Time to take some time off the Drupal community
slashrsm
Tue, 28.03.2017 - 10:11

When I joined the Drupal community I felt that I arrived in the enthusiastic, welcoming and positive environment. I felt that all contributions are appreciated and that we're all following more or less the same goal. This belief was also mostly the source of motivation for my extensive contributions to the Drupal 8 Media initiative in the past 4 years or so. This has dramatically changed in the last year or so and seems to be getting worse all the time.

Our community has governance and conflict-resolution rules. Everything should be clear and transparent. At least in theory. But in practice things don't work that way. Decisions (political and technical) are often made behind closed doors where only small fraction of the community is allowed to participate. Decision processes are nontransparent and leadership doesn't seem to feel any need to improve that. This was also the main reason why I recently decided to discontinue my DA membership.

I think that, in order to survive in the long term, we'll need to reform our community to become truly transparent and democratic. We've been "living" in a dictatorship and it has been working for us so far. But history shows that too much concentration of power in an small ruling clique almost always leads to its abuse (I strongly recommend this book).

My impression is that the community in general is getting increasingly toxic. It feels that there is more and more hypocrisy, lies, secret goals and partial interests being involved (and I think that the lack of transparency contributes to that). Best indicator for in my case are the community events which have (with some rare bright exceptions) become a burden instead of enjoyment for me. I still enjoy meeting some people that have become my friends during the years, but I recently started seeing the community in general as increasingly negative, abusing and exhausting.

Stress and bad mood directly linked to the happenings in the Drupal started affecting my personal life, including relations with my family. This is not acceptable and I decided to take some time off to think about the situation and to decide if and to what extent I want to remain active in the community. This decision was not made solely due to the most recent ousting (which also clearly showed how the community and its leadership actually work). It is based on many events that happened in last year or so.

This is my personal decision and has nothing to do with my employer. I really enjoy working at MD Systems and have no intentions to introduce any changes into that part of my life.