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(Originally posted for DrupalCampAustin – updated 12/3/11 from DrupalcampOhio)

Today’s keynote is with Angie Byron (@webchick) – “The Drupal Community – Where are we going and how to get involved?”

(Sidenote: they scheduled the keynotes for right after lunch – a great idea for getting the max number of people there…)

Angie is one of the 3 core committers to Drupal 7, the co-maintainer for 7.0 release and the lead author of “Using Drupal”.

“Its the Drupal community and not so much the software that makes the Drupal project what is is” Dries.

The community doubles in size with every major release. 200+ local user groups, thousands of individuals scratching their own itches. There’s no one organization behind Drupal… (like herding cats)

Its a Do-Ocracy – people who do get more of a voice than those who just talk about doing – and the project wants as many people involved as possible…

It took her 10 years before she contributed to open source…

Myth Busting

What is a contributor? Someone who sees something and says – that’s dumb, I want to see it fixed. “I can do something about it”, people who say that are the people that power open source.

You have to be really smart to contribute. That’s not true. It operates on wisdom of crowds, each contributing what they know.

Writing a bug report (with full details) – is a big contribution.
Seeing a bug report and trying to fix it … – by submitting a patch that needs review
Testing someone’s fix – posting back – needs work etc… (this is very valuable). (patching and review is iterative).
Reviewed and Tested – contributing

Perfect before you post it. Nope! – the most touch points works better

There is a “They” … there is no “they” – there is only “us” (99.63% of everyone who downloads Drupal never communicates with the community) – only 0.05% actually do something with their account.

How to get started

1. Answer one support request a day! (if you’ve installed Drupal – you know more than 54,000 forum posts on drupal.org)
2. Make progress on one issue per day
3. Help with documentation (document it as you go)
4. Start with 30 minutes a day – the 5 day challenge…
5. Make the time.

Why?

1. the secret to Drupal success? – be one of the 0.05%
2. gives other people more incentive to help you
3. helps you learn faster – saves you time and money
4. gets you more business – attract better people
5. helps keep your finger on the pulse of Drupal
6. gives you a stronger voice in the project

Contributing

1. find places to jump in – novice issues are a great place to get started
2. seek out the do-ers who are working in an area you’re interested in (maintainers.txt)
3. Where you see no-one doing something – step up -you don’t need permission!
4. Get on IRC – #drupal, #drupal-contribute and #drupal-support
5. Core Office hours – Tuesday 11pm – 12am Central, Wed. 11am – 1pm (http://drupal.org/mentors)

So where are we going?

• Big drive to get all contributed module up to Drupal 7 – one year anniversary on January 5, 2012. If a module doesn’t have something for 7 in the works – you might want to find another module. You should have an upgrade path within 9 to 12 months.
• Drupal 8 has 6 specific initiatives – web services (getting content into and out of Drupal easily), Configuration management, Multilingual, HTML5 (default output all html5), Media, Design, Mobile. – http://groups.drupal.org/drupal-initiatives
• New board from Drupal association — new committees coming
• Lots of great energy in the community right now
• Bottom line - its the community that tells Drupal where to go….

Great presentation! (lots of pics of kittens and cats…!)