Not about anyone else, about yourself.
No one else have your knowledge about what is going on, how you feel, how you want to feel, how you react when faced with challenges to overcome and so on.
Same is true about what you want to accomplish, where you want to go, what is really important for you to understand and so on.
What everyone else can do is to offer help and guidance that can be degrees of either usable or useless.
Everyone else is doing this for two reasons. Either because they care about you or because it is their role in society to do so. Sometimes these reasons overlap, sometimes they don't.
Simplify your mental world
The above are a few of the most important conclusion I have found to help me make sense about how I can find a way back and feel I belong in the world around me in a more meaningful way.
Simplifying the complexity that went on in my own mind helped me to begin my own recovery and it was what was needed to also begin to understand how and what the outside, everybody else, tried to offer me. Especially it helped to better understand "why" they offered it and what they expected me to do with it.
Structure
As I kept recovering and the world around began to make sense the need for a usable structure grew. I needed a way to compartmentalise what I learned so it also could become practically useful for the things I want to accomplish in my life. Including how to do it while also create useful meaning to others.
Simplified this is what my top-level structure categorization begins with:
- Information - The individual pieces of content in my mind
- Organisation - How those pieces connect to make sense
- Collaboration - How to collaborate improving the quality and usefulness
For me this makes a lot of sense and I'm also beginning to believe it is something that can scale too.
Here are some of my reasons why:
Personal level
I can in my mind break down information in smaller pieces and create connections to organise how they fit together and affect what I already know.
I can collaborate with my personal tools, my own analog and digital devices, to improve the quality.
Then it is easier to identify how the updated knowledge and skills can be used in collaboration with others around me in:
The world we live in (analog)
This is everything physical that isn't you that are governed by the natural laws we humans tries to figure out mainly through science. Something we still know very little about.
This is also where your family, friends, colleagues exists and where we humans throughout history have developed societally structure, rules and other things that affect and limits what you can do.
Here information comes in the form of laws, rules, regulation, common knowledge and everything else humans throughout have created to organize life as we uncontrollable move towards the future.
Here collaboration is governed by historically power bases divided up in geographical territories on country/nation level. International treaties exists to govern how nations collaborate or not. Not usually means two or more nations are considered to be enemies of some sort.
Online (digital)
Digital is also a human creation. An invention that thanks to internet as a borderless network and infrastructure have changed everything about what we know life is about. It has given us, in practice, direct and unlimited access to our collective knowledge about how things work and where traditional geographical borders no longer play a meaningful role.
With a click we can instantly access openly available information and communicate with others no matter where they currently happen to be located. All that is required is having online access through a digital interface.
Online we create communities based on interests where we organise and collaborate to improve the information around those interests to make them usable both for ourselves and others based on shared community visions and goals.
The clash between analog and digital
For me the most important difference between the analog and digital worlds is this:
- Analog - Power and change is controlled and performed top-down
- Digital - We can change and create our own destiny
This is especially true for how open source works and where you have access to and can change the rules (code) that run the digital devices as well as the information (content) available online under open licenses such as GPL and Creative Commons.
Not only are we allowed to use it, we are also encouraged to participate and help improve it from our own experiences, skills and ambitions.
And we can do it without first asking for permission or with limitation based on where we happen to be born or where we currently live.
For me this is arguable the biggest disruption to humankind since forever and the reason why I think it changes everything.
The problem is that this change has happened extremely fast, in just a few short decades and that is an anomaly in human evolution we simply haven't been able to understand at scale yet.
It is why historical power bases (politics, religion, capitalism, etc) struggle so much to adapt and find their roles in this new order of things.
After all, power is about control and traditionally that has been about telling other people what to do, how to act and so on.
The result is, at least for me, the exponential growth of mental health problems since we as individuals are the ones this clash is about.
How does the Drupal community fit here?
For the Drupal community it is about how Drupal as a product can become an as useful tool as possible for as many as possible.
Since Drupal, as a product, is created through voluntary open source collaboration the quality can only become as good as the way we organize and collaborate to improve the information that creates it.
In digital that product information is called code and it is written in a human readable language that forms instructions digital devices (called servers) understand so they can perform and produce the wanted result.
This is what Manage in CMS stands for. We want Drupal to manage our content in a systematically way so that we humans can go on and live a more meaningful life.
As a community we can only make the information, the code that instructs the server to create and run a Drupal-based service, as good as the organisation and collaboration within the community allows.
Our opportunity
I think we have a fantastic opportunity to bring all this together to create room for us as individuals to grow and develop while at the same time collaborate to contribute to what our community visions and goals are.
We have a complex community infrastructure and organisation that has been created from needs as the Drupal project has grown.
Not long ago the https://www.drupal.org/home page listed a machine calculated number that ticked over 1,000,000 for number of active community members, individuals who had created an account to in one way or another communicate and collaborate with us.
Now there is another number, almost 100,000 users actively contributing to our project.
That is a lot of people. Each and everyone coming here for own unique reasons and with individual ambitions and needs.
I am one of them and so are you. Together we can help each other find ways to improve the way we organise and collaborate and we can do it with both analog and digital needs in mind.
We can do it by sharing from our own experiences and skills about ups and downs and improve the community culture so burnout and other forms of mental health issues can be avoided.
And we can do in ways that improve our own personal lives outside of the Drupal community too.