Topic:

• Drupal

Some people have a day job and Drupal is a hobby. If your work simply gets deleted after weeks of activities ... during an active day ... without any possibility to appeal ... its enough to stop being an evangelist.

I've worked during the summer to create an open space on education for London, which was a success. One of the main outcomes was a demand for a stand alone 3-day DrupalEdu open space. Sadly the follow up was a lot less, which kind of prove my point that an open space is really needed. Many people have been protesting against the open space, saying the BoF is all we need, well we proved that was wrong, for the cross-pollinating BoF only 3 of 20 people demanding a BoF showed up. I've tried to get more interaction going after the open space, but there is so much todo during Drupalcon, so of course that is hard. From our activities during the code sprint and talking with other people in the code sprint it was suggested to work on some particular d.o. improvements for mentoring and peer-learning. Only recently the novice tag got realized, which is a great step in the right direction (to bad I didn't see the issue when it got created, I would have loved to help).

We had a small and not yet very active group called Padawan Initiative to investigate and stimulate some of the more feasible plans from the open space and particularly the code sprint. The first thing that hit us was resistance by people that considered learning the sole property of Dojo and d.o. improvement the property of Prairie Initiative. So no reason at all for us to exist ... after a month of some activities we simply got deleted. Only this week some students start joining (its the first week of our academic year, so this is early) Ok, my communication skills are not good, maybe the project should have been articulated differently, but hey, I'm doing my best, trying to give things that are emerging a chance.

I'm sick and tired about politics that have emerged in the past year, this has created quit some conflicts. I've been listening to some of those conflicts, always with the necessary understanding of both sides. Organizing the open space also had the occasional bump, but hey, we figured things out. Still deleting a group after a month of work ... this is too much for me. There are too many hidden agenda's and peoples attack other initiatives if the other one would create some redundancy with their ow goals. I mean if you don't like another initiative you can ignore it or put more energy to understand why they are doing something. There is no problem with having a different option as long as differences are tolerated, but an authority deciding about it without the ability to appeal is simply not what I consider part of an open source spirit. If the Drupal culture has become KILL what you don't understand, I'm not sure if I like to stay on ... no wonder one of the topics in de core conversation was burnout! Well I'm having a burnout.

So now my concrete plans. I'm going to be more of a passive consumer of Drupal again. Having put too much energy is something that is not appreciated enough by some or supported enough by others. I've got 500 students to focus on for mentoring their projects in the coming months and I've got way to much good thing going with my research to waist time "tilting at windmills" in the Drupal community.