 All right, well, let's um, this is extremely informal, so I will put slides up and then we can discuss them And you know the other thing Climbing the Drupal Ladder it sounds like somebody's gonna help me learn how to use Drupal, but it's really not It's Climbing the Drupal Ladder it is about that But it's about teaching people how to contribute and in the process actually learning Drupal. Howdy Jess That's all right. We're informal. We're all friends. We're just chilling. We should have beer Although I guess it's technically before noon, so isn't it normal in most places? I Watched the Super Bowl the other day and it started at 10 30 in the morning. I do not watch the Super Bowl without beer And the people at the bar did not seem at all distressed by that I'm just saying But yeah, so the the concept behind the Drupal Ladder is actually Contribution not net not just Personally learning Drupal and figuring things out but actually learning through contributing and learning how to contribute Which is its own separate world of confusion for people, right? I'm just gonna run through like what does that mean? Like what is the ladder specifically in terms of a project? What has happened up to the point? goals both Real and fictitious and then some concept of perhaps how we're trying to get there We'll see how it goes But so this was the main problem that was identified Right, there just aren't enough people who are contributing There are a lot of people contributing and a lot more than there used to be but at the end of the day It's a huge amount of work And you have millions of people around the world relying on code that very very very few people Actually do anything to help make happen. So this problem was identified Well, it's been identified by many people over time but specifically for this project Brian Hirsch sort of tried to put a name on it and then actually come up with a solution Which was revolutionary To try and break it down that way These are Jess's slides. We still use them. I know Whether the specifics of it don't matter right the pattern matters and So so this is the number number of core contributors over time per release of Drupal So you can see it's gone up goes up pretty steadily It's pretty that looks awesome and you know for eight we're over a thousand So it's it continues to go up with every release But if you flip it around and you look at it as a percentage of people It's gone down extremely dramatically, right? So numbers raw numbers are a little bit deceptive when you're looking at that Yeah And Pulls it all out. Yeah So, you know, obviously people contribute to core in a lot of ways that aren't in a commit message But still as your general trend This is still reflective of like the general idea what we're talking about here Which is numbers going up but percentage going way down because the number of people who are actually using Drupal has Lotified and And so our percentage of people who are contributing out of that number has it just keeps decreasing dramatically and so you think of it, you know, like You have basically this like mountain that's being carried by, you know a couple of ants who are trying to like, you know You know ants are strong and they carry a long way and it's been doing You know, they're doing an amazing job of doing that But how sustainable is that if we continue to have this number go down and down and down and down? It's not like a very bright future for having core continue to be what we all rely on every day So Not good and you'll notice that these percentages over here are not full percentages. There's a point So this is this is like point one It's not one percent It's a tenth of a percent Right, okay, so it's really Now this this these numbers are a bit old but again the general thing I think I did these numbers last fall when I did this at bad camp, but There were over 7,000 core issues that were that at the time that were open in various states of open broken down into those percentages and so one percent of them were RTBC, which is ready to be committed or Reviewed and tested by the community. You can always tell like an old schooler. I think sorry Everything else is then some state of needing work and over half of them were active just nothing just silence That is what we're asking That point one percent of the Drupal community to do for us That's not cool I'm sure some of you have seen this before You know things are getting things are getting more complex It's getting harder and harder to actually From I can speak to this from personal experience So I started using Drupal right around the 4.7 to 5 transition I Had first looked it at 4.6 and kind of Headed on out and then came back around again later And and I am not I don't have a programming background. I'm an anthropologist And so everything that I've learned about tech like the big button on the front makes it go Like things like that right so I and I so I taught myself everything And so what I know about like say PHP and all of that stuff I learned because of learning Drupal and how to get stuff done with Drupal and So like I jumped in and and started learning and figuring things out and and having some grasp of The beast that I had to work with And Even now I've been using Drupal and I've been working with it for seven years and every time a new Version of Drupal comes along. I'm a little bit like Okay I'm gonna need to go into a hole for a month and figure out what is going on right it feels like there's just more More complex pieces. There's there's I mean there is there's more code a lot of it is tests Which is awesome, but still there's more stuff that's going on and honestly From my perspective again sort of coming forward is that there are new practices new best practices in development and coding that are going on that I Not familiar with because I've just been doing this the same old thing in the in the Drupal way And so I have it's good But it doesn't lessen the pain that I can't now just jump in and start building sites the way I did in the last version Where I understood what was going on? So and this Makes it a lot harder for people to actually get involved with core because you end up being overwhelmed by this cliff of I Don't even understand how to build with this How would I possibly help you make it into something you could build with like how do you break that into little pieces? I can't I don't even get the big piece So that makes it quite scary And so that all of this is just sort of like that problem that we're looking at to try and solve So that problem is we don't have enough people are contributing to core and there are reasons for that the solution was this Drupal ladder that ended up getting created and The idea behind the Drupal ladder is to literally create a ladder That has rungs on it and people move up through the rungs And it has to start at a very like the bottom level. There's like this basic entry point of All right, let's get Drupal installed That's your first step Once you do that you then have the record prerequisite skills to move to the next level and do the next step and work your way up So instead of trying to jump in at the beast, you know at the top and try and take on everything Break it into little teeny bite-sized chunks and let people walk their way through in bite-sized chunks so that you basically don't freak out That's the idea the the first several steps of the ladder Are just getting started sort of getting set up getting oriented making sure that you have the tools that you're going to need and understanding how they work Then Once that's that sort of phase of the ladder is completed Then you move into actually contributing so you've gotten things set up You understand the tools now actually take a bite-sized chunk of something and do something with it and understand How the process really works and then of course the ultimate goal is to actually get people Not just to sort of contribute on the edges But actually moving into the the ranks of people who are helping to maintain and sustain over a longer period Obviously we want contributions period and if you do a contribution you spend half an hour and you Contribute to an issue on core and then you we never see you again. That is still awesome And we'll you know we'll take that as a community of course, but ultimately of course the idea is To get more people who are actually helping us sustain you're going to burn people out like you have So yeah, we have over a thousand people who've contributed to Drupal 8 so far a lot of those people have done You know a patch here patch there one or two things a Very very very small number of those people are the people who month after month after month are Sustaining the work and carrying big ideas forward because chipping away at a little teeny bit is awesome But you can't make the system that we are all using by just little teeny little chippy bits There's at some level. There's got to be a plan There's got to be large architectural decisions and the amount of work to get from idea to implementation on those is massive so We need to not just Contribute here and there, but we need to also build a wider structure of Maintenance and sustainability because you end up with having like a handful of people who have dedicated two years of their life To making this happen, and they just get tired They're gonna be done. They want to go play with their kids right It's true. It's true Now I just build Drupal Yeah, so it's and and the thing is it's like I'm not I Don't think the goal is to say okay now you should be the new maintainer for this thing so that Larry can go have a life. It's creating a much broader Base so that things can be handed off and so people can be like tag out Let me take a break, you know, and there's somebody else there so that everything doesn't just stop dead in the water You know, it's it's more about having a system of being a hand things out and support each other And it does require like a longer term understanding of the the project the problems that are involved and things like that so Ultimately, that's why that goes there like people come and they look at the ladder on the on the Drupal ladder site And they're like, okay cool. I can install Drupal. I got it. We're rocking it, you know Oh, I'm doing an issue look at me go and then they get they look at the top of the ladder And they're like whatever with this like maintaining core component thing. I'm out But but like Again, it's not like we're trying to like make like we're not trying to like replace like that one failure point with just another one Failure point. We're trying to broaden the base so that we don't have those failure points like that So maintaining things does not mean you are the only person on the planet It's like can you help support longer-term maintenance of these things in lots of different ways? Doesn't mean you have to be the you know the crazy person running around drawing stuff up on the board and saying this is what we're gonna Do how we're gonna do it, you know So that's the the basic idea with the ladder is break stuff down Make things accomplishable step by step and make sure that each step prepares you for the next step I mean having random unrelated steps would be kind of stupid in a ladder because you'd start going up This side of the house and then all of a sudden you mean the other side of the house and you would fall into the pond And then it would be ugly and it just doesn't make sense so that's the concept with the ladder and So this was the ladder was sort of originally the concept of it and the creation of a ladder starter started in Boston Two years ago now. Yes, 2011 Yeah, yeah, I guess well, yeah, it was like the fall. Yeah, so yeah, you're now I don't know. We're in the future. Everything's messed up days years. I don't know But so the idea like Brian Hirschke like came up with this idea of like, okay Here's a way we can do it Let's like chunk things up and break things down and create this ladder and what he did is he got the local User group in Boston to help him with this concept because it was like great to talk about in theory But how does that actually work in the real world? And so what they the user group did is they started coming up with okay What what lessons do we need let's sort of start writing things up But then how do you actually get people to do them and how does that like? Literally, how does that process work? Writing a bunch of lessons does not mean that suddenly people know things doesn't Magically work that way surprising. I know shocking but true so what they ended up doing after spending Months sort of prototyping all of this stuff out as they came up with doing sprints at the meet-ups and Keeping the sprints small enough so that it was a meet-up sized chunk of something that people could do And so the and there are two kinds of sprints The first kind of sprint is this learn sprint and that basically covers that getting started section of the ladder that stuff at The bottom what are the tools people need? What are the processes that are in place? What's going on here? And so at a meet-up they would get together and People would look at where they were on the ladder in terms of well I already have Drupal installed, but I don't have get installed and So the people who were on the same rung of the ladder would get together in little groups at the meet-up And they would all work on a lesson together and help each other get like through that lesson and get set up And most of those lessons are designed to be about 15 to 20 minutes So you can have a meet-up everybody talks everybody explains what's happening you break out Everybody's a sort of lesson and then everybody sort of comes back together And then you know gets pizza and does whatever you want to do with your meet-up kind of thing and So they would do that at meet-ups to kind of get everybody sort of up to the same place and Everybody understand what the tools were and then the other kind of sprint they had Lines up with that contribute section that second step Which is to actually do stuff and They tried a lot of different things In terms of how to actually work on issues Because as Jess knows she runs the the core mentoring Program and you know Even if you have people who are super enthusiastic and have the tools available You get to the Drupal.org issue queue and it's just like a cartoon And yeah, it's like oh my god It's so overwhelming is not clear where you can begin if you should be touching that issue or not like scary land and so Yeah, so the way they set up the issue sprints is that you before a meet-up you go through and identify issues that people can work on and then People come in and actually pair up together So you work on it as a team. So you're not sort of floating on your own in the ocean and work through it together and you know if you have a larger meet-up where you have Many pairs, you know, you can also sort of help each other and see who knows what about things But this is something that you know, you can do in a meet-up of two Right, you need two people to do this so you can be like, you know, I want to work on XYZ issue and I'm gonna go be at the cafe at blah blah blah. Well somebody meet me there and we can work on this issue together Okay, it's not complicated overhead You need an internet connection maybe Depends what depends on what issue you're working on right? So And the other thing that that's really important about this and this is very related to the whole core mentoring world as well is that There are lots and lots of issues on core that don't you don't have to be a coder You don't have to be a developer in order to help And so it's a matter of like finding issues that people can achieve with the skills that they have and There are lots of those out there the the core mentoring Program has a website to sort of break out like tasks that are related to issues and sort of Digestible way I would say And the Drupal ladder actually has its own little subset. I'm not sure the status of that though. Yeah, question What is this core mentoring program that I speak of? Yes. So the core mentoring program Has been around for I guess roughly the same amount of time. Yeah Right. And so the the idea with the core mentoring program is basically you actually have mentors People who are working on core and have a sense of the lay of the land and understand the larger picture of what's going on You can show up on IRC at set times and Believe I might have a link in the slides Yes Yeah, 1 p.m. You know Australia in this time zone, yeah Yeah, but you can show up on IRC and then of course we also do events We're like live at camps and cons and stuff like that We do live sprints where people can get together But the idea is you show up you want to help we make sure that you have the tools and processes in place And then somebody says well, here's an issue you could work on or you can go Well, I kind of like to work on this issue, but you know, is that crazy? And you can get some feedback for helping you figure out where to start and find a little piece that's gonna work for you And as you work through it if you like have questions like oh, I don't know I was trying to do this and now now I'm lost and it doesn't make any sense to me anymore Did I like miss some major piece of what's going on? You have other people around to ask and get feedback from and help you work through the process and okay I did all the work and I made it work. I need to make a patch now How's it work again? And they can walk you through that process. So that's the thing is you actually have people who are involved with core understand what's happening and Their whole focus in those set periods of time is to make sure that you get through that process and that you Understand what it is that's going on So and it's interesting because the core mentoring stuff started and the Drupal ladder stuff started sort of in their own little separate world Both basically trying to accomplish the same thing And we've been spending time sort of trying to bring them more into line with each other I think which hasn't really been that hard. It's just a matter of oh, you're doing that. Huh? We're doing this That's crazy. Maybe we should talk. I don't know. Let's communicate share a little bit. So Definitely been last year has been in quite a lot of that I think So learn sprints issue sprints the idea behind these is that they are Small things that can be done it at a meetup level. You don't need a major event. You don't need to have craziness actually in Denmark I Started doing some of this in the Copenhagen group and I timed our meet-ups So that they match up with core mentoring hours on Wednesday nights in Europe And so I don't even have to take on the responsibility of figuring things out Because often what I'm doing is I do learn sprints like I lead a learn sprint because I have a lot of people who don't Really have much of an idea of what's going on in terms of the tools and processes So I do the learn sprints But for people who are experienced and want to just dive in and work on things then I can say well Core mentoring is going on an IRC You can hang out with those people and talk to them and they'll get you issues and get you started While I'm working with people on getting their local development environment set up and that kind of a thing That's really worked out really well for us in terms of meetups to sort of help again like because I can't run everything. I'm not I'm not good with that I'm not like Jess. I can't keep a million things in my mind at the same time You pull it off quite well lady So and although I have to say like if you're doing if you're doing a specific issue sprint Like where you actually are like you have lots of groups that are going to be pairing up and working on issues together and things like that A longer meetup like a two-hour meetup ends up making a lot more sense In a one-hour meetup by the time you've explained what's going on everybody gets set up everybody gets going they start to work on issues Working on an issue is not normally a 15 or 20 minute task So you need to allow time for that another thing that we do in Denmark occasionally is we do like just a Drupal day a Drupal Drupal sprint day. We just make up our own sprint We find some company who's willing to have a venue and then we just everybody shows up But we have you know some people can just show up for whatever But we have this kind of structure in place for a lot of the people who are coming So that we have the time to let people actually really work on issues But we have it planned in advance as an issue sprint. It just gives us a little more elbow room to make it happen Yeah, so the whole goal of This this thing it says really this is the goal. This is the goal that Brian Hirsch has stated for us Is that instead of 0.1? Percent that we should be at 1% in a year But you know if you don't set high goals You're never gonna you're never gonna see how far you can push yourself. It is this is crazy. It sounds crazy and But one of the so I was first introduced to the Drupal ladder in Drupal con Denver, which was March last year and When Brian sort of presented this like they had done all of this work in the user group Sort of figured things out and then at Denver. They were like, okay, this is what we done We figured this out so far We need the rest of the community to help us make this happen and one of the reasons that I ended up getting involved in the ladder was not because I Mean yay 1% by 2014. It's a great idea It is a great idea. There's lots of great ideas in this community We are full of great ideas But the reason that I got involved with it and got kind of excited is because Brian had an actual plan like he'd actually thought this through in terms of reality He was shocking and exciting at the same time so So there is a bit of a plan so I'm gonna talk about sort of like what's happened so far and Then sort of what our plan from the point where we are now is and and wow you guys can hope So the Boston experiment which I said was like the the proof of concept thing So that was just user group working on stuff writing the lessons coming out with the ladder They wrote a an actual whole distribution and so and created the website that exists for it And all that stuff was done by the local user group before we got to jupycon Denver and then between Denver and Munich, which is August There was this goal. These were the goals that they had and we did actually accomplish these goals To add ten user groups because Boston was doing this. We wanted to add ten more user groups To be doing it and giving feedback because part of it is Boston had done this and they'd come up with a plan that worked for them But when you start translating that to other groups, what needs to change or like what what are modifications that people can be making to make it Really work for them They wanted to relaunch relaunch triple ladder org It has had a lot of improvements made to it now Right, there's like sort of two contributing things going on here one is contributing to core and then the ladder itself There's a website people need to run it, you know, people want improvements Everybody wants it to be fancy and flashy and cool And as a useful tool So they did a bunch of work on that and the Drupal ladder website itself Actually uses a distro So that you can recreate that Yourself locally the entire ladder website with all of the ladders and everything like that Yeah, and it also includes code samples It includes like buggy code that people can use to go through the lessons to to learn how what they're fixing and things like that And how the process works So all of that is wrapped up together So you can always just grab that and like have that and then everybody would have like exactly the same stuff Or you don't even need to be online You can use the lessons and you have all of the sample code and everything like that locally And you can just run it like on the beach or something like that As you do And then the last thing this wasn't a goal the steering committee But it was something that that ended up coming up in August When we met in Munich there were a couple of us who thought this was interesting and cool And we figured we'd help and Brian Got us all together and basically asked if we would work as a committee because he was one person who works full-time and And has a life as much he tries to as much as he can Living between two cities which adds extra time to having your life so So he just wanted to have help to help spread the load in some sort of I mean not official capacity But in a way like you know like to know like this is someone who's going to take that So he doesn't have to think about that anymore kind of a thing. So we sort of came up with that to help sort of Continue to drive things forward So this on the steering committee, so I manage the lessons the actual ladder lessons that are written Manage all of this is quite loose But the idea is like if someone wants to write new lessons or if there's a new ladder that needs to be created I would be the point person and from here. I can help get everything sorted out Brian himself works on the the distribution So the underlying website and the distribution that sort of powers that and and some new features that need to go into it New code samples to be added for you know testing things and stuff like that Karen Casio She is helping coordinate the learn sprint stuff So I'm coordinating, you know ladders and ladder improvements and edits to the lessons themselves But she's helping people like okay. I have a meet-up group How do I do? Getting materials for people to use for the for the learn sprints She's also working on getting it so that people can register their meet-up group as a as a ladder group So that we can just make sure that we have better communication going on with people and so that we can honestly see if we're making our goals of Getting more people actually doing them and things like that And then Kay is Kay was part of the original Boston group as well his thing is about coordinating with external projects and by external projects, we mean other documentation kinds of things or other efforts that are being done in the same realm and Because like there's a lot of concern around like Drupal ladder has all this stuff on lessons and how to do these tasks But we have all this documentation on Drupal org in the handbook like are we duplicating effort? Are we not how do we bring those together that kind of stuff? So that's what Kay's main focus has been also we Brock was on the committee and Brock was responsible for issue sprint stuff Brock is stepping down one of the things about the steering committee is We are each volunteers as well And so there comes a time when we will need to also broaden our base And have other people who are willing to help with these things Because yeah, only so much time in a day. Here's a quick sort of timeline on sort of what's been going on So between Munich and Sydney the goal is to sort of add add another get more than 20 user groups So we original goal between before Munich was to get 10 then the idea is okay by by now We should be up over 20. I believe that we are I don't have the actual list of meet-up groups that are involved, but I'm fairly certain that we are well over 20 by now And creating ladder outlines for all of the Drupal 8 initiatives all the big pieces of what's new in Drupal 8 We have a ladder on Here's how you get set up with things But now we want to drill into the specific pieces of of Drupal 8 not just a generic That's core. Don't work on it We want to create individual ladders with those bite-sized chunkable lessons for each facet of Drupal so like Multilingual initiative, how does multilingual Drupal 8 work? Well, let's create a ladder that has lessons that starts off with install a site with another language And then work your way deeper and deeper into the bowels of what is running that system and how it actually operates So that you actually can become skilled enough to assist in that area Actually understanding what's going on, but starting from the basics of here's how you install it and use it in the interface What does that mean in the back end and and and so on? So we want to get outlines for all of that stuff. We aren't we don't have all the outlines done part of that is getting the initiative leads Sort of just nailed down long enough But you know, it's also it's it's proven to also be a bit complicated because it's a moving target so creating an outline on a moving target is Interesting to say the least and so it's been more challenging than it sounds just by oh good creating outline Why not a creating outline on how to do things? And then you know like two months later. It's like that outline doesn't make any sense at all So So but one of the things that I want to work on Tomorrow at the sprint, which I'll talk about more later, but I want to work on getting these outlines at least started So that we have More of an idea of what we need to do Feature freeze is right after this conference like in 10 days No hard attacks, please and And then in Portland and we have Drupal con in May and at that point you want to have over 30 user groups Which I think is really really manageable honestly like we are very close to that at this point anyway So I kind of think we should revise that upwards even as a goal between now and May I mean geez we should be able to get over 50. I think but it's only if people actually get out there and do it And we actually want to get the actual lessons written For all that Drupal 8 stuff the idea being that in Portland. We're gonna have 3,000 people And if we actually have lessons written and people can just sit down and work their way through a lesson and then begin contributing It would be amazing and we could get a lot of work done So that's why that's a big goal for us because we'll be after feature freeze will be before code freeze There's going to be a lot of work that needs to happen to kind of polish off all the stuff that's that's been put in And people need to understand how that stuff works Nobody's gonna help if they don't understand it So that's that's our our next big goal that we're in Code freeze will happen after that before Prague These are Brian's goals Every active user group has an issue sprint at some point at least once And That to achieve that goal means That we need to have people understand how issue sprints run and can assist User groups getting the setup and we need to actually have the tools and the lessons available for people to get up to speed So we have to have sort of our our underlying ladder infrastructure stuff kind of in place To then go out to every user group and just be like look just do this once it's so easy All you have to do is this this and this and we have these people here to assist you Just schedule a time and we will help you make it happen But that obviously we're not quite at that stage. There's a lot of work that needs to happen to get there He also wants to Identify two out of every 100 active users as potential contributors So this is actually doing active outreach instead of expecting people to come to us But it's the kind of thing like being at a meetup or being at an event being in an IRC channel for a local community And chatting with people and actually sorting out like hey, you know There's something that you could help me with and work on You know, would you be interested in helping out with something? And we have this wonderful structure in place that makes it easy and things like that and actively Reaching out and finding people That can contribute rather than expecting people to come to us So definitely a different step in terms of goals, but that is the only way that we're going to get to that mythical 1% Mm-hmm Right totally. Yeah. No, you're right. Yeah Somebody say work So this is yeah, so this is the idea for this year is to get ourselves to this place You know at Prague basically so that at Prague when we talk about like where are things and what are we doing? This is what we're doing That we are that we have gotten like all of the user groups that we know about sort of engaged in some fashion And we've come up with a way that makes it Because for me like, you know reaching out to people like you I can reach out to people But what am I offering them right now is is still a bit of confusion? I mean we have a lot of great things in place But the more sort of structure we can put in place that that people just feel like they can just walk through the steps Without big scary gray gaps and they don't know what happens when you fall there The much more likely you are to actually get that person to come on board. So so really like Yes, this is like, you know, this is that goal by Prague But the way to achieve this goal is all of that other stuff of getting all of that other structure in place So that by the time we get to Prague we just sell people. Hey You're talking you seem to be you know, like you're functioning Do you want to come help because it's pretty easy to help you can just pop over here for you know Half an hour and get you up to speed. We have everything in place and you can actually have a patch You work on get committed to core And your code will work on you know websites millions of websites around the world It's it's a pretty cool powerful thing. But if you don't have a Friendly road to get people there. They're a lot less likely to try and take that chance and then of course Drupal 8 is going to come out sometime between Prague and the next Drupal Khan in the US We assume It better or I think several people are gonna lose their minds And so the idea is that by the time we get to that that Drupal Khan in the US a year from now Then we will be at one percent. I mean that's what one percent is one out of every hundred active users right now We're at one out of every thousand So that's the plan to get there. It's awesome because it like it's on slide And there's like these like little transitions and things and like it just moves along and it looks really easy Yes, we made it. We are there man not So in terms of immediate goals in outside the big picture I said Karen's been working towards like reaching out to user groups and Registering groups. I don't know if she actually has that stuff set up yet, but that's her sort of on her agenda She's had quite a lot going on actually I would say like everyone in the steering committee Kind of checked out for the months of December and January Holidays family lots of stuff so But she's working on that is like a goal of hers to be able to figure out what's going on with the learn sprints and Creating this learn sprint kit. So I have a meet-up. I don't want to do a learn sprint. All right here download this These are materials. Here's a presentation. You can use this is you know all of the kind of step-by-step play-by-play stuff Issue sprints Brock did a lot of work on this So Again creating resources for people who want to do an issue sprint because it's quite a different activity And it requires sort of different resources and different skills even And we did create this issue tracking tool for ladders So Drupal office hours org the core dot Drupal office hours org is what the core mentoring team uses for And that's what they'll be using like this weekend to assign tasks to people who want to help break things down But we also created a separate one for the ladder So if you're doing an issue sprint for the Drupal ladder, you aren't getting in necessarily messing with the core mentoring teams Set up you can set up your own you can just sort of do your own little custom This is our world that we want to work on and we're going to make our own little tasks and use that for the sprint And then one of the things Brock really wanted to also Try and figure out is making sure that people are getting mentored between the sprints And I think honestly the biggest thing for that is to get people in touch with the the Drupal core mentoring team and Make sure that that that people understand that that resource is available every week And you can always check in with that and you can always have access to that and keep going You don't have to wait for your meetup in order to work on things if you want to work on stuff But a lot of people don't know that that exists or how that works And so once you sort of introduce people to that and make people feel comfortable with that process Then there's stuff that's available all the time and people can kind of keep going and also like in a meetup People do an issue sprint and they just don't have time to finish, you know the meetup ends got to go home And then it's like wait Do I have to wait a month or two months for the next meetup to keep working on my issue? Like that seems weird So just keeping things rolling along On the lessons we've been doing a lot of reviewing and revising of the existing lessons in that main ladder As I said we need to create Drupal 8 ladders for each of the initiatives ultimately we're going to create ladders for each of the major core components But for now these are the new big scary scary things and things that need a lot of work and help So That's going to happen before that sub ladders for all major components thing happens But ultimately like you know if I'm interested in Drupal's file handling system I should be able to go and find a ladder and understand how does how does Drupal file handling work? Get myself involved into that in in deep enough to understand how it works And then I can help contribute and fix it make it better make the changes I want So These are ways that you all can actually get involved and help Honestly just spreading the word so that people even know that these resources exist and what we're trying to accomplish It's a simple simple thing going to a meetup and just we actually have On the Drupal ladder org website. There's a resources tab and we have slides. You can download We actually have a video. That's like a 12 minute video So if you don't want to do a lightning talk You can just play it and sit in the corner because I don't want to talk in front of people You can just play the video for a lightning talk Sort of size session or something like that to just introduce people to the idea of it bring it up in local meetups And and try and get people on board that in and of itself is a huge help for us Climbing the ladder yourself. You don't have to do it in a meetup We find it's a lot more effective doing that kind of stuff in a meetup where people work together to help each other that Community aspect create a tie with somebody, you know bonds like yeah, we totally had to work out that weird-ass server configuration together Organizing the sprints yourself like I said earlier. It's not a huge Crazy overhead thing. You don't need some big venue. You don't need a lot of planning around it What you need to do is you need to just say I want to do this Does anybody want to do it with me? Is there one other person out there who wants to do this? Let's find a place to meet up and sit down and just do it and see how it works And then writing lessons as well. A lot of people really shy away from this Which is I understand and it's fine, but Also more so than even just writing lessons and also helping to edit the lessons like doing the lessons and getting feedback on them Is really really useful as well but we do we have a lot of ladders that need to be written and You know what like we have all these initiatives I don't know them either just because I know just because I'm the steering committee person for the ladders Doesn't mean that I know how to write these lessons either. I'm gonna have to do the same thing anybody else would Which is learn what's going on ask the people who are involved in core and say okay, so We have this Allen. I'm at this step and I've managed to install Drupal 8 with another language But now I'm trying to figure out how to you know convert something to something. I don't quite know how that works Can you help me? That's really gonna get written, but it's not like you have to sit in the corner and know everything You're not like this font of knowledge You can have to do the same thing I do because I have no idea How any of this stuff works either But I'm gonna learn and I'm gonna write a lesson and then other people are gonna learn and they're gonna improve on that lesson And then we're all gonna get there in the end Just some stuff if you want to sort of track down and become part of the conversation for the Drupal Ladder itself The Drupal Ladder website is at Drupal Ladder org We do the group discussion is basically where you know, I haven't meet up and I want to do something I have some questions or I just want to share. Hey, we're gonna do this. It's pretty awesome If you do have a meet-up that has a Drupal Ladder sort of event with it You can post the event on groups dot Drupal dot org for your local Meetup, but you can also cross post it into the Drupal Ladder group And we encourage that so that we know and everybody sort of working with Drupal Ladder stuff understands it like that And it's like hey, maybe I can make sure I'm available on IRC or something if anybody has questions when that happened The Twitter accounts really not used but it's up there And then we do have a Drupal Dash Ladder IRC channel It's not There's not a whole lot of activity in it all the time But there are a lot of people just hanging out in the channel sort of like you know It's in that list of Drupal channels that I log into when I go into IRC So tomorrow you could actually do some of these things if you wanted to We actually have so there's the code sprint that's going on all day nine to five Jess is going to be leading up in the centennial room So you can actually just come in and work on stuff if you want to In the morning, I'm going to be doing community tools workshop Which is for people who don't have anything sort of set up and don't understand what tools we have we're gonna work through What the issue queues all about how that issue queues works how to use IRC actually getting on IRC and talking with other people Then and getting a local web development environment set up so local web server And get so that you can install Drupal 8 And get get it running on your local machine because once you've gotten to that stage You can start working on core. You don't even need all that honestly to start working on core Truth be told there's a lot of things you can just do because you can you have a Drupal.org account And then you're good But I'm gonna be doing that in the morning to get people sort of set up with those tools if they want and Then in the afternoon, I'm not actually going to be sprinting on core issues. I'm gonna be sprinting on Drupal ladder So I'm gonna be working on creating those outlines fleshed out and starting to work on Drupal ladder lessons the Outlines that we do have right now are We're most complete outlines. We have right now is for the multilingual initiative and for the twig new theme system in core And so there's some stuff that's been written and so there's lessons that need to be reviewed Like people need to actually walk through and then there's some stuff. It's like We just need lessons written. We need someone to figure out. How do you actually do this? Spend the time and then write down how they got through it So if anybody wants to help with that stuff, I'll be doing that tomorrow afternoon after I do the workshop in the morning But other than that you can if you want to like you can show up tomorrow and You can actually work on a core issue tomorrow Regardless of skill set up or tools you have promise promise Like we're tight. I mean like a Really really this is like we use this as an example all the time There's a really great example of the kinds of issues that are ways that you can help an issue is We have issue summaries So when you go to read an issue and it's got a million million comments There's actually a summary at the top that so that people don't have to read everything and understand it Those don't get written by magic And so picking an issue reading through everything and sort of summarizing the conversations and the decisions that have been made in that Issue summary at the top of the issue is like a massive task that needs to be done and you just need a Drupal dot org account Don't need a local web server. You don't need Drupal 8 nothing So you can work on a core issue tomorrow promise No matter who you are So tomorrow be here or Be there be square, but how would you say be here? Yes, I know but be here or Be silly Be here or be beer. No, see I'd rather be beer Okay, just be here, okay Yeah, and then feedback for this session if you want to leave some lovely feedback Yeah, so I don't know does anybody have questions in terms of like They may think we're crazy Yeah So you are running these already I've run them. I run them. I ran them in Copenhagen last year. I haven't done any this year That's our regular meet-up and so yeah, I mean again, this is gonna depend on the community but in Copenhagen We had basically all we had was a beer meet-up and nothing, I mean it was Fun, and it was fun for those of us who know each other and can find each other in a bar Not particularly good for newcomers So I actually just introduced this as our meet-up and we started off doing learn sprints And then like I said like new people come I'll do learn sprints with them But other than that people can work on issue sprints Because we do it at the same time as the core mentoring team is available I Go to the different companies. We have three major Drupal shops in Copenhagen We have a couple of other companies that use Drupal quite a lot and so yeah, and basically I just started approaching them and in in again, this depends on your Community in the market, but like in that instance going to one and just saying they're the ones who are gonna do it all the time is maybe not politically Dead-on and so we've actually rotated through all of them And they're just sort of like okay, when's the next one I can do And we sort of just put it on the calendar and rotated around some of them do just the evening meet-up thing They have you know have the space and we all go to their office and they have a big room And we sit down and around the table and do but others have also Hosted like a the weekend day kind of like the day-long sprint thing Yeah, but that's I've just gone to the different companies and said hey, you're the one who says you want to hire people who know What's going on? Here's a way Simple way that you can do this just give us access to your office for an hour or two So that's how we've done it. Oh, yeah Yeah Yeah, the question Depends on you and what time you have what time other people have when people want to do it Like that's the reason we actually end up doing this alternating thing in Copenhagen where one month It was an evening workshop Evening meet-up, you know at a place and then the other month It would be like a morning or a day thing on the weekend because some people could do it during the week Some people could do it on the weekend. So we just started alternating them every other month Just to sort of flesh it out, but that's just sort of what we came up with Yeah It is yeah, so it's a little yeah So the question is like, you know rating the of the issues so you have some sense of how difficult something is That's what the core office hours task breakdown does it breaks things into Three levels a b and c if you come tomorrow morning, you will learn all about it But it breaks them down sort of into skill level that's required and it also doesn't break it into it breaks it into tasks Not issues Right. So one issue might have several tasks that are needed to accomplish the end result And so the core office hour website actually breaks things in the individual tasks with a ranking and rating on them So that you can be like, I don't really I don't want to deal with code I don't even want to figure it out. I'm gonna go for an A level, but no, I'm a hardcore developer I just don't understand where to start go to see you know, so yeah So that's the core mentoring stuff is totally geared towards what you just asked core dot Drupal office hours org Yeah, yeah, we have to this is the Where did I put the I don't know Every now and then We're like, what is he saying I can't understand the words It's overwhelming I Think that's It is Well, it's someone who's gone through that step. I was at San Francisco and found the code So that's how I did my first call back Yeah Yeah, and the thing is like yeah, there's like this like big picture view of what's happening But there are so many components that are complex and doing lots of interesting things and like nobody nobody Knows it all nobody nobody can and there's really no reason to honestly, right? Because we have a huge community we can all help each other You don't have to know everything to get something done, but being able to dive into something. It's just like okay files weird You know But yeah, so that's the thing is like these are all like the the core mentoring stuff and the Drupal outer stuff is Relatively new but still it's been around for a year now, right? And like this is the thing that's why I said like the number one thing is simply letting people know and Getting the word out and people will sift in and do things according to whatever their predilections are That's fine But a lot of people just don't know because it is way overwhelming to try and get involved and like might so my wife is a Is a Drupal developer and she's worked on core and for seven She wrote a lot of tests and did a lot of work that went into core and then she like took a break She's like her item done with core development working on other things And then she came back to start working on eight and she was like whoa And I'm like she's a core developer and she was like I don't know what's happening here You know and it took her the time to sit down and sort of wrap her head around something She was interested in Talking to people and getting people to walk her through those initial pieces of the system She ended up like helping which is the the blocks and plug and stuff But like she was you know and this is somebody who was much more involved than I have say in the last one Like I haven't really been involved with course in six So yeah letting people know that these tools exist these people exist the system that we're trying to grow it helping us grow It is great, but just letting people know it exists and to you make use of it I think is our big battle right now is to just just let people know It's all win-win win it's just it's just time and focus You know which is sort of what all ends up coming down to so Well, we are I think quite quite out of time at this point, but I do appreciate you guys coming and talking and Yeah, so hopefully I'll see you tomorrow But if not, you know like I said tomorrow's like it's though You don't have to be at the event in order to actually engage and take part in this stuff So please do check it out and come back around if you don't come tomorrow, okay? Sweet thanks guys end of show You