Remote DrupalCon - Day 3

Friday, 25th September 2015Remote DrupalCon - Day 3

"Talk is silver, contribution is gold"

It's the final day of sessions at the Real DrupalCon and these are the keynotes I've been waiting for! (click here for yesterday's blog if you missed it)

I say "keynotes" as in a departure from the norm there are two speakers today, both whom I've had the pleasure of seeing previously and both whom touch on subjects close to me - Contribution beyond source code in Drupal and Mental Health in Open Source.

Contribution beyond source code

Sketchnotes by Peter Decuyper

David Rozas (@drozas) is a Free Software enthusiast, Drupal developer, PhD candidate and postgraduate researcher whom for the last few years has been researching contribution in Free Software communities, specifically Drupal. I've seen David talk at a few DrupalCamps and it is great to see his work being recognised and able to reach a wider audience.

I find it a particularly interesting area as my non-code contributions to the Drupal project are orders of magnitude greater than the ones of code - I just noticed the other day my Drupal Groups Profile says I've been involved in organising 70 events, plus I've done things like create a cool short film about What is Drupal? In fact one of the reasons I used Drupal in the first place was because writing code for other people's websites selling parking spaces or whatever didn't really float my boat much as a computer scientist so I could do most of what I needed with existing modules and just provide the 'glue code'.

It is only really in the past year with the advent of Drupal 8 that my code contributions have started - much of that has also been to do with actually knowing how I can join in, along with confidence issues - the latter covered by today's second keynote covers so I'll park that one for the moment.

Commons Based Peer Production

The key to David's session for me was the introduction to the audience of the term "Commons Based Peer Production", which is how the Drupal community works. I honestly think the vast majority of people who currently use Drupal at the moment think it's a CMS product produced by some magical team toiling away building the exact feature you want to use for Free, or they simply don't think about how or where it comes from, it just is. By David introducing the notion of Commons Based Peer Production it ideally frames the community and the product, and explains how it is built and maintained - not by one specific company but by a community of peers, i.e. you and me, no magic unicorns in the sky. Far too often I see Drupal 'sold' as a product which often serves to disappoint when people encounter issues and don't understand the process of how they can deal with them, often expecting people to work for free and/or blaming Drupal itself for their problems. An overview of CBPP should be in every Drupal 101 tutorial, get people involved in the community from the start!

David covers the notion of what commons are and highlights a number of quotes from Drupal community members and comes to the conclusion that to continue to scale the Drupal community effectively more local meetings in real life are needed to strengthen the connections built online and enable community members to interact on other levels than just code itself. In terms of funding the growth, David explains we need to explore new dimensions of value - an area I'm particularly interested in as I love to write and do other things than code however the only proven way I get money at the moment is from coding.

Profiles on the Drupal website are covered, highlighting that community contributions are beginning to be included a lot more, as well as things like listing your mentors which helps the mentors too, not just your own profile. More non-code contributions need to be included - it's often been the mantra of Drupal that "Talk is silver, code is gold", I like the alternative "Talk is silver, contribution is gold". The more we recognise people's contributions of any kind, the more the community will grow organically.

David's keynote is an enlightening one as it educates members of our community as to what it is they are actually part of - I think this is key to knowing that you can and are part of it and helps to break down the barriers to contribution. He ends his keynote saying this is only the first set of results and wants to continue the research in an open, Drupal fashion and invites people to join in over at a new group set up Research about the Drupal community - this is only the beginning!

Mental Health & Open Source

Mike Bell, UK Drupalist begins his keynote on Mental Health & Open Source with a caveat that he is not a doctor and this is just from his own experience via a break down. Shortly after his talk I saw this infographic by Anna Vital go by on my twitter timeline which I thought was quite appropriate as I think I have at some time encountered similar scenarios and it's how you deal with them which makes them either constructive or destructive.

Mike covers these issues well in three sections - Depression, Anxiety and Imposter Syndrome. Rather than repeating his entire keynote I'm going to cover a little about how each of them affects my life and I encourage you to watch Mike's keynote to gain more insight into what is a very important subject everyone is affected by at some time or another.

Depression

It's strange when you look at your life and all the things you have - I live in a wonderful apartment, in a wonderful city, close to the beach yet depression is something which, as Mike says, just comes over like a dark cloud and it's very hard often to see the good in anything. Like Mike, when I first went for help with my depression from the medical profession I was put on a dose of medication and it did help me get through the worst of it. This was 20 years ago when I was a 'mature student' at uni (I'm now 43!). A year later I went particularly low again and was put on a different medication which had an adverse reaction with me which meant I was shaking all the time and when my best friend pointed it out I took myself off the medication and haven't had any pharmaceuticals since. For me, I know what causes my depression and I know what I need to do to get out of it - eat healthily, do lots of exercise, etc. Doesn't mean I always do it, and I'm particularly out of practice at the moment hence why I'm not as happy as I know I can be, but whilst the pills do help in some cases, they only tend to mask the underlying issues which are often more than not life issues which I believe working through them makes me a stronger person in the end. I'm not advocating not taking medication, I'm just saying for many people it's not the answer but a temporary fix, and if you're happy with that then that's fine. Mental illness isn't one thing affecting people in one way and there's no one answer.

Anxiety

I'm going through lots of anxiety right now - I spent a lot of time and money traveling this year so I could grow my Drupal network and learn more about Drupal 8 but I went over-optimistic again and didn't build my pipeline up enough, so a month ago I lost a number of potential opportunities all at the same time and now I'm two months behind in rent. The worst is it's debilitating which just produces a downward spiral as it means you stop doing the things which bring you the work in the first place. Luckily a couple of months back I forced myself to start blogging again, so when I had to cancel my DrupalCon ticket I thought that instead of being depressed and anxious about cancelling the one thing which probably would've meant I'd bump into someone and make connections for work I'd use my talents, keep myself busy, create the opportunity for connections to happen, and give you all an ear-bending in the meantime ;)

I'm anxious about writing about this stuff because I'm freelance, I'm the salesperson, and I worry if people know every bit about my life then they somehow link it with work. Well, for sure I don't do a 9-5 any more, but I go by what I produce, the end result, and when I look back at the projects I've produced lately I'm very proud - happy clients takes my anxiety away for sure! So thanks to Mike, because if it weren't for you I wouldn't feel as easy as I do now writing about this stuff, and frankly I don't care what people think, whether self-indulgent, too much, or whatever, it's helping me right now lol.

Imposter Syndrome

This is probably my biggest bug-bear with mental illness. I've been hacking on computer code for the lat 34 years, yet often when I look at some code I go "I can't do this" and it often take a lot of effort to get past this point, but every time I have I've proved to myself that I can do it. That's probably more confidence than imposter syndrome, for me it stems back to when I was in a previous company in the dotcom days and the head geek took the mick out of my technical capabilities. I admit I'm not the best one to be sitting down coding all day on a client's site, but that's more to do with the fact I'm a creator as opposed to a mechanic, and my days are not 100% coding any more.

Where I get imposter syndrome most is when all three issues are affecting me, and I can honestly say yesterday was one of those days. I was ready to sell everything up - I don't know where my next income is coming from, I'm late with bills, I'm credit carded up to the max - what am I doing, who am I kidding that I know this Drupal thing? I realised it was only my current wave of thinking though so instead of staying up late last night to write this final blog of the conference I'd do it the next day. Then anxiety set in - what if I forgot everything I watched? What if I just let it slip and didn't end up writing the blog? I knew this blogging thing was a silly idea & wouldn't last long - etc. etc. - if I told you every thought I had last night on this the page would never end, but we are here so once again the world didn't end ;)

Managing Mental Illness

Mike continues his keynote covering what methods he's using to cope at the moment and areas such as how it impacts companies and business. For me, Drupal enables me to live with who I am as a person - there's enough opportunities around so that I can, bit by bit, fulfil my needs from a number of different areas - personally I've never found a job which could do that for me. You're either building your own life or someone else's, from a bad experience being made redundant back in the 'dotbomb' days I've always wanted to be in a position where I'm in control, and although it's hard to say this right now with imposter syndrome creeping back in with the thought of the late rent and bills, I do believe I've managed to do pretty good having freelanced now for the last 15 years. That's not to say I'm not open to opportunities - often I think about how 'easy' it would be not to have to worry and just take my monthly pay, but I don't believe that's going to fulfil my potential as a human being - in fact I don't think it does for any human being, but that's another story for another time.

All I do know is I'm enjoying writing this way too much - I used to blog and write stuff every day as I wrote a Plain English Guide to Open Source but my writing stopped shortly before my Drupal started due to an abusive relationship I was in over in Canada with a girl who I found out was BPD & bipolar, but that's yet again another story so for the moment thanks Mike for helping me back on my road to recovery, apologies to those who are just trying to catch up with the goings-on at DrupalCon, I'll get back on the case shortly, if you want to discuss this, or anything, further please do tweet @stevepurkiss or contact me through my website, comments are broken on here and I'm not fixing them as I'm migrating to Drupal 8 just as soon as I finish this blog ;)

Mike's keynote finishes up with a well-deserved standing ovation from the audience then a short Q&A session discussing things like how we can help within our community and at our events. Mike suggests a table at events where local mental health professionals can set up a stall with leaflets, etc. Personally I think we should do those as part of the process but focus on the underlying issues as to why people are having break downs in the first place. It's a strange year as this is covered in other sessions I watched which I brief below as our project has experienced much 'burn-out', but it is great to see so much focus on this - seeing and being part of how we address these issues is great as I'm sure if it were in some company they'd probably just pass it on to the HR department to sort out, we have the opportunity here to forge new ways of dealing with the pressures of modern life. Personally I believe new ways of living like being a digital nomad are part of the cure - we don't need to be near the factories to do our work any more yet we live in an infrastructure and culture built around those principles, luckily this is changing slowly as we do more of this sort of thing.

Other sessions from Day 3

I must admit I had to have a break after watching the two keynotes, it was all a bit overwhelming - two subjects close to my heart, community members and their work being recognised, the reaction of the audience, etc. but I knew there were more awesome sessions coming and two days in with only one to go was certainly no time to give up now I've been blogging about it too ;) So on we continue, and on a similar vein to the keynotes...

Avoiding and surviving of contribution burnout - @laurii1 and @schnitzel provide an excellent session on what burnout is as opposed to stress, some tips on how to deal with it personally (like drink more water, cos it makes you pee so forces you to get up and move around!), and how to deal with it in our community (delegation, more praise for participation, etc.). More than half the session is given over to discussion with the audience on how we can make Drupal more sustainable so well worth a watch. I think there will always be stress and burnout whilst there's such a disproportionate amount of contributors vs users of Drupal so believe that at least some of these issues can be addressed by growing the community of contributors so the workload is shared more, and perhaps saying no to stuff if there isn't the material support to go along with the efforts necessary to produce it.

Pain Points of Contribution in the Drupal Community - Kalpana's (@kgoel) session is along similar veins but more on the practical side of what the problems are with the current interfaces we have and stumbling blocks to participation and how we can get organisations to contribute and participate more.

Hassle-free Hosting and Testing with DevShop & Behat - there's lots of options for managed Drupal hosting, and whilst I love them they are rather expensive especially when dealing with small or personal projects, plus it's always good to look at other options so when I saw there was an open source hosting project for devshops available I thought I'd check it out. It's interesting, but I still don't feel confident enough to manage my own and clients sites as I'm no sysadmin (I like to break things, guess that's why I like tests so much!) so whilst I'll still be playing around with self-hosting a few pet projects, I'll leave the client stuff up to the professionals. Worth watching if you want to set up your own hosting stack though.

The future of Groups on Drupal.org - unfortunately the presenter's slides didn't display properly so we couldn't fully see the proposed improvements but you got a good idea that there's a lot of good change on the way, focusing on the personas that were created a while back for drupal.org users so contextual data should show up in the future, at the moment it's focused squarely on developers.

Planning for Drupal 8.1.x, 8.2.x, and our future together - this was actually more interesting and important than I thought it would be, another half-session, half audience participating in making a list of what to be included in the next versions of Drupal now that we have gone to semantic versioning, i.e. minor versions as well as major providing functionality additions. Presenter Tim Plunkett whom I had the pleasure of finally meeting when I went to DrupalCon LA (yes, that's another reason why I'm cashflow poor at the moment!) is ideally placed to host this talk as his work in the panels and layouts area is particularly affected by semantic versioning as not everything will get into the 8.0.0 release. Watch this if you're planning on using Drupal 8 and want to know what's coming up soon!

AMA: Drupal Shops Explain How They Do It - not much in terms of visuals on this one but an interesting discussion from a few Drupal shops as to how they do things like manage remote teams and encourage clients to become part of the community. I find it encouraging hearing their efforts but as someone who's seen a lot of the issues lately with getting Drupal 8 out of the door I'll be a lot happier when the balance of contributions is, well a little more balanced. If people can make millions out of Drupal, then it shouldn't be as hard as it was to get $250k for funding some core development - for whatever reason. What businesses get back is Drupal, if you don't fund/help maintain/grow Drupal, it will disappear. Free as in speech, not beer remember!

Distributed Teams, Systems & Culture - An interesting session on how one company - pantheon - manages its remote teams.

PHP 7 is (almost) here. OMG! PANIC! - I started to watch this as now Drupal 8 is almost here we are actually making use of some of the functions PHP has developed in the last 10 years or so! It was a little too heavy for me for yesterday so I'll revisit it sometime as interesting things are happening in the PHP world.

Paid contribution: past, present, and future - this was a really interesting session on funding contributions, mainly driven by audience discussions being part of the core conversations track. There's been a lot of different approaches to funding in the last year with more people now being paid to work on Drupal fulltime, a few funding campaigns for things like Rules and other efforts. One particular point I thought interesting was the discussion on return on investment for companies sponsoring DrupalCamps, and the general feeling that it's becoming harder to justify as businesses want to know direct results. Suggestions such as questionnaires before the event so companies can research potential employees were offered and a general feeling that the overall sponsorship packages need to be revamped - companies don't care how big their logo is, they want value they can value. There was also the Rules initiative which was funded but took a lot of effort and it was mentioned that it's going to be hard to go back and ask for more so other options would be good to look into - personally I think people just don't know what needs doing or how they can get involved so it's good to see sessions like this try to hatch more ideas out.

Building semantic content models in Drupal 8 - I was particularly interested in this session as one of my projects is a Drupal skills-matching site. I must admit I was eagerly waiting Dries' Drupal 8 retrospective to appear in the video timeline so once it did and I saw that most of this looked the same as it was in 7, I moved on. Extremely interesting topic though!

Drupal 8 retrospective with Dries - each year the founder of the Drupal project Dries does a Q&A session which is one of the only sessions I usually attend. After quite a few DrupalCons (8 I believe!), I soon worked out that most of the videod sessions I was fine with watching after the event, so mostly ended up going to BoFs (Birds of a Feather) sessions where you get to participate in the growth of a certain area of the project, or the hallway track. This DrupalCon is the only one I've watched all sessions during the event but sadly that's only because I'm not physically there!

Dries goes through what worked well, what didn't, and how we can improve in the future - release fewer things sooner, improve core funding, etc. The take-away quote for me was when he said "we need to get off our processes island as well as our technical one" which couldn't have summed it up better - other projects and organisations have worked on this for years and we should gain knowledge from them, at the moment we just throw things into the pot and Drupal comes out the other side, we need more direction.

A truly superb session and one every Drupaler must watch!

Watch Later List

By this time I was pretty bushed so I thought I'd go through the rest of the Drupal Association videos to see which other ones from the conference I'd like to watch. As per usual a massive list emerged but thought I'd post it here for those like-minded!

We did a DrupalCon!

These words from the closing session where they announced the next European DrupalCon will be in Dublin next September! Before that there's DrupalCon Asia in Mumbai in February and DrupalCon New Orleans in May. I do hope I manage to work out my business models so I can afford to go to all. I'm particularly interested in Mumbai as I've never been there and I think there is massive opportunity over there, I'd love to grow teams of connections out there, watch this space and get in touch if you want to be involved or can help out in any way.

Although I didn't make it I do feel doing this blog has made me feel more part of it so didn't totally miss out but I do recommend you make the effort to attend a DrupalCon if you haven't already, at least go to your local events or start one up if there isn't anything - I learned the hard way that Drupal isn't just a sole way of working, it's all about the people, join in and soon things start to become much clearer.

Well, that's it from me - thanks for joining me on my remote DrupalCon journey and I hope never have to do it again as instead I'll be there ;)

Click here to contact me to discuss this further, I welcome all feedback!

tags: drupalconbarcelonaPlanet DrupalDrupal Planet

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