 Okay, so why don't we go ahead and get started, because it's 10.45, and that way we can leave time for questions. Are we good on? Great. Okay, so welcome everyone to the Drupal Contribution Ladder, a gift and a challenge from you, a gift and a challenge to you from Boston. This session is about an experiment that we've been doing over the past six months in Boston to try and make it easier for people to learn about and contribute to Drupal Core. My name's Brian Hirsch, I've been coordinating the project in Boston over the last couple of months, and the project had no name for a while, so it's become affectionately known as the Boston Initiative, but the idea has always been to try and come up with activities and materials that we can share outside of Boston. So this session is both a case study and a recruitment event, so I'm really excited to be able to share some stories and lessons with you guys and materials that we've developed. We're also looking to plug people into this initiative. This is a project that the Boston User Group believes is worth spreading to other user groups, and our hope is that this initiative will become a vehicle for involving more and more people in contributing to Drupal Core, and ideally over the next two years getting more people involved in Drupal 8 and increasing the velocity of the project. Before we dive in here, if anyone is in the wrong room, now is a fine time to go find the place you intended to be. While people are moving around a little bit, I also just wanna ask you guys a little bit about yourselves. I'd like to get a sense of who we have here with us. So could I just see a show of hands? How many people here have ever attended a Drupal User Group meetup? Nice. How many people here are regulars at their local meetup? All right. How many people have ever led their local meetup? Great. How many people here have contributed to Drupal Core? How many people here would like to contribute to Drupal Core? Yes. Great. Quick overview of what we're gonna talk about here. I'm gonna walk you guys through the problem we're trying to address, the experiment that we've been doing in Boston, and the results of that experiment, and talk a little bit about where we can go from here. The problem, we need more people. Dries talked about this in his keynote yesterday. Our talent pool is too small. This is a problem we need to solve. If you look at this from the perspective of the issue queue, the number of developers contributing to Core has gone up steadily from major release to release. But as a percentage of users, the percentage has gone down. So these are slides I should say from last summer that I went back from DrupalCon to the Boston user group to discuss this problem. So these are as of last August, but I don't think they've changed much. So the percentage of users on Drupal.org contributing to Core has gone down pretty dramatically. And as the popularity of Drupal skyrockets and more and more people get involved in Drupal, the number of people creating issues and making suggestions in the issue queue is going way up. And it's impossible for contributors to keep up. So at DrupalCon London, we heard a number of people who've been involved in Drupal 7 development, talking about the fact that they're just, a lot of them are feeling exhausted as a result of this. And so if you, back in August of 2011, eight months after Drupal 7 was released, there were 9,000 open issues in the core issue queue. And this tiny green sliver represents the issues that have been reviewed and tested by the community. The yellow chunk represents about 1,600 of those 9,000 issues ready and waiting to be tested by somebody. So as a result of people who had been contributing to Core or feeling exhausted, this is also frustrating for site owners. And not just because of the rate at which issues are getting closed, but if you try to step into the shoes of a site owner, an NGO, a government agency, a business who has a Drupal site, how many people here have tried to hire someone, how many people here have tried to hire Drupal talent and have not been able to find someone with the Drupal chops they needed for their own organization? How many people here have tried to train a Drupalist in-house and found that to be a daunting or challenging task? So for Drupal to thrive and continue on its extraordinary trajectory, this is a problem we need to solve. The question is not, can we solve it? The question is how will we solve it? How can we get the rate of people contributing to Drupal to keep pace with the rate of adoption of Drupal? Or better yet, how could we get the rate of contributors to Drupal to exceed the rate at which we're bringing new users into the community? How could we get one out of 100 people who are active on Drupal.org to contribute? So maybe this sounds audacious, but here's why it's not nuts. If we look back at this slide about the decreasing number, the decreasing percentage of contributors. So if you look back at Drupal 4.7, there were about 0.5% of users on Drupal.org contributing to Core. That number has gone down to, it looks to me like 0.1% of users. So we can't know with certainty how this has happened, but I think that we could make some educated guesses here. So I'd like to take a few quick straw polls. How many people here think that the number of contributors, that the percentage of contributors has gone down from Drupal 4 to Drupal 7 because Drupal is less interesting now? How many people think that the rate of contributors between Drupal 4 and Drupal 7 has gone down because Drupal is less useful? How many people think that the rate of contributions has gone down from Drupal 4 to Drupal 7 because Drupal is less relevant or less profitable? So I think it's unanimous. Drupal is more useful, more relevant, more popular, more profitable than ever. The Obama White House is using Drupal to powerwhithouse.gov and the federal government's Bleeding Edge Open Government Initiative. Warner Music this month is launching dozens of artist websites on Drupal. Websites like kidrock.com. Drupal is more interesting than ever. So I'd actually even go a step further and I'd argue that people are trying harder than ever to get involved in Drupal, to wrap their brain around Drupal and to keep up with what's going on. How do I know this? I think there's a lot of strong anecdotal evidence. Look at the time and the money that we and the people around us are investing in trainings, in conferences, in books. Look at how competitive it's become to get a slot to talk at DrupalCon to sign up for a bof. Look at the increase in the number of people that we're seeing at meetups. Bi-annual conferences aren't enough anymore. We see a bunch of Drupal camps and an increase in turnout at Drupal camps. There were 250 parties in 90 countries celebrating the release of Drupal 7. This is one of the coolest open-source projects I've ever heard of. Every indication is that more and more people wanna get involved and wanna contribute to this project. So look at this slide again. I'm not gonna drop the F-bomb, but I think you guys all have to be thinking what I'm thinking here. These numbers are crazy. So what's going on? After doing some research, I believe that I've found a technical term to describe what our community is going through right now. It's called a double whammy. Whammy number one is the learning curve. Here's a graphic that has made its way around the interwebs. Some of you've probably seen it. This depicts the learning curve for Drupal as a cliff and as Drupal gets more and more complex, it's harder to contribute. So if people are still just as interested and still trying just as hard to get involved, but it takes longer to figure out how to contribute, naturally, our developer community is gonna grow slower. So in addition to needing to increase the number of people getting involved and contributing to core, we also need to find ways to make it easier for people to learn about Drupal and contribute. Whammy number two is a lopsided recruitment effort. We're not as effective at recruiting large numbers of people into our developer community as we are at recruiting large numbers into our user community. To be clear, from Drupal four to five to six to seven, we see a steady increase in the number of people getting involved in Drupal development. A lot of things have to be going right here to see this kind of steady growth over several years. There's a lot to be proud of in this slide. At the same time, there's a lot going right and something very different going on in the way that we're bringing users in to our user community. So what is that difference? There might be a lot of things, but there's one thing that jumps out at me is a striking difference. Between 2001 and 2006, the first half of my career so far, I was an organizer for political and issue campaigns. And a lesson that I learned working on campaigns is that there's no substitute for one-on-one conversations. So if you pit fancy advertising against a well-organized canvas operation, grassroots outreach, one-on-one conversations blow other strategies out of the water every single time. So when I look at salespeople in our community, identifying target markets, and then methodically moving through those markets, giving people individual attention, reaching out, having one-on-one conversations, I see them bringing in huge numbers of new users to our community. And I don't see a similar recruitment effort where we try to reach out to people and bring them in to our developer community. There are other things we do. The door is wide open. And I know from personal experience and I know from these numbers that when someone walks through the door to a core sprint, they're likely to have a positive experience. But I think that if we did a similar kind of methodical recruitment effort and one-on-one outreach to get more people to actually make that step and walk through the door, I think it could do wonders for growing our numbers. So the good news is that whereas with campaigns, an effort like this can be both laborious and costly, I think there is a lot of low-hanging fruit here. We've already got meetups. We've already got camps. We've already got our conferences. We have all of these great opportunities to reach out to people with a relatively small amount of additional effort. I think we just need to be deliberate and methodical about making sure that every single person gets personally invited to contribute. So now let's talk about the experiment, the Drupal Ladder, the namesake of this session. So late one night in Coders Lounge at Drupalcon London, I had a great conversation about a lot of this stuff with Angie Byron, aka WebChick, Drupal7, co-maintainer, and Jeff Eaton from Lullabot, and the idea that we hatched was this. There are a lot of people who want to get involved and contribute, but they don't know how, they don't feel qualified, the time commitment feels prohibitive, or maybe they just haven't been asked. So what if to try and lower the barriers to getting people involved? We make a list of all the different ways that a person can contribute to Drupal and organize it like a ladder. The first few steps are easy for anyone with no knowledge of Drupal required to get started climbing their way up the ladder, and then as you work your way up, each consecutive step should be reasonably within reach if you've taken the previous steps. Ideally we have written instructions that can help people walk their way through the ladder and the lessons take between 15 to 30 minutes, so these are bite-sized chunks for people to take on. And with volunteering for campaigns is my frame of reference, where volunteering to Canvas is an easy couple-hour commitment. I was even thinking that if we can figure out how to get people to contribute in a one or two-hour sitting, our meetups are the perfect Drupal volunteer event. So there are Drupal user groups all around the world, and if every meetup group got involved in getting their members to spend a couple hours contributing, we could make a huge impact. We could move a ton of issues forward. We could help tons of people work their way up the ladder, building their skills, getting involved in contributing at higher and higher levels. This could be great for capacity building, it'd be great for the project. So we all got excited about this idea, but for the idea to actually get off the ground, some things needed to happen. We need to develop these how-to materials for these rungs that we have outlined on the ladder. Then we need to do some usability testing for each rung on the ladder. Make sure that we're reasonably setting people up for success to dig in and sort of work their way through these steps. And then someone has to do some outreach to people at other Drupal user groups. So I went back to Boston and I made the following pitch to the Boston user group. I said, here's the idea. I think that we should dedicate one hour of our monthly two-hour meetups to trying to get this thing off the ground. And if our meetup group is willing to commit one hour of every meetup between now, at this point this is in October, so between now and the next Drupal conference in Denver and March, I'll be willing to take some of my own personal time and some time that was donated by Acquia to working on developing these materials so we have some stuff to test out. So the group agreed. And over the past several months, we've been trying out all kinds of different things. We've tried digging into the issue queue and getting everyone in the room to work on similar kinds of issues. We've tried breaking up into small groups. We've tried unconference-style breakout groups. We've gone through several different drafts of the ladder. We've gotten invaluable input and guidance from Angie and from Oshe Weitzman. We have gone through several drafts of the different lessons. Every lesson has gone through at least two drafts. I think with Kay's help, actually we've probably gone through three drafts of most of these by now. Here is what the most recent version of the Drupal ladder looks like. The general idea here is that for any part of Drupal that you download from Drupal.org, a person could go through all 14 of these steps for any area, so like for the node system or for the theme system, these are all the different ways a person could contribute. So the first five steps have very clear instructions for getting started. This walks people through, this covers the nuts and bolts, excuse me, the nuts and bolts things, like installing Drupal, getting oriented with the issue queue, and getting involved, helping out. Anyone can start at step one. If you make it to step three or four or five, you end up with some pretty powerful tools in your toolbox to get involved. So if you know how to post an issue, if you feel confident about posting an issue in the issue queue, and you have design ideas or user experience ideas, you can get involved. If you make it to step four, you don't necessarily know any PHP, but you know how to apply a patch, you can peer review other people's solutions to issues in the issue queue. If you know some PHP and CSS or some JavaScript, you can write patches. So we spent a lot of time hanging out on this part of the ladder, and we learned a lot of important lessons worth sharing, I think. One lesson is that the issue queue is a major obstacle for a lot of people to getting involved. For newbies, it can be really confusing. It can be hard to understand the issues. Sometimes that's because the issues are complex, but frequently it's because the issues are just not very well written or not clearly written. Either way, that experience leaves a potential contributor feeling sort of deflated or demoralized. So, hand in hand with that was the realization that getting people just to feel comfortable in the issue queue, feeling confident about posting something or commenting is an important first step and a non-trivial first step. There's another step up at the top of this section that says, find a core system that interests you and learn about it. So, this is something that we've been doing with limited hand-holding up to now, unlike the other steps, we're basically pointing people to documentation on Drupal.org. So, if someone's made it to step six, they haven't implemented a hook or they haven't used a Drupal API, this gives them some guidance on where they can go to figure that stuff out and then sort of continue. What we would like to do is actually develop more lessons so that, well, hopefully with your help we can develop more lessons so that we can offer people more guidance at this step the way we do in the other steps. So then the next group of steps are great activities for people who've made it through the first steps who wanna get involved in contributing but they don't wanna make a major time commitment or they don't want to commit to a particular component of core. So, these are also steps or activities that are really great two-hour activities for meetups and I'll talk more about that in a minute. Then up at the top of the ladder we have steps for getting involved and contributing at a higher level helping to maintain a core component, running an initiative. So these are obviously things that you can't do at a meetup but our idea here is we wanna be greasing the wheels, providing information to people about what these kinds of commitments involve, who they should contact. If someone wants to do these things, obviously meetups are fertile grounds for recruiting people into these kinds of things. So let's talk about the results. The stuff that we came up with that is worth actually sharing. Working through these steps, we found a lot of stuff that didn't work but we also found some important things that did work. So we have good anecdotal evidence that makes us feel like the project is successful and in its first steps. Our meetups normally go from 6.30 to 8.30, first Tuesday of the month. Our format is two hours of lightning talks followed by pizza and beer. We normally have a pretty thin crowd when we start at 6.30 and then around 7.30, the room fills up and then we go out for pizza. So once we started doing the Boston initiative, we're starting right at 6.30, digging into the Boston initiative section of the evening. We saw people arriving early and we saw a nearly full room right around 6.30. We saw that consistently month after month. We also heard a number of people say, this was their first time really spending any time on the issue queue. We had a bunch of people who posted their first comments and a number of people who posted their first patches during these activities. So all that stuff feels like, we're headed in the right direction, we're finding some things here that work. So building on what worked, we have three concrete recommendations that the Boston user group thinks are worth exporting to other user groups and those three things are learn sprints, issue sprints and pairs. So it turns out it's unrealistic to try and both learn something new and do something productive with that knowledge in the issue queue all in one sitting, which was sort of the original thing we tried to do. So we had much more success once we broke this one activity into two separate things and that's learn sprints and issue sprints. So now I'll tell you about those two things. So the first one on the list is the learn sprints. The learn sprint is a great one hour activity and it's appropriate for people of all levels. The idea here is to get the people in the room to take a look at the Drupal ladder, identify where they are on the ladder and then get them to take the next step by just clicking the link and following the lessons and exercises that will help them make that next step. So lessons should take between 15 and 30 minutes. If you set aside 45 or 60 minutes during your meetup, you can easily introduce this new activity, get people to pair up, find where they're at on the ladder, do the thing and then wrap up and transition to your regularly scheduled program. Steps that are good for this sort of one hour learn activity include steps that have really clear written instructions and exercises. So this is basically the first two thirds of the ladder with the exception of the two steps that say create an issue team or join an issue team and work on things in the issue queue. For people who know all of the stuff in these lessons, step number eight that says create an issue team is a really good step for them to start working on. So basically there's some prep work that is critical to running a good issue sprint that those folks can help with. So if you point them to the issue queue and say during this hour, spend some time in the issue queue, finding issues that you would be willing to work on, you don't necessarily need to know how to solve these issues, but find stuff that you know how to sink your teeth into, find something where you know where to start and get them to put that stuff into a spreadsheet in preparation for an upcoming issue sprint. If you have someone who knows all of the things in the lessons and you don't have an issue sprint on the calendar or they're not gonna be in town for an issue sprint, encourage that person to go to the website that we've set up and write a new lesson. No shortage of opportunities for new lessons still. So that's learn sprints. So now let's talk about issue sprints. Issue sprints, oh, getting ahead of myself, issue sprints are a great two hour activity. So the idea with issue sprints are they're, we're pairing people up to dig into issues in the issue queue and work on something. So there are two different steps in the ladder. One says create an issue team, the other is join an issue team and I'll just talk about how that works. So you got one person, let's call that person Jane. Jane is one of these people who at the learn sprint or in her own time has agreed to start an issue team. So what that means is she's gonna go check out the issue queue, she's gonna find an issue that she knows enough about, that she knows where to get started working on it. She doesn't necessarily know how to solve it but she knows where to start. And she puts her name in the spreadsheet, she puts her issue in the spreadsheet and then on the day of the issue sprint, when people arrive at the sprint, you have people like Jim who are on this earlier step in the ladder that says join an issue team. So Jim is someone who wants to get involved in working on issues, he has made it through the first couple of steps but he's not sure what issues to work on or doesn't know where to start. So Jim can look for an empty slot next to Jane or in some issue team that isn't full and he can join that team and they'll pair up and work on issues in the queue. A few tips and pitfalls for running successful issue sprints. Number one, select issues before you arrive at the sprint. It can be a real time suck if people are trying to find issues to work on when they arrive and then that's less time spent getting things done. Recruit team leaders personally before the sprint. A mass email or a post on groups.drupal.org is not gonna get enough people to step up and lead teams. Take a few minutes to have some one-on-one conversations or emails and you'll get people to lead teams. Feed people at the beginning. If people are hungry, they're not totally focused on the issues going on. I think people work better after they've eaten. Last but not least, issue sprints are really a two-hour activity. Less than two hours just isn't enough time for people to wrap their brain around a new problem, figure something out about it and then craft a comment or a patch to post in the issue queue. So once we bumped this activity up to two hours, we saw a pretty dramatic increase in the number of people who were able to get things done and posting things in the issue queue. So that is issue sprints. Last thing on my list here are things worth replicating are pairs, working in pairs. So we tried lots of different formats. We tried working as a large group. We tried breakout groups with input from both group leaders and participants. Two is the magic number for both learn sprints and issue sprints. So just take my word for it, pair people up, encourage people to work in pairs. So that's pairs. Okay, on to the next part. Where do we go from here? Or more appropriately, how do we grow this initiative? So you've heard me say that we in the Boston Group think that this is an initiative worth continuing, worth exporting to some other user groups. And so the question now is how do we grow this initiative? To answer this question, we really need to look at it from the perspective of two different time frames. So there's the immediate question of between now and this summer, the next DrupalCon, how can we get more user groups involved? What do we need to do? And then there's the long-term question. So the statistics that I shared earlier were from August of 2011, seven months after Drupal 7 came out. So I think that the real measure of success for this initiative will be seven months after Drupal 8 comes out, do we see that we have a higher rate of contributors in the first eight months of Drupal 8 than we did in the first eight months of Drupal 7? So let's take these one at a time. So the immediate need. We need a place where people can go to find lessons and materials, or user groups can go to find lessons and materials. We need a central place where people can go to contribute lessons or materials. We need a place where people can keep track of which lessons they've completed, where they are at working their way up the ladder. So we can help each other work their way up the ladder. And then we also need a way to package up well-prepared lessons. So I think the first three bullets here are pretty self-explanatory. I'll just say a little bit more about the fourth. So a format that we are all familiar with is Lightning Talks or Vimeo and YouTube videos that demonstrate some new thing that we wanna learn or do. So if you know what you're doing, you can watch the video, you download some modules, you do some Drush, whiz bang magic, and hopefully you can reproduce the thing that you saw in the video and you've learned something new. So there is a valuable and important place for this sort of thing, obviously, in our community. But this is not the right format for what we're trying to do here. For three reasons. Reason number one is it makes a lot of unstated assumptions, and so inevitably people get left behind. Reason number two is the setup required can just take a lot of time to sort of replicate someone else's demo environment. And so that just makes it not that good of a fit for a one-hour meetup type activity. Then the third reason is the time and attention that's going into setting up your demo environment is a distraction from the new thing that you're actually trying to learn about. So our proof of concept response to this was to set up a sandbox site that had a known issue with a known solution. And then as an author of a lesson, if I know what's going on in the user's Drupal site that they've got locally that they're using to follow along the lessons, I can write out steps one through five or one through 10 to walk a person from start to finish in the lesson. So that model proved to be without a doubt the most effective way of doing lessons that we tried out. So our thinking now is we wanna do that same sort of thing for all kinds of different lessons. So how to implement hook form alter should be a lesson. How to implement hook node view. How to use the Ajax system. So all of these things have set up. Maybe you have certain lessons that are prerequisites to setting, to working on a lesson. Maybe you have some modules that you need to install. Maybe you need some demo content or some particular content types. So we wanna package, oh, I spilled my water. Excuse me for one second. It's all right, it's all right, safe. I think we're good. Excuse the interruption. I'm just gonna put my computer right there though. Oh, slides. Okay, this slide is not actually that. Oh, hey, great. Thanks, Kay. The magic touch. Magic touch. Yeah, let's give Kay a round of applause. We're helping out with that. Okay, I knew that was a dangerous place for water but I wasn't sure where to put it. So I've lost my train of thought. I'm sorry. Sandbox site. Here's our solution. Here's our solution. We want to package all of these lessons and curriculums and example steps, and example content up into an install profile. So we, to lay the ground for this, to lay the groundwork for this, the Boston Initiative has done two things. We've started LearnDruple.org and we've started a LearnDruple distribution. Now these things, design and UX, attention, but there's enough here that it should be easy for other user groups to be able to replicate the best of what we've been doing in Boston in their own groups. So there's the Drupal Ladder and the materials and things. So the LearnDruple.org serves three purposes. It's the place where anybody can go to find lessons and find materials. It's a place where anybody can go to contribute materials and lessons and it is a live example of the current version of the LearnDruple distro. So our hope is that with all of your help, we'll be able to get some more lessons in here, do some work on the code and be able to release a polished version, be able to relaunch a polished, more attractive version of LearnDruple.org as well as a 1.0 release of the LearnDruple distro this summer in time for DrupalCon Munich. Now at the beginning, all we set out to come up with was a single Drupal Quark contribution ladder. All the steps you need to know to contribute, 14 steps, 14 lessons and some activities that we can share with other user groups. But once we dug into this ladder, we found out that we really need this additional step in the middle of the ladder that says find a core system that interests you and learn about it. That is, hop off this ladder, go learn about some other stuff and then come back to the ladder and keep working your way up and contribute. So we wanna be able to offer the same kind of guidance and structure we've done with these other lessons to people who are deepening their knowledge of different parts of Drupal. So we want for there to be lessons for this kind of thing or maybe even additional ladders. So for example, a node system ladder or a theme system ladder. So LearnDruple.org will now let you do this stuff too. So you can contribute lessons but you can also create your own ladders. You can create your own curriculums which is just grouping together some lessons and they get displayed as a ladder that users can use to track their progress and work on their way up. So that's the short term vision for where we're headed. Let's talk about the long term part of this. So looking back at the slide, we've gone from 0.5 users contributing in Drupal 4.7 to 0.1% of users contributing in Drupal 7. And I believe that with modest amounts of help from a large number of people, we can get to 1% by 2014. If we can get, so this in my notes here it says this is where the crowd goes wild. So if we can get 10 user groups outside of Boston to run issue sprints and if we can get a 1.0 release of the LearnDruple distro and a polished version, well at least a respectable version of LearnDruple.org up and running by DrupalCon Munich, I really believe that we can get to 1% by 2014. That is by DrupalCon US 2014, eight months after Drupal 8 has been released, one out of a hundred active users have contributed something to core. So I know that sounds ambitious, but if you break it up into chunks and look at some of the major milestones between from DrupalCon to DrupalCon, I actually think it's achievable. Here's how I think we get there. So between DrupalCon Denver now and DrupalCon Munich, if we get 10 more user groups to hold issue sprints, we get a 1.0 release of the LearnDruple distro out the door and we relaunch LearnDruple.org. I think we've got a solid foundation to build on. So then between DrupalCon Munich and DrupalCon US, during which time, remember, there's also the feature freeze and code freeze in Drupal8. We expand more, we get 30 more user groups involved in issue sprints and we recruit some people to take on developing curriculums or developing ladders for the different Drupal8 initiatives. And I think that this is realistic with the code freeze coming down the pike. Then between DrupalCon US and DrupalCon EU August 2013, when Drupal8 is scheduled to be released, we have a goal of getting every user group to hold an issue sprint and we arrive at DrupalCon EU having identified two out of 100, for every 100 users we've identified two users who are potential contributors to DrupalCore. So they haven't contributed yet necessarily but we at least know who we're talking about. And then last but not least in the first eight months of Drupal8 being out in the wild between DrupalCon EU and DrupalCon US 2014, one out of 100 active users are contributing hopefully to Drupal. So hopefully by now I've convinced everyone here that the Boston Initiative is an initiative worth bringing home to your user group, bringing to the next user camp that you're going to contributing lessons or contributing code or all of the above. So one easy thing that you can all do right now if you haven't already is tweet something out about the Boston Initiative to encourage people to get involved and before we open it up for questions I'm just gonna hand it over to Kay and Jeanie who are gonna talk about ways people can get involved here at DrupalCon and back at home, thanks. So please if you really enjoyed hearing what you've heard today, our tweet tag actually is hashtag Boston Initiative all one string. So my name is Jeanie Finks and by day I work at Acquia managing the Drupal Gardens support team. I've also worked in several learning related organizations and past lives. But as part of my side Drupal community efforts and interests I've been organizing the design for Drupal Camp the last several years also held in Boston. I also co-organized the monthly Boston Drupal Users Group that you've heard about where this Boston Initiative has been piloted and I can definitely tell you after several years of doing Lightning Talks the opportunity to introduce this new Boston Initiative has made an amazing difference for our users so. So before I tell you about the related activities this week we have one ask that you can all do right now if you have a laptop or mobile device. And that is we want you to be able to give us if you wanna stay in touch some information visit learndrupal.org slash sign dash up sign up and there you'll see a form that you'll be able to tell us your interest level. Perhaps there are people here who just wanna write lessons or maybe you are a maintainer and you want lessons written against your initiative. So what are we planning this week? We've got two buffs and a sprint. This afternoon Wednesday 345 for one hour room 502 we're gonna be connecting volunteer lesson writers hopefully some of you out there with very excited enthusiastic Drupal Core maintainers and initiative owners in search of people who need your help to write these lessons and by the end of that session you'll be able to walk away with something you've already immediately contributed. So the Rockstar Core Contributor lineup that we've got is David Strauss and Gabor Hocchi and we've also invited Dries, Moche Weisman and obviously if there are any maintainers in the audience that want to come this afternoon please let us know. On Thursday 1045 from one hour room 502 we're gonna brainstorm and prioritize features for laurendrupal.org and the Lauren Drupal distribution and our last activity for the week on Friday at 9 a.m. Room 401 we are actually gonna hold our Lauren Drupal Code Sprint and everybody is welcome. We want lesson writers, module developers, designers and themers and if you've never ever contributed please please just come and we will help you. And so with that I'm gonna pass it off to Kay. I was really heartened to see when the URL popped up on the screen people's faces immediately go down they started typing and signing out it's really cool to see. I think people are recognizing that in fact what we're not doing is we're not trying to inculcate a revolution we're trying to do a tweak. We're not trying to introduce new work in addition to things that people are already doing. We're trying to create an invitation you know an opportunity, a direction actually to give you a URL that you can hand to someone when you're talking to them at your meetups and at your Drupal camps to say would you like to contribute? Here is a really good way to get started a really good path something very very concrete other than you know beyond what we habitually do you know where we say it's really important for people to contribute to core. Here you can have that conversation and say hey if you haven't heard about this path for doing it here's a URL. Get signed up start taking some lessons and you can start connecting with core initiatives and with projects that actually need your contribution on a variety of levels. I think it's exciting. I think it's also important to note that in addition at the same time that we're talking about this starvation of talent it's also easy for us to recognize all of us I think in this room and certainly I'll introduce myself as well and give you what my perspective is we see armies of people who actually want to build their Drupal skills and the nice thing is there are also a number of employers who are looking for these skills and these skills actually map very nicely to the ladder so we're not talking about new asks we're actually talking about something that aligns very well with a number of different angles and a number of different perspectives on Drupal skills and contributing to core and growing the community. So to introduce myself I'm Kay VanValkenberg and a significant part of my career has been helping people acquire software skills. Currently I run a Drupal training company called Ownsourcing and I am the co-director of AquiaU which is a training program obviously run by Aquia in Boston to bring new people into the community. I'm really excited to take up this role as project manager and help reaching our stretch goals because they are stretch goals between now and Munich which is under six months away. I think we can reach them without a significant burden on individuals but I think this opportunity to continue the discussion, figure out how we put things together starting now during our discussion period and continuing in the boss that Jeanie described and continuing in the sprint and then of course looking further beyond that where we can continue the discussion and give feedback to each other and keep the initiative on the same page. We'd like to organize some real-time conversations, conference call style or IRC chats on a monthly basis where we can all get together and help direct this initiative as it goes forward. So we'll be putting up a schedule and announcements of things like this on learndruple.org. So and as you've heard, one of our goals is to add 10 user groups. I suspect that, well actually by show of hands there are a number of people who are actively involved in their user groups. We'd like to help you convey the message about the Boston Initiative to your group. We'd love to have you in addition to signing up, have one-on-one conversations with us, nothing beats actually meeting face-to-face and talking about how we can help you get this message back to your user group and create enthusiasm and get that next 10 between now and Munich and then on a more individual basis, those of you who are ready to get going, Jeanie described what we're going to be focusing on this afternoon with writing lessons and then during the sprint we'll continue that on a broader scale but actually meeting with core maintainers who I do hope that several will join and actually describe to interested smaller groups what it is that would be useful, what skills would be useful for people to have in order to contribute to their specific initiative. So we'll start that this afternoon and we'll continue that during the sprint and then of course that goes on over the course of the next several months and then ideally with larger and larger groups of contributors we'll reach this goal that Brian spelled out of having every user group actually contributing and using the Drupal Ladder in their sessions. It certainly does create a lot of energy in sessions. There are some very specific skill sets that would be great to have. If you're a themeer, Brian mentioned some of our needs around theming. When you visit learndrupal.org I'm sure there will be some obvious initial cuts that we could take at that and I'd love to have conversations with you about how to go about coordinating and setting good goals and that type of thing. Theming lessons, theming curricula. And then for those of you who are coders there are a number of things that we need to work on around workflow and around usability making the ladders easy to understand and use and keep track of progress on, add to and the same is true with lessons making them easy to add, making them easy to export and distribute and so on. So there are quite a number of things that we'd like to start checking off of the list on having people actually focused on getting these things done. So I think now would be a great time to kick off this discussion and I'm also queued to make sure that people go and fill out the survey. The link is right up here. Let us know what you think and of course sign up at learndrupal.org slash sign dash up. So I guess we'll open the floor for question and answer. Folks could just go to the microphone in the middle so we can capture a question. I have an announcement, a suggestion and a question. Okay, so in that order, first is announcement. I'm actually sad to see that you guys are doing a sprint on, I mean I'm excited that you're doing a sprint on Friday but I'm also doing a sprint on Friday that I want everyone to attend, which is sort of relevant. My name is Jess, I'm XJM on Drupal.org and I facilitate the Drupal core office hours. So we are also doing a sprint about contributing to core on Friday. The first hour or so is going to be like a training session that we're putting together about how people can get involved in core simple self-contained tasks that are sort of simpler to some of the tasks in the lower section of your ladder. So I don't know if you guys, if anyone is available, between the nine and 10 part of the session, I would love your feedback on what we're doing or if you're available to meet before then and talk. This evening I'm meeting with the other people who are leading that sprint and I'd love to know if you guys have any input for that. So that's the next, the announcement. The suggestion is that I think there's a couple of parallel efforts going on. There's some documentation at Drupal.org slash new hyphen contributors that Jennifer Hodgson has put together. Have you seen those docs? Yeah, okay. All right. So I don't need to worry about the suggestion that I just submitted that to you. And then the third thing is a question. My user group is not nearly as big as Boston. I'm from Madison, Wisconsin and obviously Boston has huge Drupal community with Aqui in town, it's a big city. The average number of people at a user group meeting in Madison is maybe six and two of those are myself and Aaron Couch who works for ZivTech and then the rest are people from the university or community who aren't really engaged with the community and they're mostly there because they have a problem with their sites, they wanna get feedback on it. So my question is, do you have any suggestions for how to engage them? And with that small of a forum, how to make it so that it's not just like, this is Jess again standing there trying to tell you this is what you should do and contribute and stuff. So that's my question. Great. So I'll try to take those in order. And thank you for all those great slides and statistics that we used at the beginning. That was Jess. So first of all, about the announcement, I'd love to talk to you more about your sprint and coordinating and that sounds great. Thank you for announcing that. And about your question, so about the parallel tracks, I think it's totally right on to say that there are a lot of things going on in the community, there's sort of overlapping efforts. On my to-do list is to find ways to better integrate that into the various lessons and materials that are going off on learndruple.org. And hopefully we can just start those conversations and get things more coordinated. To the thing about, you've got six people in your user group and that you don't have Akwia in town and so the meetup is not as big. I have two things to say. One is that Boston had a gigantic and thriving meetup seen before Akwia. And the second is that with only, what's that? It's still a big city. It is also still a big city. The second is that with six people in your user group, if you are the only person in your group who offers to lead an issue team and you reach out to one of those other five people and offer to work on an issue with them, after you guys dig into something and post a patch together, you will have a 30% contribution rate. So you're like way ahead of the curve. So I think that you could be exemplary. It's not cheating. It's absolutely not cheating. One out of every 10 people is all we need to make a major, major impact. And I have some suggestions too about how you can make that possible because at least you have six people. I've talked to people today. There might be the only person. And they often maybe live in very remote areas and they feel very isolated. So a couple suggestions on that and I've thought about this as well. You know, now we're kind of in an era where we've got Google+, Hangout, we've got GroupSkype. I've often thought about how to make this kind of like dating service for a life. People who want to contribute but also there are people who need you and so is there a way that we can match you guys up? And all this discussion has been active in my mind because I hear it a lot. So again, the idea of being physical in person, I think we should start thinking about how do we think very cleverly. Pairs can again work very well with these other types of communications. Join me, I use that a lot. So the, let's see, the other, the reason also the other idea too is that when I've let a lot of camps, I've wanted a lot of amazing people to come speak at my camp but I couldn't and so I've arranged like them to be Skyped in and think about that's like a very daunting task to have a roomful of people like this that you're staring at a video. But in the end, I just took a risk and thought, what the heck, people from Copenhagen or UK where are gonna come in and at least talk and people want to contribute the time and do it, it will happen. So maybe those are other ideas for you. The thought about Skyping people in also makes me think multiple groups could coordinate an issue sprint. So you could all join Skyped together and you could be on IRC and if you've got five groups that all have five people doing an issue sprint it's a pretty big sprint. Hi, thanks, that was awesome. This is really, I'm Jeff Schuler, I run the Cleveland group and this is like super appropriate for what we're doing right now. Quick question, did you consider making contributing to Contrib part of the ladder and why did you decide not to? So people can definitely do Contrib stuff and in fact there are two curriculums posted on learndruple.org right now. One is the Drupal Ladder which is obviously the thing that got this off the ground. The inspiration for the Boston Initiative is definitely to get more people involved in core but certainly everything that we're doing is useful in Contrib too. So the second curriculum, the first contributed ladder that has appeared on Drupal.org is for the schema.org module working with RDF, Stefon, Score on Drupal.org posted that. So people can certainly package up Contrib lessons and put that stuff on learndrupal.org too. Hi, I'm actually kind of new to Drupal and I'm really interested, I guess not necessarily in contributing but as a way of learning core, you know I've always found that the best way to learn something is to really get your hands dirty with it and I just wanted to maybe share my perspective of what it's been like because I've been using Drupal, I was hired on from a PHP background because our company had trouble finding Drupal talent and it's worked out so far and I've experienced that learning curve cliff and I almost feel heretical saying this because a lot of people compliment the quality of the documentation but I feel it's a little lacking in some areas and for me what I've found is that it's very granular and detailed like if I wanna look up a function you know all that information is there and what it does is there but I don't have any context you know why does this function exist, what does it do, where is it used in the core so you know it's improving documentation part of this latter initiative and I wonder I can't be the only one who's thinking about like I need like bigger pictures like kind of graph stuff or how do different parts interact and I think that's part of what is intimidating to me like if I wanna make a patch, if I learn about this system I wanna make a patch but I don't want to introduce bugs to other areas and I have no idea what they interact with so the whole big picture of Drupal is still very big mystery cloud to me so. So I think you bring up some very valid questions and things that do represent something that the community in my experience grapples with. The ladders are focused on helping people get to the point where they can make contributions across the board where the contributions are needed and definitely documentation is a strong one. Certainly the lessons themselves are a form of documentation and the ladders themselves are a form of creating context and they're nicely linked up with sandboxes that also create context they rely on in many cases the example module which I don't know if you've come across that already but the example module certainly helps walk through various sections of core. I think that at the beginning it's hard to promise that these things will actually all be solved but I think that our objective needs to be to provide methodical ways for solving them that are complementary to the existing ways that integrate well with the existing initiatives and efforts. So I think that it's probably worth adding to our verbalized challenges that this become another way for perhaps a specific learning style to get this big picture and get that type of exposure and certainly another way to incorporate documentation in the work that other people have been putting up to creating that unified vision. And to add what Kay has mentioned I know listening and talking to people who've attended our meetups people do have different learning styles some people can just watch a very short video like watch it and then do it Maybe many of you've heard about Khan Academy it's been picking up a lot of press lately but we thought about there was ideas tossed around could the learn Drupal distro actually include ways that maybe videos can be incorporated into the curriculum and that's just another way to be able to learn the material. I'm just gonna quickly add I thought that one of you guys were gonna say that that's a perfect suggestion for a ladder. So someone should write a ladder that's like here's how you get started here's like from zero to create a content type add some fields, do some stuff I think that's a perfect user story so if anyone here wants to do it that'd be awesome. Hi I'm Brian Gilbert and I'm from Australia I'm a reality loop on dribble.org, Skype and IRC and I'm mainly saying this because a lot of the stuff that you're doing about talking about connecting groups up is time based and it's currently 4.30 a.m. in Australia so for you guys if we do our events in the evening and you're all asleep and it's the other way around. So anyone who will listen to this later or want to talk to me after the session I'd really love to connect with people who are closer to our time zone to try and join up. I'll say now we're gonna start doing the Boston initiative so you've got one. And we already have our structured events. So we do meetups once a month and we also do mentoring which is four hours on a Saturday so it's really good to fit both things in. So great, thanks. Thank you. I basically just had a comment pointing to Jess's actually comments earlier about the Boston initiative. My name's, or the Boston user group, my name's Eric Peterson, I'm actually a part of the Boston group as well. But having a large group is not always the best way to get new people involved because there are a lot of people who are actually not comfortable being at the Boston user group because of all the high level people who are there and they feel a little intimidated. So having a small user group, having a small user group is not a bad thing at all. There's also, there's actually a parallel group in Boston that's trying to get more new people there. We're trying not to fragment the community but to try and get both groups to be working together but you don't have to do everything all in one, one big group or one shot. There can be targeted group meetups and targeted areas for people to feel more comfortable that way. So keep that in mind when you're thinking about the big cities and how lucky they are. I just had to respond to the comment about wanting to know how all the pieces fit together and not wanting to introduce bugs. This is something that we actually handle really, really well in Drupal Core. I would just say don't worry about it because the patch review process for Drupal Core is so intense that people will find, if your patch introduces bugs, people will figure it out. Angie has this really great bit in the session she does about the Drupal community where she talks about two developers. There's Perfectionist Pat and Sloppy Sam and Sloppy Sam goes out there, she makes mistakes, she posts paths that are full of bugs and errors in white space but her experience overall in the community is actually better because there are hundreds of people in the Drupal Core issue queue who will tell you, they will let you know in no uncertain terms if your patch does something that's dumb. And I, dumb is not the right word, but well maybe it is. But I'd encourage you to sort of embrace the review process and the culture that we have in place already and if there's a way that we can indoctrinate that part of Drupal culture, it's like don't be scared to make a mistake, make mistakes publicly. The more mistakes you can make, the more publicly are, the more that you'll learn more quickly. So don't hesitate to be involved because you don't understand stuff because no one really actually understands the big picture, maybe like Son and Jacks. But that's it, I mean there's really not anyone who really like, I hold all of Drupal in my mind. So don't think that there is. Thank you very much. You just made me think about in a way you could almost have like a process ladder. Like this is just a general scope of these ladders and obviously we have these 14 steps, but really it's just a model for all the different types of ladders and concerns and stuff that we have out there and how to just step through it in a methodical way. Hello and thank you. I really appreciate the defined path that the ladder provides and the idea of having multiple ladders and different sub-ladders or whatever you're gonna call it. I would like to, I'm curious about having the components to fulfill a step in the ladder, be bundled up as open courseware and being able to be integrated in third-party learning management systems for entities that maybe aren't 100% focused on Drupal or that might have a knowledge verification component to it or whatnot or internal training systems. And I was wondering if at the Boston Initiative that there's been talked about making the bundle lessons more portable and maybe even developed as a Drupal project. Awesome. I can talk a little bit about that and pass it on to my peers here, but because I do manage a support team at Acquia, I've often thought about how to take this ladder and build in the types of skills that my peers should actually have. And to what you're saying, like some organizations, they might use again a proprietary LMS to be able to do that, but I thought what a great opportunity to be able to take this ladder and put in the different rungs that would be appropriate for my community. So thank you for that comment. So just to add to that, very quickly after we started talking about an install profile, I've heard tons of great ideas about ways that people could bring this into their own organization or their own company and use it for when you deploy a new feature, you're also deploying a lesson that your customer can do to learn the new feature or there's some in-house training systems and whatever. So part of the way that things are getting packaged up is that the lessons are getting stored in code and when you do a fresh install, those nodes get created. I think ideally we would move toward a model where this is all being done via services. So there would be learndrupal.org which is sort of a data warehouse and then you've got your organization's own installation of it that you can customize and change, you can pull in lessons and you can repackage it however you want. You could even ideally point to other warehouses. So if you're in education and someone else has like learndrupalforeducation.org, you could be pulling in lessons from their custom version that has education-specific lessons and whatever their stuff is, plus from learndrupal.org and then you've got your own thing going on. So I think there's a lot of cool things that you can do in the same direction as what you were just talking about and I'd love it if you get involved to help shape the distro in that way. So thank you for staying with us. We do have room for one more question and again, thank you for staying around. Hi, I'm Daniel Schivoni with Snake Hill. We coordinate a meetup in Baltimore which has become very popular of late and especially amongst people new to Drupal to the extent that we've had to do a pre-meetup just for beginners. And I was wondering if you had any ideas of how to onboard them into the Drupal community. So having organized our user group for the last couple of years, we've done a couple methods. I'll just talk about one recently that in conjunction with the Boston Initiative. Often people are showing up to your group and it can be daunting. There's a large group of people, there's a wide range of skills, can sometimes seem a little clicky, right? And one of the things that I really wholeheartedly believe in is trying to make everyone feel welcome and so one of the things I did is that I kind of almost was like a traffic cop when people would come in if they just seemed a little lost or just quickly find out what are they interested in and try to, we actually had a separate group of people who had no idea and or maybe they were in that position of just they were just like ground zero just needing to leap in somewhere. So we already kind of preset up a group that would accommodate that interest, right? So right away they just felt like okay and again reassuring them that it's okay. They won't die afterward or you know. So that was a pretty good method and again they met other people right away and by the end we would go out for social opportunity and they already had met someone that they could talk about stuff with and connect with even after the meetup. So now as Eric mentioned there was also another separate group that meets too that they can spend one to two hours. They actually use their library to do that and at a much different pace that's appropriate that they agreed upon. They can also do similar activities and they are very active too about posting questions they have that they may not be able to address at that meetup so. I just, I know we need to wrap up here so before everyone leaves I just wanted to thank you all for your time and enthusiasm. I'm obviously really excited about this initiative. I think we all are and it's very exciting to hear other people talking about taking this back to their groups and getting involved. So I hope you've all signed up. If there's anything that any of us can do to help you guys get up and running personally or with your user groups or whatever else you can think of please let one or all of us know we'd love to help you. Thanks.