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.
I vacillated several times when deciding whether to apply or not. It is a lot more than getting another badge to add to my footer – this is gonna be some serious work. The Association is young and still learning. There have been some ups and downs and fits and starts during the first year while the basics of what running the Association meant. The original members poured a lot of time and energy into it to get us were we are today. I have an obligation to pour an equal or larger amount of my resources into it now to carry it forward even further. This is the decision I made when I applied.
All PM, whether on the Board of Directors or not, do work in many areas to keep the ship afloat. In addition to general Association work we also have areas of focus that we are interested in and work on. In my application I specifically indicated that I have a passion for mentoring and education. Of course my involvement with the Dojo is part of this but beyond the Dojo, I really want to reach out to other Open Source projects to learn what kinds of mentoring they do, share information and see how we can work together in this arena to benefit all of our projects and Open Source generally. Being very involved in the GHOP contest has already connected me to quite a few awesome people in other projects. I’ll also be giving a presentation at the SCALE Women in Open Source conference on OS Mentoring and am looking forward to chatting face to face about these goals and issues.
So basically I’m damned excited to be helping out, working towards goals that I think are important and having incredible cohorts around me. I feel this is a going to be a very big, very exciting year for Drupal!
* Sharp (or bored) readers that actually counted the applications will see that there are 62 applications. 5 of the applications though were from existing PM. PM do not need to re-apply for that status but do need to specifically apply if they wish to become part of the Board of Directors. You can read about the DA structure and get details in the statutes. Any questions about how all that works, feel free to ask in comments.
RockTreeSky 