DC: Boston Initiative planning meeting notes

Several of us met last night to discuss bringing the Boston Initiative to DC. I've cleaned these notes up a bit, but they're still a bit rough. We wound up debating the merits of and concerns about LearnDrupal.org, but came away with plans to get things started.

For those in DC not familiar with, I'd urge you to read Bryan's original post about it, and/or watch the video from the Drupalcon session. The super-short version: the goal is to get more people involved in core development.

General Info

• We'll be talking about this briefly at the meetup on Monday (April 9)
• Learn Drupal group on groups.drupal.org

Misc Notes

There are four activities we can do to move things forward:

• Issue sprints (about 1 hour): pair up, and each pair finds a core issue to work on
• Learn sprints (about 2 hours): everyone identifies where they are on the Drupal Ladder and works through the next lesson at LearnDrupal.org.
• Lesson writing: spend the session writing new (or improving existing) lessons on LearnDrupal.org
• Contribute to the Learn distribution: this distribution is behind LearnDrupal.org, and needs some work for a 1.0 release by Drupalcon Munich.

Projects on Drupal.org that make up LearnDrupal.org:

• Learn install profile
• Lessons module
• Ladder module

Is there a ladder to learn how to contribute to LearnDrupal? Not yet!

Concerns about LearnDrupal.org

1. People can't develop for Drupal without knowing how to use it. Bryan: We still need to build ladders for learning how to use Drupal itself; existing ladders are about learning how to develop for Drupal.
2. Johann Falk has a "learn Drupal in four weeks" lesson. Are we duplicating that?

   Bryan: LearnDrupal.org is filling a vacuum in documentation. Lot of stuff out there is lightning talk kind of stuff: watch a five minute video to learn how to do something small. The downsides: they make a lot of assumptions, can be very time consuming (to setup develop environment in order to duplicate the lesson), distracting (trying to learn one thing, get distracted by doing something else)

   Hence: lessons have prerequisites, and there is a project sandbox. Each lesson starts with installing the install profile, so there's a clean starting point.

   Johann has also been developing a learning tool, mostly oriented towards leveraged existing materials. LearnDrupal.org is oriented to very specific examples, learn by doing. Worked with Johann at the sprint on making his content compatible with LearnDrupal.org

3. Concerns about existing docs on Drupal,org: are we duplicating existing content? Not really: lessons will link back to existing content as much as possible. Drupal.org documentation is mostly handbook/references. LearnDrupal.org will be how-to's and step by step lessons.
4. Scorm: some kind of learning/training protocol? Learndrupal.org is kind of a lightweight LMS

Events

Could we do every other week? Alternate sprint formats: do a learn sprint one time, then an issue sprint. Decided to start with monthly events and increase frequency if there's enough interest and venue availability.

Important: lessons need to be repeatable. Boston was the guinea pigs for what we have now; we could be the guinea pigs for the train-the-trainer materials.

Locations

• Newer libraries in DC have reservable conference rooms and wireless
• Need to speak to local companies that have space we might be able to use:
  • Alexandria: Phase2?
  • DC: APCO?
  • Maryland: unknown

Option: bi-located meetup: video conference between main location and some satellite location with mentors there that can help out folks there.

Plan

• Talk to local organizations that have meeting space we might be able to use
• Schedule three learn sprints to get us started, ideally one each in DC, MD, and NoVA