Prairie Initiative

We encourage users to post events happening in the community to the community events group on https://www.drupal.org.

The Prairie Initiative is a Social Architecture Project for Drupal.org

Project Goals:

  1. Improve the collaboration tools on Drupal.org so that we can do more and better work together and make Drupal better, faster.
  2. Grow the pool of contributors by making Drupal.org a better and easier place to become a contributor - to make it less intimidating to people who want to get started contributing.

More information and current status of the project on Details page.

Discussions

dahacouk's picture

Drupal 8 social network integration rewritten (thanks Google)

Drupal 8 social network integration and functionality is being rewritten and harmonised thanks to Google grant. Expect more unified social network user interaction and config management.

Tomorrow's (Wednesday's) Drupal Social API call (Hangout On Air) 3pm CEST 27 July 2016. Join at
https://plus.google.com/events/c04ei9ilpdhsl66s8ln90s3bq2g
We'll post exact invite code just before 3pm CEST. Be ready for it – headsets recommended.

To be included in future weekly calls follow
https://plus.google.com/+drupalsocialinitiative
and join
https://groups.drupal.org/social-initiative

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Improving Collaboration and Consensus Building in Drupal Issue Queue

What's your idea?

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Reputation/badges system for drupal.org: proposal

Part 1. Voting system to recognize contributions/expertise

Basic functionality for this part is written - Reputation module.
Take a look at demo site. Feedback is welcome. Especially code reviews!

We define a list of types of contribution - up to 6, "+1" widgets on comments in issue queue, forums, doc pages, g.d.o posts etc. let users vote for comment and specify type of contribution they wish to recognize.

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webchick's picture

Upgrade Drupal.org to Drupal 7 Sprint!

Start: 
2012-04-23 (All day) - 2012-04-27 (All day) America/Los_Angeles
Event type: 
Sprint

The week of April 23 - April 27, the Drupal Association is sponsoring a sprint, hosted by the Oregon State University Open Source Lab, to upgrade Drupal.org from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7!

The sprint will be mainly focused on the following areas, and the following attendees will be there:

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webchick's picture

Drupal.org Office Hours

Start: 
2012-04-09 11:00 - 12:00 America/Los_Angeles
Organizers: 
Event type: 
Online meeting (eg. IRC meeting)

Come to Drupal.org office hours to share what you're working on and help us come up with the weekly drupal.org hit list!

Stop by #drupal-infrastructure from 11am to 12pm Pacific Time (18:00 - 19:00 UTC).

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webchick's picture

Submit and vote on your Drupal.org ideas!

Two of the Drupal Association's 2012 priorities are to make Drupal.org awesome: both for site builders and for developers. We want to hear from you about what improvements you'd most like to see on Drupal.org.

Please let us know your thoughts at http://drupal-association.ideascale.com/. You can propose new ideas, vote on existing ideas, and also leave comments. When we have the more discrete list of things we plan to cover in 2012 and when, we'll share it with the community for feedback.

Important things to note:

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Expertise/Reputation system: initial draft

Current proposal for reputation system: http://groups.drupal.org/node/225824

Code for this sub-project is published as Reputation module.

For current state check out demo site.

Overview

The goal of this sub-project is to build an expertise/reputation system which will:
a. expose all the different types of contributions (including non-code ones, which can't be measured by simply counting data in database)

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tvn's picture

Ideas.drupal.org - community brainstorming tool

Goal: provide a mechanism for community to suggest ideas and evaluate community support of proposed ideas via voting.

Similar projects: brainstorm.ubuntu.com

At first stage idea gathering will be limited to Drupal.org project only, with possibility to add other projects if necessary.

Purpose

Tool aims to be a centralized place for all the brainstorming around improvements to Drupal.org. Currently idea/suggestions are scattered around various issue queues, groups, wiki pages etc, making it almost impossible to follow everything and see "big picture" of features in demand.

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dww's picture

Issue following is now live on Drupal.org!

Yay -- another victory for the Prairie Initiative and improving Drupal.org!

Drupal.org front page news:
Stop subscribing, start following

See also:
The history of how we killed "subscribe" comments on Drupal.org

People interested in this might also be interested in:

Expand "follow" functionality on Drupal.org

And while I'm dropping links, for anyone in town for BADCamp, don't forget to checkout:

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"Initiative pages" on drupal.org

Angie "webchick" Byron just posted a big thread in the drupal.org webmaster's queue:

#1300972: Replace /community-inititaives with a more structured means of creating initiatives + tracking progress

This has a LOT in common with our concept of Topic pages (although there are important differences).

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Topic pages: Technical implementation

Initial discussion on Topic pages is here : http://groups.drupal.org/node/144584
Latest mockups are here : http://groups.drupal.org/node/144584#comment-592174

This wiki is ment to aggregate all discussions on technical implementation of these pages.

Issue tag is "topic pages".

Desired features for Topic pages grouped into stages by the must-haveness of their implementation:

Basic topic page

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Contributing Code for Prairie Initiative - the technical side

1. Develop small features locally

To really work on features I'd say you need a local copy of d.o. Only the relevant sections would be enough, but as they are hard to cut out we go with a complete copy.

To get a local copy of drupal.org:

Apply for bazaar pull access for the d.o. live repo. This way you can always pull the latest d.o. code from that repo.

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tsvenson's picture

Module development guidelines and checklists

Drupal 7 has introduced a much better user experience, especially for site builders and content administrators. The much clearer separation between backend and frontend is one example from a long list of improvements.

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webchick's picture

Tracking community health via metrics

Dalin pointed me to this bad-ass blog post about how Mozilla does metrics around community management: http://eaves.ca/2011/04/07/developing-community-management-metrics-and-t...

Check this dashboard out!

Only local images are allowed.

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gdd's picture

Low Hanging Fruit

Yesterday we had a scrum with all the initiative owners for D8, and we were discussing tools that could be used for the initiative owners to help communicate with contributors and organize information (one of our biggest pain points at the moment.) Obviously this group has been doing a lot of work around this. Therefore I ask (on our behalf) if there are items you have identified that are low hanging fruit we could grab and work on but would still provide high impact.

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Success Metrics and Survey

As previously discussed, it's important that we monitor whether or not our work here is having a positive, negative or any impact at all.

There are two ways we will do this:
1 - site metrics. We'll grab a snapshot of certain site metrics at regular intervals (quarterly) and compare
2 - survey. We'll take a regular survey to capture attitudes to contribution to see if these change over time.

Survey:

I've created a survey here.

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Project page redesign

Current Status - on hold

The current project (module, theme) page could do a better job of supporting both a site builder (someone choosing modules to use when building a Drupal site) and a module maintainer (someone responding to feature and support requests and planning a roadmap for future development hopefully with the assistance of co-maintainers). We'd like to find a way to support both these audiences better.

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Improving notifications

Current status - on hold

We need to make it easier to subscribe to issues/topics/areas of interest and then to be notified when something is going on that we might be interested in and willing/able to contribute to.

The dashboard of Drupal.org should be redesigned a little to make it easier to display and read these notifications
We should also make a much better use of email notifications than we currently do, and look at ways to automate Twitter/IRC notifications for those who want more immediate notice. We need to allow users to configure their notification preferences globally or by specific topic.

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Reputation system for d.o.

Current Status - Active

Initial draft is open for discussion
Basic module is under development
Demo site is available

Overview

The goal of this sub-project is to build an expertise/reputation system which will cover all the different types of contributions (including non-code ones), show the value of non-code contributions, encourage more non-code contributions, encourage more possible contributors to start actually contributing.

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Topic Pages

Current Status - Ready for implementation

The design phase is over for this sub-project and it is ready to be implemented.
Discussion on technical implementation started here: http://groups.drupal.org/node/179394

Overview :

'Topic' page aggregates all activity across d.o, which was tagged with this specific topic.
We've explored and ditched the idea of these things being 'team' spaces.

Earlier Prairie discussions

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Issue Page redesign

Current Status - on hold

Re-designing an issue page so that it is easier to contribute and our discussions/collaborations are more effective.

Few positive things happened recently to issue pages, such as Issue following and Issue summaries, but we can do even better!

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Exploring Solutions: Better Tools for Large Initiatives

On very own example of Prairie Initiative we can see that there is no convenient place/way on d.o to plan and manage big initiatives/activities.

Currently first idea which comes to mind when one is managing initiative like Prairie is building separate website for it. Ideally this should not be the case as d.o must provide environment for this kind of work and not force people going elsewhere.

There are 2 possible ways to manage big initiatives right now: via issue queue and via g.d.o. Both are not working very well, probably because both of them were designed for other purposes.

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eigentor's picture

Exploring solutions: Better Module/Theme Listing Pages

A page that is closely linked to the individual project pages http://groups.drupal.org/node/137914 is the Module (theme) listing page.

This page can be filtered a lot, but keeps basically the same look, if you filter by Module category, most installed or whatever. And they are also the same if you list Modules, Installation profiles or Themes.
What tasks do those pages try to accomplish and how do they achieve / fail?

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Shadlington's picture

Exploring solutions: Supporting Sponsorship for Drupal Contribution

There are people who would like to spend more time doing Drupal contrib work but who cannot financially justify taking time off commercial work or minding the kids (or other demands of life) in order to do so. These are often highly skilled and experienced members of the Drupal community.

There is an opportunity to make it financially (and otherwise) viable for these contributors to choose to do Drupal contrib work by helping them find commercial sponsorship, primarily from companies who benefit from Drupal being a better product and a stronger more active community.

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Exploring Solutions: Showing Reputation/Experience on Drupal.org profiles

OK. So I know this is a big hairy, scary one, but I think it needs tackling.

We need a way to better recognise a wider scope of contributions to Drupal for 'social' reasons (so people who don't actually know each other can more easily determine who is who and how they contribute to the project) so that people who don't actually 'commit' anything but contribute a lot have their contributions more recognisable, and then so that we can potentially match people to projects/issues when we need people to help!

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naught101's picture

What decision making model do you favour for running the various parts of drupal? Eg. d.o, g.d.o, issue queue, promo etc.

Totalitarian dictatorship - absolute control in the hands of one person.
0% (0 votes)
Benevolent dictator for life - reviews community decisions, has veto (eg. Dries)
15% (2 votes)
Elected dictator, elections every X year(s), one citizen one vote, 50%+1 wins, minimum Y votes
8% (1 vote)
Representative Democracy with quorum - elect a council, one citizen one vote, quota%+1 wins, minimum X votes
8% (1 vote)
Representative Democracy with who ever shows up - elect a council, one citizen one vote, quota%+1 wins
0% (0 votes)
Participatory Democracy with quorum - every issue, one citizen one vote, 50%+1 wins, minimum X votes
8% (1 vote)
Participatory Democracy with who ever shows up - every issue, one citizen one vote, 50%+1 wins
0% (0 votes)
Concensus with quorum - minimum X people discuss until there is no dissent
0% (0 votes)
Modified consensus with quorum - minimum X people discuss until there is no dissent from at least ~75% of participants
15% (2 votes)
Meritocracy - who ever does the most work gets the most say.
15% (2 votes)
Oligarchy - rule by few - same as dictatorship, but with a few dictators.
0% (0 votes)
Anarchy - everyone does what they want (open permissions), but with discussion, and the best interest of the whole community.
15% (2 votes)
Anomie - everyone does what they want (open permissions), and screw the rest of you.
0% (0 votes)
Gerontocracy - rule by the ones who have been part of the community for longest.
0% (0 votes)
Demarchy/Lottocracy - rule by rotated, randomly selected council.
0% (0 votes)
Other
15% (2 votes)
Total votes: 13
naught101's picture

Separate dev.drupal.org

Disclaimer: This is not a request. This is not a complaint. This is not a demand. This is just an idea, posted here with the intention to provoke thoughts. I cannot commit any time to any future implementation, and I would not expect anyone else to. I do not even expect you to think it's a good idea ;)

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Drupal.org Process: Bringing idea to production.

The draft policy, procedures and requirements for bringing *.drupal.org initiatives onto the live sites are published here:

Process for getting changes deployed on drupal.org
Drupal.org development guidelines

Hopefully as ideas are generated and refined through the Prairie Initiative and people start implementing solutions, implementors can be proactive rather than reactive to the process and requirements necessary for improving Drupal.org.

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kika's picture

Github's Issues 2.0

Github has an excellent track record merging code and communication. The do not fail to deliver: https://github.com/blog/831-issues-2-0-the-next-generation - lot to learn from there!

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dalin's picture

Mozilla Foundation develops community management metrics and tools

This might be outside of Prairie, but at the very least is tangential.
http://eaves.ca/2011/04/07/developing-community-management-metrics-and-t...

This blog post talks about how Mozilla is creating some new tools to monitor contributor experience and catch people falling away. They are really trying to tackle the same issues that the Prairie Initiative is. Perhaps we can borrow some ideas. Here is a quote from the blog post, but I've replaced "Mozilla" with "Drupal":

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lisarex's picture

Drupal.org content audit approach

We did it! Auditing phase now over.

A Drupal.org content audit will help us determine what we content have, where it is, and what work it needs (whether it's redundant, outdated or just not worthy). I haven't determined if this project should exclude Documentation book nodes, which obviously add a lot more nodes to the mix!

This content audit will be the first step towards a content strategy for Drupal.org.

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Module Approval Process is Too Slow

We have many individuals waiting to be reviewed, and few reviewers. This gives us a backlog of applications awaiting review, which makes both reviewers and applicants unhappy. So how can we improve this?

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Prototypes/Idea/Mock-ups

Put up your ideas/prototypes/mock-ups here in this wiki page.

Lewis' Full HTML Prototype 3 Version 2 - Sandbox

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leisareichelt's picture

Prioritising User Journeys for the Issue Queue - Share yours here!

Something that we should definitely do early on in this project is get a sense of all the different user journeys we need to accommodate and do a prioritisation exercise around which we want to best support (we'll try to support all of them, but in order for any of them to be good, we need to make priorities).

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moshe weitzman's picture

Github Pull Requests

For code contributors and reviewers, I think the Github Pull Request model is extremely tight. Please read their blog post at https://github.com/blog/712-pull-requests-2-0. Note that Github can optionally associate an issue with a Pull request. I think thats a good starting point for how pull requests and issues play together.

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leisareichelt's picture

Mini Research Project - Module Maintainers (Participants please!)

I'm really pleased that we're starting to see some divergent use cases starting to emerge as we explore this topic further - the whole big challenge that we've got here is different people using the issue queue (or not using it), issue pages and product pages in different ways and we need to create an environment that better supports a wider range of needs.

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MGParisi's picture

Too Many Cooks in the Kitchen!

Improving Drupal.org and its sub sites can be difficult if not impossible at times. Solving small issues with any project are usually easy. However I have noticed that dealing with larger more complex issues (many of them presented in the Prairie Initiative) become very hard to implement because everyone has an opinion on how it SHOULD be. If a solution is presented a single individual has the ability to drag out the problem simply by continuing the debate.

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leisareichelt's picture

A Topic page? Initial ideas

I think we've touched occasionally on the idea of a 'topic' page - a way to get a slice of the issue queue across a particular topic (I'm using this in place of tag at the moment... partly because I want to avoid the issue of legacy tags right now. we can get to that later).

this would be a place where you can both get an overview of D.O activity relevant to the topic and to be able to follow that topic for future notifications etc.

I've done a really rough wireframe of what might go on there - lots of detail yet to be added.
thoughts/feedback/ideas welcome.

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Finding your way on the Prairie

leisareichelt's picture

Exploring Solutions: Notifications

So, part of the problem that we need to solve involves notifications - being able to know when there's something going on that you might want to be a part of and being able to manage the noise.

At the moment, I'm thinking broadly about three solution areas:

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yoroy's picture

Google Summer of Code projects?

April 8 is the deadline for submitting project ideas for this years Google Summer of code: http://groups.drupal.org/google-summer-code-2011

Lets see if we can carve out a spec for something that a student can spend a couple of weeks of coding on in the coming week :)

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Exploring Solutions: Better Product/Project/Module pages

Product/Module pages are the entry point to the issue queue for many people and one of our opportunties to both increase the quality of the additions to the queue (bug reports and feature requests), to direct support queries appropriately, and also to recruit new contributors and recognise existing contributors - to that end they definitely qualify for some Prairie Initiative attention.

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leisareichelt's picture

Issue Page Templates - Some ideas (in the form of a wireframe) for your consideration

I've put together a rough wireframe looking at some ideas drawn from elsewhere on the web (particularly Quora and OpenIdeo) and the way that they might apply to our issue page.

I've posted a wireframe here that you can annotate directly https://disambiguity.notableapp.com/posts/960b8ce5781fb3cca2aadcec808f68... this also includes my annotations.

As always you're more than welcome to post your response in the comments below.

Look forward to hearing your thoughts on this.

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leisareichelt's picture

What parts of Drupal will the Prairie Initiative touch?

Part experiment, part update that maps out the parts of Drupal (predominantly Drupal.org) that I have a feeling the Prairie Initiative is going to want to get its fingers into.

You can take a look at that document here:
https://disambiguity.notableapp.com/posts/97ddea6f0af0c2f70c0dc05f623eed...

If you have feedback on the document you can do one of two things:
1. post your feedback here
2. post it in context on the document there

I know I'll probably get in trouble for using a Not-Drupal tool here but I want to be able to share this outside of the confines of Groups.

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MGParisi's picture

Providing better content to its audience.

The thing I commonly find with forum/committee based systems is that they become very set in their ways. The systems become very difficult to change, and the hostility within these systems are most often sharp as a knife. Contrasty, open community based systems (like those found in "social networks"), are naturally less hostile, more flexible, faster to change with the tide, and able to meet a the needs of a much larger target audience.

This document is an attempt to reduce duplication, increase information accessibility and provide additional flexibility. In addition it will attempt to explain a system which will increase collaboration and decrease hostilities towards change. Thus promoting a healthier environment that accepts rapid change and reduces

I have seen, and even proven that the way in which a system is built directly effects the culture that is within that system. Thus carefully made systems tailored to their audience actually promote growth, improve communication, promote change, reduce hostility and reduce information duplication.

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Exploring solutions: Our Profile Pages

I think there's a big opportunity to make more of our profile pages so that they are actually useful - both for humans and perhaps some automated match-making in the issue queue). Thoughts?

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Exploring solutions: Managing Duplication

We want to reduce duplication in the issue queue but we want to do it in a friendly way.

There are (at least) two parts to this:

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Exploring solutions: Changing the way an issue page works

How can we fix the layout/components on an issue page so that it is easier to contribute and our discussions/collaborations are more effective?

Some big ideas seem to be:

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Exploring solutions: knowing about issues when I need to know about them

We know that one of the major problems is that it is next to impossible (unless you live in IRC) to know about all the issues you'd like to know about. Let's explore some solutions to that problem. Ideas that we've talked about already include:

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Exploring Solutions: Discovering the issue queue (onboarding really new people)

So, we know that if you're new to Drupal, the issue queue can be pretty overwhelming.
Actually, worse than that, it can be completely undiscoverable!

Here's a place to start exploring possible ways to make the experience of getting started contributing to Drupal a more pleasant and inspiring one.

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How do we know if we're succeeding? (Metrics)

I'd love to have some kind of metrics that we can monitor to make sure that we're actually improving things through any changes that we manage to push through.

Can you help me work out what numbers we'd want to keep an eye on and then work out how we find out what they are currently so we can start measuring?

Suggested metrics

The kind of things I'm thinking of are:

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Senpai's picture

What if the Issue Queue informed you that the code you're working on is also being touched by someone else? (Yay!)

[EDIT: This idea is temporarily code-named D.I.A.S., the Duplicate Issue Alert System]

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webchick's picture

Brainstorming: What's the current issue status?

Hope this isn't being presumptuous to start throwing around some designs, but I was thinking about this some on the plane ride home...

One of the things that's really challenging about our collaboration tools is understanding what the current status is of an issue. Another thing raised at the talk was that it's very difficult for a passer-by to understand how they might be able to help. And a third pain point is lack of easy, contextual documentation about how to actually do things like write docs, create patches, etc.

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Stopping the bleeding

I was talking to Leisa at DrupalCon about how this initiative fits in to various efforts to "stop the bleeding" on things that are obviously broken and need something done, even if they don't have the benefit of months of collecting user stories, synthesizing the pain points, exploring possible solutions, etc. She said she wanted to hear about those efforts, but not to be a gatekeeper for them moving forward. In her words: "A half-good solution is better than no solution at all".

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rfay's picture

Slides from Core Conversation at Drupalcon Chicago

Here are my slides from today's core conversation

Leisa, might help if you could add yours as well. Thanks!

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leisareichelt's picture

welcome! who's who

Hopefully this project will bring together a whole bunch of us who may not have worked together in the past. Let's do some intros so we can get to know each other a little. Also, who else needs to be in this discussion? Let's invite them.

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leisareichelt's picture

exploring the problem space - where are the pain points?

Let's start at the very beginning.... Here we make a list of the what pains us about inereacting with each other on Drupal.org - in the issue queue and beyond. What are the opportunities to do better?
Add your thoughts here.

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