At the Drupalcon DC keynote I was in for a bit of a shock. After Dries had delivered the State of Drupal and its general rockingness, Jose Zamora from the Knight Foundation took the stage. He started talking about the Drupal proposals that were submitted last year to the Knight Drupal Initiative (KDI), one of which was mine, for doing Drupal documentation sprints. I had been informed that the board meeting necessary for the decision about which proposals would win funding wouldn’t happen until next week so I figured he would just talk about it to spread the word about Knight. Well, turns out he had a surprise: he had confirmed the winners and I was one of them. The Knight Foundation has awarded me $50,500 to make Drupal docs kick ass this year.
For a quick summary, the money will be spent to cover three basic things:
- 80 hours of my time to write documentation and create training materials. This will mostly focus on making it super easy and clear for people about how they can help our work and make it easier for everyone to use Drupal, not just geeks.
- Running a few focused sprints with a limited group of people to really hammer on tough over-arching issues and working on code that may be needed to address them. (More on this will be getting posted later this week.)
- Getting me to DrupalCamps around the world to spread the word on documentation efforts, run doc sprints and teach local folks how to run their own to keep the doc goodness rolling.
You can read the full initial proposal on the KDI group site and there will be a number of posts coming up to talk about all the good places that grant will go, so stay tuned.
I really need to give a huge shout out to a few people that made this a reality. Starting with the idea last year, Tiffany Farriss and I talked about how awesome the doc sprint in Szeged was and how I could do more of them. She tossed out the idea of the KDI after talking to Ken Rickard about it some. Ken is the guy that shepherded the KDI process and was beating the bushes to get projects lined up. His efforts to make this program happen led directly to the Drupal community getting almost half a million dollars in grant money from the Knight Foundation. At the end of the day the person who pushed this over the finish line and made my initial proposal into a real grant proposal was Jose. He (and his cohorts) worked incredibly hard to make this grant happen. Thank you, thank you, thank you. And thank you too, to the Drupal community.
RockTreeSky 