Drupal Association's Role in Growing the Community
As you probably know, voting is currently open for the Drupal Association’s Board of Directors. The Board of Directors plays an important role in developing the Association’s strategic direction, and voting for the Board of Directors is an opportunity for members of the Drupal community to participate in shaping the Association’s future.
One of the reasons I’m running for this position is because I want to help grow the Drupal community into new areas, and to ensure that the Association’s strategic vision is representative of the needs of Drupal’s diverse community.
Although Evolving Web is a relatively small Drupal company, we have an incredibly diverse team, with our 15 employees coming from 11 different countries. Managing such an international team has broadened my perspective and made me think about the the Drupal experience in communities around the world.
There are several areas where I want to make sure that Drupal better serves the needs of its growing communities:
Toolkit for Drupal Event Organizers
Anyone who’s been to DrupalCon or a DrupalCamp knows that it’s an amazing opportunity to make connections with other developers and designers, to ask questions, share knowledge, and build a sense of community.
There are plenty of opportunities I see to create a toolkit that would allow for more and larger community-organized events. Already, the Association has standardized the branding for future DrupalCons, and provided a DrupalCon license that will be available so that the community can organize DrupalCons in Europe.
I think that it would be great to provide a more open version of this license, that would be a template anyone can use to organize DrupalCamps. For regions where the Drupal community is still small, and there are only so many people able to volunteer their time and effort, having an easily-adaptable format, planning procedures and best practices could make organizing a DrupalCamp a much less daunting prospect.
Similarly, this year we’re organizing the first ever Drupal Business Summit in Montreal. This is another type of event which could be replicated in other cities and regions, and could be a great tool for growing Drupal adoption along with community.
Promote Drupal Global Training Days
Drupal Global Training Days (GTD) is an exciting community initiative that I’m proud to be a part of. The idea behind Global Training Days is to introduce new and beginner users to Drupal. It’s a great way to introduce Drupal to regions where there are not yet large or active Drupal communities. It also provides a welcoming environment that can be less intimidating for non-developers or people just starting to explore Drupal.
Global Training Days are a great opportunity to expand any Drupal community, whether new or established, and can be used at the community level to promote Drupal. I think having more shared marketing tools to promote these trainings would be a powerful tool for growing the community.
Understand New Users’ Needs
As a trainer, I’ve had the exciting opportunity to introduce people from all over the world to Drupal and to see them on their journey toward using Drupal and becoming involved in the community. Over the past seven years, I’ve trained over 1,200 people from at least 17 different countries; across Canada and the US, at DrupalCon Munich, and at DrupalCon Asia in Mumbai.
Through these trainings, and my interaction with trainees, I’ve developed an understanding of how newcomers perceive Drupal, as well as an appreciation for the diversity of needs and priorities of Drupal users around the world. There’s an Admin UI initiative underway to improve the experience of content editors, which I think will go a long way to making Drupal feel more intuitive for new users.