First off, I hope this is a good place to post this. If not, let me know and I'll make sure to move it.
A little background
I've presented at many Drupal events, both camps and cons, for years now. I often present on community topics, and generally, unless I am a keynote, the audience at these sessions is, in a word, disheartening. Often the audience is very, very small, and composed of people who already "get" what I'm talking about, so I feel like I'm preaching to the choir instead of reaching a lot new people. Don't get me wrong, I have definitely met great people, gotten new people excited, and felt some great successes from my sessions. But, those are definitely rare, and when measured against the time and energy required to give a presentation, it's frustrating. I know I'm not the only one who feels this way.
I'm honestly getting tired of doing community-focused sessions at events, but I feel like many of these sessions are important conversations for our community. Here are some of my thoughts about this issue going forward.
Types of community session
I think one thing to recognize before I dive in too far is that there are different kinds of community sessions. In my mind, to simplify things, I see two main categories: "get involved" and "community discussions."
The "get involved" type of session is where we explain to folks why we need everyone's help, and how they can get involved in the community. This is the classic, "here are things to do, and how to do them" that gets people to engage more in some process we have in the community.
The "community discussion" type of session focuses on more meta issues that the community needs to see and/or address. This includes things like sessions on community governance, lessons learned in community management, scaling our community, getting various groups to coordinate efforts, etc.
The Community track
At DrupalCon, and some large camps, which have tracks, there is a track all set aside just for "Community" sessions. I'm not sure this is a good idea. Inevitably, if people are at an event with a lot of thing going on, they have to prioritize, and while they might even be interested in community stuff, they aren't going to prioritize it over skill-based or technical sessions which they feel will make their direct Drupal experience better. At other events, community sessions are often mixed in, and while that can work better, at the end of the day, people often overpack the room with Panels, and there are something like 5 people in the community session room.
What would it look like to basically remove singled-out community sessions from events? Community info is important, so we don't want to eviscerate that. Here are some thoughts, and I'm curious what the rest of the community thinks.
Get Involved: A little community everywhere
I think we still need to have "get involved" type of sessions at events. I think it may make more sense though to have one session with the classic intro get involved song and dance, and have that early in the event. That session should be able to point to at least one or two other sessions happening later in the event that pertain to specific ways to get involved. These later sessions could be "normal" topical, technical sessions, which include a closing section on the community aspect of it. Things like doing a presentation on using Views, and then taking five minutes to explain the Views bug squad and the kinds of help that project needs. The intro session can also tie in to sprints that may be happening during or after the event. Basically, have a base intro that points people to practical ways of getting information and direction for getting involved. If they are going to a session on a topic to begin with, then they have some interest and may be more receptive to the ways to get involved with it.
Yes, this means that presenters need to think about this ahead of time, but I think encouraging every presenter to find a way to tie in the community aspect of what they are talking about would be a wonderful way to spread the word better, in a more engaging way.
Community discussions: doing some work
As for the more community discussion type of sessions, I definitely have the draw to present these at events to get the topic, whatever it is, on radar, and hopefully start discussions and work around them. Often there is some interesting banter around them, but then everyone disperses to the rest of the event, and most things are left hanging until the next time someone brings something up.
What I'd really like is a space to have community discussions and work, much like the technical sprints that are all over the place. I have been toying with the idea of having a "Drupal Community Summit" event that would focus only on community meta issues, and would a combination of topical presentations to get conversations going, and actual working sprint time. Basically a Core Conversations for Community stuff. And this should not run against anything else. Many of the people who want to be, and should be, involved in these community discussions are also deeply involved in other aspects of Drupal, and again, asking people to choose between fuzzy community stuff, or people sitting down to code on an initiative or project is just not going to work in the community's favor.
I have a lot more thoughts about how an event like this would look, and I have even started looking into the logistics for planning an event like this in Copenhagen. If anyone is interested specifically in this aspect of my above thoughts, please let me know, and let's see if it is something that is viable.
Aside from the summit idea, I'd also love to just get feedback on my thoughts generally here. This is a really big problem, and I'd like us to start looking at and trying out some solutions. We may not get it right the first time or so, but if we don't start to address this, I know that at least for myself, I will find myself dropping away from event sessions that have anything to do with "community" or a community track.
Comments
I think your pretty spot
I think your pretty spot on.
Lest face it the majority of the people that come to a drupal event is those that have some kind of technical itch they wanna scratch, and listening to somebody talk for 45 minuts about "the community" is a hard sale if its compared to having a 45 minuts sessions about Drupalcommerce / panels / wheteverthatmakesmyworklifeeasier kinda sessions.
We have a community that is around all these tech topics & having sessions about "the Community" is even for me that are addicted to the people around drupal a little bit to self centered & the attendees are usually all of us "who gets it"
I think the idea instead of using sessions as the same the Frontend Devs are doing codesprints now - where we try to get consensus around the basics (how do we wanna do this, concepts & thoughts - instead of hammering code) taking the same approach with community sessions would be a good ide.
Use them for governance issues (where flame's can start easy) is maybe better suited for face to face talks.
But in general i dont think theres a huge need for the "this is the Drupal Community = we are awesome talks" more:
- How to handle assholes in the issueques
- This is how you do a camp workshop
- conflict resolution for geeks
...and yes i have a community session at DrupalCon Sydney ;)
/morten.dk king of rock
morten.dk | geek Royale
I think in some way community
I think in some way community talk is important (we are the community and we need to be sometimes reminded by it), as the community grows and evolves this will grow with it.
But once you have been in the community for some time the need for such sessions declines, you know the drill and you rather learn something from a session. A good way to combine this is to focus more on 'hands-on get-involved' sessions I think.
You want to write patches? Come to session-X and we will take you through it, step by step. Once the session ends we might even have fixed some bugs and committed the patches (win win!). The people that have attended this session will have learned a valuable thing (and don't have to go through all the trouble by themselves to get git to work, get there account settings right, find all the Drupal help pages etc). Afterwards people can have time to ask questions.
And when you already know how to do this? Just go sit down next to somebody who seems to be struggling with this stuff and help this person.
Same could be applied to all the different 'groups' on Drupal.org, what is the best way to help out with translations, don't tell us that we need people to do that, show us, walk us through it.
That is a community, not a few hundred people facing one way (the stage), but a few hundred people facing each other, communicating, learning, helping.
Drupal trainer and developer
Community Camp++
Addison,
I also get the feeling that the community track is the 'black sheep' of the DrupalCon tracks, but I'd fight for it any day. Without the community, I'll stop doing Drupal in an heartbeat. That's why as community track chair I like to see stuff as "How do other open source projects manage their community" and "Why should I run for a slot in the DA board?". Of course keeping the "How to organize a camp" and the "Get involved in Drupal" sessions that are the heart of the track.
However, our community leaders are also business leaders and entrepreneurs and usually are required to present and attend the more "sexy" Core Conversations or the Coding track. Or even simply meet potential partners/clients...
That's why this idea you've now written in this post, and that has been on the back of my mind for some time. In Europe we've created some spin-offs of the DrupalCon tracks into separate events: there's the Drupal Dev Days, Frontend United, and the Business Days. The community track and the site-building tracks are the only 'regulars' not to have a specific event here. A whole camp about how to build sites would probably be of interest only to beginners and to the people showing off their c0d1ng 5ki11z.
However I see a couple of problems: 1) who would want to go to a community-specific camp? 2) how to ensure that we get the community leads along with the community wannabees? One possibility would be to spinoff the community track to it's own special day of DrupalCon. Usually DrupalCons are from Tuesday to Thursday, with Monday being training and Friday being sprints-only. I had in mind doing a community summit on Mondays, as the community leads (and wannabees) can easily afford to come a day earlier and I'm sure the overlap with the training instructors and attendees would be almost negligible - unlike for the code sprints.
Community Camp++
Apparently, managed to double post..
Maybe we should take a good
Maybe we should take a good hard look into what they are doing with the community leadership summit up in portland (http://www.communityleadershipsummit.com) - brainchild of Juno Bacon
I think someway of a fork of that event would be pretty sweet as a combo on top of the 3 other events we have running now in Europe.
I would love to dive into what they are doing in other communities to get some fresh air into the Drupal way of doing things (yup im talking joint venture with open source projects: typo3, joomla, wp, ubunto whatevere else we can find that we can learn from)
/morten.dk king of rock
morten.dk | geek Royale
Why fork?
Having attended CLS a few times, I can state unequivocally that there's a lot to be gained not only by internalizing and bringing back lessons and experiences from other projects, but by Drupal community people sharing our experiences and lessons learned with other projects, as well.
CLS has Typo3, Joomla, WordPress, Ubuntu, etc. people there already, because it's positioned around a major open source event (OSCON) which provides them enormous incentive to attend. We wouldn't need to build these inter-project relationships from scratch, over the course of multiple months/years. And because of the commercial incentive around OSCON, there'd be a higher chance of shops sending key folks there, and/or freelancers paying their own way, due to the opportunity of expanding their networks. This means a much reduced burden to get sponsorships, which we would otherwise need plenty of in order to fly in key people from other projects who wouldn't attend such an event on their own (this is also a Good Thing™ for this type of event, because I can about imagine the howls over "Drupal Community Leader Summit, brought to you by Acquia!™" ;))
So I actually would recommend doing this "Drupal Community Leader Summit" event, but having it the day after CLS in Portland, and encouraging Drupal people to fly in a day or two early and take in and participate in CLS. Then our discussions around challenges in our community like how to run great local user groups or how to handle jackoffs in the issue queue isn't stuck within our own echo chamber bubble, but instead incorporates best-practices/lessons-learned from other community leaders, and we also have the opportunity to reach out and help other projects who are just now hitting the governance/scaling/diversity/whatever issues that the Drupal community has already mastered.
Oh, and a huge +1 to Addi's suggestion of incorporating "how to participate" info in all major sessions. I'm not quite sure how to institutionalize such a thing... maybe include title slides for it in the back of the DrupalCon slide template?
not fork copy n paste ;)
the problem about "only" doing this in portland is that a huge number of europeans wont be there - thats why im looking into a "copy paste" for "ze europeans" & not forgetting the rest of the world of our usergroups & community leaders.
Afaik there isnt any initiatives like this over here so thats why im thinking in a fork - or copy paste version of this kinda commynity schooling event.
/morten.dk king of rock
morten.dk | geek Royale
I agree with Morten
The first thing that came to my mind when I read the 'join everyone else at OSCON' was to google for it to find out where it was.. As a European, I of course only heard of it in passing in Slashdot, and never even considered attending one. And looking at the list of 2012 attendees (http://www.communityleadershipsummit.com/attendees/2012-attendees/), I only see US-based people.. I'm pretty sure there were non-American-based attendees from other FOSS communities, but clearly not from Drupal.
There is of course FOSDEM in Brussels every year (I think one of the early DrupalCons was actually planned as an add-on to it). But that I know of, there's no community leadership summit there. And honestly, Drupal hasn't been seen at FOSDEM for a few years now, so I'm not sure 'our' crowd even attends it anymore.
I could easily imagine spinning of the community track into a CLS-type even in Prague on the Monday before the DrupalCon and having it work.. I am less optimist for stepping in to Jono Bacon's shoes and organizing a CLS-event close to FOSDEM, or making an independent event.. However, I'll do a fast survey among 'us' European to get some feedback and encourage the others to come here.
Different targets
I think a lot of people has this community camp in mind and all the ideas exposed here are great, one specific day in parallel with the trainings at drupalcons, its own event and combining efforts with other open source projects to do a global summit.
My point of view is that we're somehow mixing targets, I definitely think that the current model of having community tracks in drupalcons is working, but only for some type of sessions, the ones targeted to the global community, name them writing patches, learn git to contribute, etc. The ones that are probably frustrating (I agree with Addison completely), are those targeted to community leaders, such as learn more about drupal ladder or Drupalcamp panels and so on, so it would probably make a lot of sense to keep the general community track in drupalcons but move the "community leadership" kind of sessions to its own space.
Maybe its about time we begin
Maybe its about time we begin to have a "schooling program" for community leaders in Drupal ?
Maybe a day before/after DrupalCon in Sydney/Portland/Prague, & have a day of disucssions, learning(s), planning & schooling of newbees ?
Its the same as learning to code you need someone to show you how its done ;)
/morten.dk king of rock
morten.dk | geek Royale
Thanks for getting the dialog
Thanks for getting the dialog going on this Addi.
I definitely concur with a number of the observations. The Drupal community is good at talking to itself. In many cases, the echo-chamber is setting in across all segments (Drupal biz owners, product/distro summits, etc.).
In Atlanta, we recently conducted a post-camp survey with a decent sampling size (149 respondents). On an encouraging note, 48 people (32%) had never attended a Drupal event before. However, only 15 people had not used Drupal before and 30% of the attendees had been using Drupal over 4 years. By the way, Addison was our first keynote speaker in 2009 and graciously donated her time.
I think Morten is on the right track - we need to cross-pollinate, evangelize, and learn best practices from groups outside of Drupal. For example, we could use community grants to sponsor speakers at a conferences like Dreamforce (70,000+ attendees), and talk about how Drupal can integrate into an organization's CRM package. I know putting up booths at these events has been talked about before, but not sure what the results were. In essence, our community leaders should be speaking or attending non-Drupal events to truly reach and inspire those who have not yet drank the blue kool-aid.
It's hard to say if the
It's hard to say if the emphasis on community in Drupal's branding led to the great community or the current branding was an attempt to hold on to the way things used to be. Probably a bit of both. Being part of a great community of people back in the day made some of the technical issues a bit more tolerable. We were all in this together. That is less true today as the stack and tools used by bigger shops are very different from the experience someone starting from the Download & Extend link.
Parts of this thread read like a small town pride vs. the apathy of a big city discussion... which makes sense. We've grown. There are still stores open on Main Street, but there are several Wal-Marts too. While we had to walk up hill both ways to get a WYSIWYG editor working back in the day, I'd like to think people were more likely to do things because the thing needed doing. That's probably selective retention, but with the number of people involved and the amount of $$ changing hands, it is easy to see why so many people assume someone else should take care of their problems. If someone does decide to donate a small amount of time to benefit "the Drupal Community", it is much less likely you'd be recognized for your effort.
We are now a community of communities. While many of us are members of the back-in-the-day community (Sunnyvale... woot!), we now also part of several active sub-communities within the larger Drupal ecosystem. Every week you can find topic specific camps, sprints, and summits for Drupal using designers, educators, non-profits, media, community media, commerce, dev-ops, etc
Many of these sub-community events were bigger than Sunnyvale!
While I'm less active in "the" Drupal community, I'm more active than I've ever been in my Drupal communities. Within the community media space, we maintain more than dozen modules, 3 install profiles (easy, moderate, and difficult), our own area of documentation, a GDO group, a weekly virtual meetup, and camp and summit each year. While there are still only a handful or people contributing code, dozens contribute support and documentation. These people believe they are active members of "the Drupal Community", but they only contribute within this niche. That's really not a bad thing, but requires a shift in the way we think about "the" community.
Right or wrong, it doesn't help to ignore the growing number of people who think the big shops making lots of $$ and should be driving the Drupal Giving to take care of all the issues of everyone has. The rest of us can just sit back and wait for Acquia, Phase 2, NodeOne, etc to fix it.
Part of this discussion has to be about improving the benefits of giving back on smaller scale. We're great about highlighting the big investments big shops make on the front page of Drupal.org, but do less for an individual fielding questions in the forum for a few hours each week. We all know "Drupal is used by some of the biggest sites on the Web, like...", but the individuals have been reduced to a statistical summary. Compare this with CiviCRM.org. The first thing on that page are random images of the people. That says a lot about the priorities of that community.
Compare with our http://drupal.org/community-spotlight. That is 2 clicks from home (Community -> Community Spotlight) and hasn't been updated in almost a year.
I really like @mortendk's idea of organizing the organizers and offering session to train them to effectively manage/energize their sub-communities. We should be offering more tools and carrots, but I think we need to discuss the stick as a tool for cultivating collaboration too. As the size of community has grown, it is easier for bad actors to take without contributing and not get called out. Without getting too specific, there was a group at BADCamp's Higher Ed summit promoting a Drupal based "syndication server" they had deployed at several schools, but weren't going to release. These sub-community leaders should be educated enough in "the Drupal community" to encourage contributions, praise the groups and individuals who contribute in that space, AND know enough about GPL to discourage taking without contributing.
Where do I sign up?
As a mid-level developer
As a mid-level developer (module configurer, really) with no coding background but fascinated with Drupal, I struggled to find a way to get involved and contribute back to the community. I finally found a non-technical way to be involved (the Marketing committee and the content moderation queues). Even the non-technical queues can be intimidating - not knowing which components and what status is proper, etc. As Morten says, "It's the same as learning to code you need someone to show you how it's done." Now that I have worked the content moderation queues, I'm finally looking at other issue queues and thinking of diving in. "Community sprints" as Addison suggests might have helped me get involved sooner. It's a lot of work to nurture and train newbies, but since the community is now so large, it's not as easy to get involved. Anything we can do to encourage community involvement should be considered.
DSquaredB
Danita Bowman
Context: I'm the community
Context: I'm the community track chair for DrupaCon Sydney, and the most active organiser of community events in Australia.
It's seem widely accepted that one of Drupal's major strengths is the community, cutting out community track seem to be very counter to that understanding to me.
However the community track does in my experience appear very dificult to resource with talks that attendees want to see (as Morten said, we're largely preaching to the converted).
It seems to me that a combination of things, some which have already been suggested, may present a better approach:
*The views expressed here are my own musings, I acknowledge some of them may be difficult to resource but lets throw everything at the wall and see what sticks.
@BrianGilbert_
Help make Drupal Melbourne meetups more awesome:
http://groups.drupal.org/node/204518
The best way to grow your local commununity is by participating in it!
Heres an idea - So how about
Heres an idea - So how about we try this stuff out in sydney !
Lets use the day before DrupalCon Sydney, to get some of this stuff into order & use a couple of hours on that.
3 hours of of epic "Unconference Drupal Community workshop"
Location : If somebody can find a location ?
Program:
* I can do a run down on my experiences of doing camps, cons meetup etc and all the do's n don't & how we ended up in copenhagen with selling out a camp & doing no kind of promotion on it.
topics
* Discussion what do we need to run a community ?
* what to do with idiots etc
Yes i like to see some action instead of hours of talking ;)
We can then take the lessons we learned & worked with in Sydney & take that with us to Portland - and again to Prague - Voila we now have a predrupalcon Unconference thats open for whomever wanna join in & learn from the Drupalcommunity. (now it just needs a kickass name)
cheers
/mdk
/morten.dk king of rock
morten.dk | geek Royale
No can do
I'm all about people getting together to talk about community stuff, so if that works for folks cool, but I can't take part the day before DrupalCon, as I am doing a workshop. I'd also really prefer to have some defined goals going into an event like this, or else it just ends up being more talking, and nothing to show for it. But then again, since I can't be involved in it, I can just shut up about how it gets done and run. :-)
Learn Drupal online at Drupalize.me
offcourse we need some clear
offcourse we need some clear goals - just putting people into a room without any goals, will end up in just a bunch of talk - and not that it isnt fun n stuff, it dosnt move anything.
The reason im advocating for the day before is that were pretty sure that we have all the local players to be in town at that time, offcourse its pretty sad that you n others cant attend now that you have a workshop to do :/
/morten.dk king of rock
morten.dk | geek Royale
Good thoughts
I'm glad to see a bunch of discussion around this. I haven't had time to really parse and summarize all of the comments here, but I appreciate everyone hopping in here. Here are some quick thoughts:
In terms of what to do around sessions at/during DrupalCon, I think this will be a tough space to sort out, and the best thing to do is to start trying new and different things with the sessions — how they are mixed in the conference, what message those sessions should be tackiling — and see what works or doesn't for us. I think it would be reasonable to change at least one major thing about the community sessions at each major event to see what happens. I still strongly feel that the idea of a separate track needs to be the first thing to change.
As for the summit/conference idea for community stuff, there are several different ideas going on, and I want to see if I'm following them all, and provide some of my own feedback there.
It seems that the general feeling is that a day before DrupalCon would work best. I could also see having an event that happens twice a year like DrupalCon (one in Europe and one in NA), but not tied to it, could make sense. In NA we can ride the coattails of CLS, and we'd need to have a European event created since there isn't really the equivalent here. I'm totally open to being involved with that. It does seem that the general feeling is to link the summit with a DrupalCon though. I'd certainly be curious to try that and see if it works. DrupalCon is already very busy and packed with brainmelt, so I don't know if this is just adding too much, or if it really would work for people.
Coming from the perspective as someone who often provides training at DrupalCons, I'm definitely not a fan of doing this the same time as the training day. I do understand that is a limited of group of people who are excluded, so if that works best for the community, then so be it. It just makes me really sad personally, since this is something I really want to see happen, and I won't be able to participate, especially if this happens in Sydney since I am already confirmed to be doing a workshop there.
For me the focus for having a community event is not to have yet another unconferency thing with a bunch of sessions. For me, I really want to have it be more like a sprint where there are predefined goals, actionable items, and real work gets done. Part of that work can be discussions and sharing ideas, but I really want it to be a space to accomplish something. We are great at talking a lot about community, and then not really getting into the work for a long time, if ever.
Another thought from some people is to make this day a time for newbies to come and learn how to be involved. That is a great thing, but it is also a totally different focus. I feel like those things should be built in to the re-working of sessions during DrupalCon, or expand upon the already successful sprint day which focuses on this stuff. The "special" event should be focused on the meta issues our community needs to sit down and hammer out.
It may not be clear what I mean in the difference here, so let's say we have 2 topics: "How to contribute to core" and "How to support local meetup groups as a community." To me, how to contribute to core would be part of DrupalCon sessions, or as it is now, a workshop on the sprint day (which works really well BTW). It is a practical session/workshop to get new people involved and comfortable. "How to support local meetup groups as a community" is a larger discussion that needs thought, creating guidelines, materials, what-have-you. That should be part of a community summit to actually make decisions, and begin implementing them. I guess it comes down to:
- Are you teaching/explaning something? (DrupalCon session or workshop)
- Are you looking for decisions and implmentation of ideas? (Community summit)
Learn Drupal online at Drupalize.me
Community track in Sydney
So - another DrupalCon has come and gone, and another community track was poorly attended.
The number of sessions submitted to the track was very low to begin with, and despite having rockstars like @webchick and @mortendk, all the sessions had small audiences.
There is a community track for Portland - but I really think the time has come for us to abandon this track at DrupalCon - and perhaps other camps.
I think working towards a series of drupal community summits - at OSCON, FOSDEM (perhaps at OSDC or LCA in Australia) is the way to go...
AND getting "how to engage and get involved" content into as many talks as we can. A few suggestions have already been made on how to go about that... now let's see about making that so.
As "local content lead" for Sydney - I was put in touch with the global track chairs - so I'll try to raise this through those channels too.
Donna Benjamin
Former Board Member Drupal Association (2012-2018)
@kattekrab
The "Get involved with Core"
The "Get involved with Core" session was excellent for people wanting to get into the coding side of things, so I could see similar workshops around "Growing and nurturing your local community" tied in on the sprint day potentially working well. BOFs can then be used to address specific topics as needed.
agreed lets reform the
agreed lets reform the community to a workshop day instead before DrupalCon - if the suits can have one the hippies can have one as well ;)
/morten.dk king of rock
morten.dk | geek Royale