In the past few weeks I have been building myself up to get back on track with my role as Doc Lead in the Drupal community. I've been off radar for quite a while now (since last fall) and I'm finally getting my feet under me to tackle the work of docs again. In the time that I was out of it though, it was too obvious that there needed to be some changes in how I (and the Drupal community) approach this whole documentation team thing. There were a few other people out there who had expressed the same concerns to me and so I sat down with them to kick around what we need to change. We came up with two fundamental shifts in how we do things as a team: communication and coordination. I think this will take a lot of pressure off of a number of people, myself included, as well as let the community take even more ownership of documentation and play a role in the steering of the ship, even if the captain sometimes goes AWOL. read more »

In my post last week I mentioned that we had a professional cat herder, Cindy McCourt, for the Toronto Drupal documentation sprint and that the entire approach was a bit new and different for us. It was certainly different than anything I'd done before, especially in the Open Source or Drupal world. I should start by noting that all of this grew from community efforts by a number of people and isn't any kind of brainchild of mine. This sprint was an awesome showing of how Drupal contributors can do amazing things. read more »

We wrapped up Do it with Drupal (DIWD [dūd] to those in the know) a few days ago and after slogging through email and catching up on the rest of life, I've had some time to begin digesting it all. Spoiler: it was awesome. I say that as an attendee and as a worker-bee. On the worker-bee side there are lots of reasons that I didn't want to run screaming and crying into the night, mostly due to great work by our organizing team. On the attendee side, I got to see lots of great presentations and chat with really interesting folks. Some big wins that made this fun for me were: a wide range of topics by expert speakers; in addition to IRC, the Twitter back channel was awesome; moderators to handle questions; and snow in New Orleans. ;-) There were too many times that I was thoroughly torn about what to go see, but being on staff made decisions "easy" since I had to be in certain places at certain times to help the sessions run. read more »

Last Friday Dries announced that Steven Peck (sepeck) had decided to step back from his leadership role on the documentation team. Steven and Dries asked me to step into those big shoes and I accepted. All I can say is that I am glad that Steven isn't going away. :-) I'm honored that two people I respect so much have thought me worthy of this title. I will definitely hearken back to the many lessons I have learned from them both and strive to not disappoint. read more »

I've been involved with the Drupal Documentation team, at varying levels of time and interest, for a while now. It was my first foray to getting involved with the community and I think it is a common entry point for many "non-coders" and people that may code but are hesitant to jump into the fray of Open Source development. Even as I've been immersed in the community and code, I still have a strong draw towards documentation. read more »

Like many other Drupalers 'round the world, I'm getting ready to fly to Szeged, Hungary for DrupalCon. The conference starts up Wednesday and myself and my fellow Lullabots, Angie and Nate, will be heading out tomorrow. I've been "training" myself to get up really early over here in the hopes that jetlag won't completely destroy me. My presentation is first up on the first day, right after Dries' keynote so I'd like to present while at least half-awake, if possible. I'm excited to be hanging out with hundreds of Drupal nuts for a week, but in particular, this is my list of "things I'm doing fer like total sure" while there: read more »

Registration for Drupalcon Szeged finally opened up last week and I'm all set to go. Got the flight booked as well as my logistics for Hungary. For anyone that hasn't looked at the registration yet, it is really a rocking setup. First of all if you register before June 30th, you get a very nice discount on the conference admission (only 80 Euros). Secondly, the 'con team has done a wonderful job of making it easy to arrange your ground transport and accommodations. read more »

Wow, what a week. Lots of people, lots of ideas and even some good work done to boot. Unfortunately I ended up missing half of DrupalCon due to catching a flu bug late on Saturday night that kept me away from Boston until Tuesday and left me pretty much wiped out for the rest of the week. Luckily my presentation on Contributing to Drupal was scheduled for Thursday and I got myself together enough to carry forward with it. read more »

It has been a busy week for me in a lot of ways, but one of the most exciting reasons was due to the first Drupal Association elections. Out of 57 applicants*, 11 were chosen to be added to the General Assembly as Permanent Members (PM). I am deeply honored to be amongst those 11. It feels odd to be amongst such Drupal luminaries but it certainly inspires me. I fully believe that you improve yourself by being surrounded by people better than you. read more »

Just over a year ago Josh Koenig started up a little group on groups.drupal.org called the Drupal Dojo. He thought mentoring a few folks in the Drupal way would be a good way to pay back some karma. Well that little group is now up to 1073 subscribers and has its own website at http://drupaldojo.com. Josh started a Really Big Thing that has turned out to be a Wonderful Thing in the Drupal world. read more »