what I'm learning. This is where I'm going with this. And then people after you will all benefit from that because everybody starts at some point and, you know, you have to be able to pick up somewhere and the mentors are trying to do this and there are a small group of amazing people doing it, but, I mean, if we all pitched in, they could get a lot more done. Hi. I think there's been a lot of great discussion about communication and momentum and empowering people and having this structure that allows people to become empowered. One thing I wanted to ask is, this is a bit of a different subject, but I think also related to project management in general, and someone mentioned scope earlier, is what can project management teach us about setting goals? And I know we don't want to say no to anyone, we want to encourage a lot of things, but, you know, there have been situations that I've been involved in where maybe there wasn't a set of clear goals and we're kind of focusing on the nuts and bolts and whether those nuts and bolts correspond to certain criteria that we've set out for ourselves, whether those are part of the scope, I'm wondering what can project management teach us about that and how does that fit into some of these ideas for the future so that we can maybe, I guess, focus effort a bit better and not prevent people from doing things but make sure that they're doing things in the right way and how do we teach, you know, experts and developers and initiative owners and kind of everyone in the site cycle to focus on goals and what does the project managers help us with that? I think this is where the PMs can help everyone shine. One thing that tends to happen in these big, tough projects is you get fixated on an issue and sometimes you just need someone to, you know, knock down all the bowling pins and say, look, you're fixating but here's what you're trying to accomplish. Let's all come back to the light, please. I feel like that's what PMs try to do and sometimes we're successful and sometimes we're not. Sometimes really the nuts and bolts need to be talked about but that also reminds me of the crab and the cereal guy picture that I had up on. I feel like that's, this is where PMs can help where the initiative expert is saying, no, you have to do this, otherwise it doesn't make sense and the other person trying to contribute, trying to help is saying they're great but of course it does, we can do it this way but maybe they're missing some critical piece of knowledge and that's when I think PMs step in a lot and say, look, you're both accomplishing the same goal, you're just not agreeing on this one issue and if you can just find a way to explain or document your approaches then not only will you be informed but everyone else looking at this issue after and everyone who's commenting or whatever will know what you're talking about and instead of having a debate between two people, the PM will change that environment to go right down what you're thinking and put it out there and then everyone knows so that comes back to communication and pretty soon consensus forms just organically through the information, the sharing of what's happening so that's what I would love to see happen a lot more. Does that answer your question? I hope it did. Hi, watch head field API maintainer. Speaking here as one of the guys being like with her crab hat and pouring lots and lots and lots and lots of hours throughout the core D7 and D8 cycle and finding out that, yeah, it's like I'm at a point where it's hardly sustainable and one thing I'd like to point out is the fact that so we are reasoning on initiatives which is a new D8 concept. Right, it's new to D8. And it's a good thing. And then again, I've been like for the past year as spending something like half time job on something that is not an initiative. It doesn't exist at the beginning of the, well, it would have been an initiative in D7 because it was an identified, let's do this. This should happen, let's make it happen but we didn't formalize things at initiatives back then. And then at the beginning of the D8 cycle, okay, field API, what do you have? Like, what's the backlog? Nah, you know, no, we'll stay quiet during this cycle and that's very, very, very much not what happened because there were other initiatives like identified new major changes and any critical core component needs to adapt. And so CMI, services, multilingual, entity, API which by the way was not an initiative either. Until recently. And the reasons for why it wasn't an initiative might be interesting. I mean, I'm not aware, I'm not certain of those but it might be interesting. And I might take on this, I suspect it might be because when we identified initiatives it was about, okay, who has something he wants to promote and it was packed as and wants to PM it as well to act as a project manager. And well, if you, if I had been asked like, well, no, I have no backlog and no, I don't intend on project managing it. And I guess, well, there was a backlog for on the entity API site. I'm not sure that the technical guys in charge of that had the will to act as, well to do the job that Larry did, to do the job that Gabor did and which from the outside looked like it took an insane amount of time. It did. Yes. And so there was not this will to commit to that and I'll make that happen and deal with it and manage that throughout the whole cycle. So yeah, the notion of initiative is a good tool to have. Then again, it doesn't cover everything because by the mere fact that you're maintaining an existing system, we have to acknowledge the fact that it's at least a part time job. Yeah, I mean, you're making the point of the multifaceted team because right now they're doing that because they don't have any other choice. Like this is, they were asked, do you want to lead this initiative? And they said yes, and they're all brave soldiers and it's amazing. But if they didn't have to have a part time job doing that, they probably wouldn't. Like if we could have four or five people leading the charge like views did and a couple of others did, then the burden of having to be the sole person with all the knowledge and insight would just sort of fade a little and it would become a team working together. That's what we want to do. This is, you're making my point. Thank you. Do I need to take a picture? I feel like this is, just for me, just for me. No tweeting. Okay, and my second point, well this brings me to, yeah, funding, funding is like, we need to acknowledge that it's a real job and like I really don't understand that it's not a much more frequent thing that, yeah, businesses need to fund Google. And the thing is that also we don't have a clear channel for that now. No we do not. I'll do another session in Austin on just that I think because I feel like that's a whole can of worms that I really want to open. Yeah. I never understood the argument about the DA not being able to collect funds for that. Like the DA is not allowed to buy the development of Drupal. This is not what it would do. It was just channel fundings and but the DA would not be in charge of directing the funds. Well, he who talks money opens up all kinds of questions. Who? I'm not, I'm less familiar with how Linux does it, but I think we needed a single point of entry like very much identified organization fund that organization and will make things happen with communication and transparency about which projects are supposed to happen, but we need something like that and I don't see who else than the DA or we create something else. I don't know. The other thing is that, so you mentioned Alex. Someone mentioned that in Portland just before you move on to the next thing. When we had this talk in Portland, someone said, well, you know, it's not that hard to create an entity that can accept money, someone should just do it and back my mind I'm going that would be cool but then there's all the other questions that I just asked that need kind of management. So I mean, it's a prickly issue that I don't think is gonna get solved overnight or we would have solved it already, but I agree with you that funding groups is gonna create a lot of goodness and a lot of stability and I think that it's definitely what we should strive to for the next cycle. Now if we're gonna do it, I think in a very short term we're gonna have to have ideas of how that can happen and I think that that deserves a lot of conversation and a lot of thought because when you're dealing with those financial issues you can really fall into a lot of traps and I think I don't wanna put, I don't want people turning away from initiatives and I don't want people turning away from Drupal because of money issues, but it's such a good question. Last thing because I've been speaking too much, so get hip, get hip and Alexport has an important and not sufficient funding amount which he did, he collected all by himself and by virtue of other people in the community, he said, yeah, please help Alex and that was important and it's significant and it's not enough and for the rest of the community it might be a good model for country module authors like, hey, I made views, please help me. If Merlin of Cairo, if Earl Miles had GitTip back then I think views and panels development might have been more sustainable. It's different for Core, well, you don't have a project page on Drupal.org, I'm the provider of this module so Core needs to be seen more as a team. It should be because it's never just one person doing it, yeah. And if we wanna go with GitTip I would tend to think we should really go for it and make it much more prominent that for now it's the official way of funding Drupal development, promote it on the front page of D.o, promote it on user profiles, maybe I don't know, signatures in comments, something. So I like that idea, using infrastructure that exists and then using D.o to promote it instead of trying to change the way that the DA is built in order to serve a purpose. That's a great idea, but is it okay if I cut you off so that I can get to other people because we're running out of time? Thank you so much. Two bite-sized things, one, GitTip.org, I think slash four slash Drupal, go there. If there's someone who makes your life easier, give them a quarter every week. It's not gonna cost you anything. Sacrifice your Friday cookie and pay someone who's made your life easier by spending a huge amount of time, like half of his life to give you free software. And then that leads up to, yeah, I just wanted to underscore, Eve and Sasha over here, the amount of work that they had to do with the entity and field API in Drupal is freaking ridiculous. And they didn't have this figurehead initiative promoted thing to do it. They just freaking did it. And so we do need a way to support that sort of like low level, please don't take a picture of me. Yeah, GitTip, yeah, GitTip slash four slash Drupal. No, four, F-O-R, for you. No, F-O-R, slash Drupal, yeah, okay. And make sure that link actually works. So yeah, I think that I look forward to finding ways that we can, and I think this is where like the core developer on staff model comes in, is like finding people who can contribute to those APIs and finding ways that we can fund, Alex Potts, another example, like he's working on CMI, but he is now, but the work that he's done as a core maintainer is completely above and beyond that. So that's what I wanna say, they're not an initiative. And they, you know, initiatives are about like new features, new, right? But there's also a lot of work that needs to be done that doesn't really fit neatly in that box. And we should applaud that and you should give them a cup of coffee at least. And tell your company to give them more than a cup of coffee, because every single person in this room, in some way has some investment in Drupal. So buy him a, you know, a weekly beer. All right, last question, then I have to probably give someone else the podium. Oh dear. All right, speaking as an initiative lead. Close her to the mic. I can say the biggest things that I've been missing for the entirety of Drupal 8 are predictable timeline, predictable resources. It is impossible to plan if you don't know how long you have and you don't know what resources you have. I don't know one week to the next what my time's gonna be to work on something or anyone else. Which means, you know, anytime I have a block of time to work on core, do I review patches? Do I write a patch? Do I try and document something? Is someone else gonna write a patch? Which everyone of it is, I'm wasting time on the other three because I don't know if I'm going to have anyone else working on them. There have been a lot of other people working on Whiskey, the dozens of people working on it, some of them doing amazing things, writing 10 times as much code as I have. But I have no idea one day to the next if they're gonna be there or not. And that is a huge source of stress and inability to plan for, I think, every initiative. Views did it the least bad of any of us because they actually had, you know, a team that had resourcing plan from the get-go. I don't know how you pulled it off, but the rest of us need to have done so. So that's point number one, predictability of what we can actually do is a prerequisite for any worthwhile planning. And it has to be consistent resources too. I mean, I know Jess gets upset every time I say this, but I'm gonna keep saying it. What I said when Whiskey started, give me five people, 10 hours a week, we can do whatever you want in a year. Give me 50 people a half hour a week, I can't do Jack. You need dedicated resources, drive buys once in an hour here and there, does not accomplish core work. It can do a lot of the crowdsource stuff, but the core work requires dedicated resources. Actually, I have a question for you then. In that same vein, what if it's 50-50? What if in the beginning, you have five people for 10 hours a week and you can focus on defining the initiative? What's in it? How does it work? What are the dependencies? Where could things go awry? Risk management is also a part of that, that I think we didn't get to do nearly enough of. And it's actually pretty fun, right? And that's one way to go, and then the other half, once you have a foundation, that makes it really easy to make nice funding pitches. And that's how you can get businesses and people to rally to your cause by saying, this is what we're doing, and by the way, this is how we're doing it, then it's easy to get teams and hordes to join forces that are actually funded, and in that way, you can take your phases and fund your phases. Different phases can sometimes use that. The, you know, this is an argument I had, I know, with Angie all the time. It wasn't until February of this year, maybe March that we really got to the point on Whiskey where just architecturally, we could crowdsource it to 50 people to work on stuff. Once we got there, great. We tried to open it up to as many people as possible, but the types of problems we were working on until then, we're just not crowdsourceable problems. Once we got to that point, great, let's do that. But yeah, certain problems require five people 10 hours a week, not 50 people an hour a week. And we have to understand which is which. So basically, it's possible, but it depends on the initiative and the complexity of what you're trying to do. Not just the initiative, it depends on, Whiskey is a little of each, it depends on the problem space at hand. 50 people crowdsourcing on rewriting the core router is a terrible idea. Five people trying to do all of the page callback conversions is a terrible idea. So you need to match the process up to the task. Hey guys, I think we ran over, but this was really cool. Thank you so much. Can I give just one of the plugs? Come see me at the Commerce Guys booth if you want to continue conversation now and again. I'm going to be in meetings, but I'm very interested in talking with you and getting to know you. My core conversation on Thursday, last session is on the release cycle. Oh, wait, wait, say that again, Larry. My core conversation Thursday, last session is on core release cycle, which tub tails with an awful lot of this stuff. That's a really good one to not miss. Thursday, last session, go see Larry's.