I mentioned the Drupal Ladder initiative in my post about DrupalCon Munich, but didn't really talk about what it is. I expect that most of my non-client-work Drupal time for the forseeable future will be focused on the Ladder, so a bit of explanation is probably in order.

The Goal of the Drupal Ladder is to have 1% of the Drupal Community contributing to core by 2014. That's the short version. A very low percentage of users on drupal.org have contributed to core, and we'd like to increase that percentage so that more people are helping maintain the system that we all use on a daily basis.

This goal is being pursued primarily through two differend kinds of events: learn sprints and issue sprints at local meetup groups. During learn sprints, attendees work through a lesson on the Drupal core contribution ladder. During issue sprints, attendees pair up and work to make some progress on a Drupal core issue. There's more to the initiative than that, but this is the important part, "where the rubber meets the road," if you will.

Over the past few weeks, a steering committee has been assembled to lead the effort and divvy up the work a bit. Before this, there really wasn't much headway being made on issues. There are a few parts that make up the DrupalLadder.org site: the Lessons module defines the lesson content type and surrounding functionality, the Lesson Ladder module organizes those lessons into sequential ladder rungs, and the Drupal Ladder install profile contains the lesson content that appears on DrupalLadder.org. The use of this install profile is two-fold: right now, it runs DrupalLadder.org, but soon it will also include sample modules and intentional bugs so that those who are working through the lessons can do so on a local dev site running the install profile. They will be able to use that site itself to make changes, create and apply patches, and so on.

With the formation of the steering committee, I am now the new issue sprint…guy? Leader? As the new Issue Sprint Whatever-I-Am, my focus will be on making it easy for people to start or continue running issue sprints with their local community. To begin with, I've freshened up our how-to for sprint leads, but I've got a lot more to do.

The core mentoring folks have graciously allowed us to make use of a new task-tracking tool that they've developed to make it easier to keep track of who is doing what during the core mentoring hours in IRC. I'm going to work with them to fix some bugs in the system, and get it ready to be rolled into an install profile. This way, we will be able to setup our own task tracking site so that I won't need to bug xjm each time a new sprint leader needs the user role that will allow them to do their thing, and things like that. All user groups who are hosting issue sprints can track their issues in one place, and ensure that sprinters don't wind up working on the same thing (thus duplicating effort).

I'm also going to try to talk to more sprint leaders and find out what is and is not working for them, and determine what I can be doing to iron out the rough patches. At this point, I don't really have any idea what this might entail. What works well in our group here in DC may not work well for a group in Oklahoma, for example, so I'm going to start from the lessons we've learned along the way but remain open to feedback from others.

I'm really excited to have more people getting involved in organizing the Ladder initative, and especially so now that we've broken the parts of the initiative into separate responsibilities. With different people focusing on different parts, I think we'll make a lot more progress than we have in taking care of the tasks in our issue queues, and the renewal of interest in the initiative will help get a few more sprints off the ground!