Brian Gilbert

About Me:

I grew up in country Victoria (Australia) I was bookish for most of my youth, and interested in sciences and technology. Growing up in a small country town with little racial or sexual diversity my mother did a great job planting a seed of understanding and belief in equality. Growing up, I have never seen race, color or orientation as any means of rank or identifier.

I have a strong ingrained belief that everyone has something beneficial to offer, and get enjoyment from learning about people and their views. Even when I don't agree with someone's view I am willing to listen, make an effort to understand, empathize, and debate the merits of differing opinions without the need to take differences personally.

In 1995 I started my first real full time job at a regional ISP. traveling out to subscribers houses to perform internet installations and help-desk operations. I sold and built the first webpage that we made for an external customer, then transitioned to web development as my primary role. Around the advent of CSS I became particularly interested and passionate about Usability and Accessibility, and since have worked to ensure that all of my projects take these requirements into account.

Around 2000 I moved to a new role as Web Architect at Wesley College here I created a CMS from scratch using ColdFusion, and possibly the first K-12 intranet that was also parent accessible, in 2005 I left this position and wanting to work with something open source I did a little work with both Joomla and Drupal and was immediately enamored with Drupal as it shared many of the concepts of the CMS I had written while at Wesley.

From 2005-2011 I bounced between a few different positions, while also moonlighting, with Drupal being the main common factor. In 2011 I started my company Realityloop full time and we have been working with Drupal ever since.

In 2009 I became the community lead for the Drupal Melbourne Meetups, growing membership from around 25 to now over 500 members, I was co-organizer of Drupal Down Under 2012, Community Track Chair of DrupalCon Sydney 2013, have organized multiple local Drupal camps, and have been a significant part of the Global Drupal Mentoring effort since DrupalCon Portland 2013.

From 2003-2006 I was a lead tenant and lived with 3 local intellectually disabled people (Downs Syndrome, Autism), it was a great experience and further opened my eyes to just how beneficial community involvement is for everyone. The people I lived with were all older than I, but each interesting in their own right and I now understand how beneficial to helping them live a rich life vs living in an institution.

From 2006-2013 I worked in an after hours capacity as Deputy College Head at Halls of residence of Monash University, here I was responsible for groups of residential Advisors and the students of the halls that I lived in, I organized much of the hall specific orientation week activities, assigned students to their rooms, planned evening events throughout the year. As part of this work I became a Mental Health First Aider, and provided support for students from many countries and backgrounds.

I developed the Community Tools that have been used for the first time contributors workshops at all Drupalcon's since 2014, and have delivered the First time Contributors Workshop at every Drupalcon I have attended Since then. Using these I have personally on-boarded 3000-4000 first time contributors since then.

In 2016, in addition to Realityloop, I started a 3D Printing related company called Zesty Technology. Here we created the worlds smallest and lightest 3D Printer extruder and ship it worldwide.

Recently I am helping a local client that is a charity define strategic plans for the future of their business.

If I was to pick two common threads between Realityloop and Zesty it would be that I have either had to create or grow a community, and work strategically to create high quality mutual benefit for both the company and our customers.

Statement of Candidacy Video:

https://youtu.be/5oWgZk1xoOY

Board meeting attendence:

2-4

Have you served on a board or committee?:

Yes

If so, tell us about it.:

I have been a part of multiple committees throughout my working life, primarily as the person with technical knowledge and as the advocate for changes and improvements that are enabled through the use of technology.

What perspective will you bring to the board when discussing strategic topics?:

As an entrepreneur, developer, business owner, open Source believer and advocate, with perspective from a region that the DA has some issues servicing I think my perspective is unique I have had a lot of personal involvement in the challenge of on-boarding new contributors and therefore a view of things that we can address to make the journey easier for newcomers. I have used the DA as fiscal sponsor for multiple local events and have first hand experience of how it doesn't always work as a non USD currency region. I like to dig down so that I can try and come up with first principal types of solutions to problems rather than band aid fixes. When thinking strategically I look for scenarios that create mutual benefit, as I firmly believe that this is the most sustainable approach. Where this isn't possible I would be looking for the best possible outcome for all parties involved within any given limitations. I believe the most important quality besides my reasonably wide experience, is that I will suggest alternatives and vote on resolutions aiming for consideration for those affected directly and the effect beyond my term on the board.

What existing board topics are you most passionate about? and why?:

I am most passionate about growing Drupal adoption, but where most of this lies is in improving the home of the project for customers, particularly beginners. Simplifying on-boarding is where my Mentoring effort has largely been targeted and where I feel I have the most experience and ideas. I believe that by reducing the friction involved in getting up and running as a Drupal user and making the path to types of contribution well documented and navigation clear we are/would be creating a more sustainable project for the long term future.

What additional strategic topics would you like to introduce?:

I'm not sure what the DA currently does to foster environmental sustainability, but it is one area where I am particularly interested and think the DA could be making an impact.

What unique skills would you bring to the board?:

My varied interests and experience allow me to make connections that others may not, it is however difficult to outline which of these are relevant in any given situation. I am an analytical and logical thinker I have a steady mood I have a knack for coming up with holistic systems approaches to things I am something of a futurist I am a long thinker (don't just think for now.. I care about sustainability)

How have your past contributions to Drupal prepared you for board candidacy?:

It's surprising given I consider myself an introvert that so much of my work and spare time involves activities where I am interacting with people, I think my history doing ISP help-desk, as Drupal community lead locally and mentor globally and starting a community in Zesty Technology business show that I am well equipped to interact and work with people. As someone who has worked on fixes for drupal.org, groups.drupal.org, mentoring, been a module developer, am a business owner, has delivered training, mediated interpersonal issues within the local community I believe I have a unique perspective and existing experience in many of the tasks I may be required to undertake as a board member.

Why should we vote for you?:

I have been using Drupal since 2005/6, but I also became an active contributor to growing the community locally since 2009 and internationally since 2013. I've also contributed to infrastructure through work on d.o, g.d.o, core contributions since 2010, module development and maintainer-ship and community tools. I was the first to suggest GitLab for Drupal https://www.drupal.org/project/infrastructure/issues/1914722#comment-7060314 I am level headed and aim for sustainable, equitable, and mutually beneficial outcomes in the types of matters that I am likely to encounter while a board member.

Questions for the Candidate

rachel_norfolk:

Comment:

As Dries stated in his Driesnote at DrupalCon Seattle 2019 (https://youtu.be/BNoCn6T9Xf8?t=2149), work on diversity & inclusion is a key priority of the project (https://youtu.be/BNoCn6T9Xf8?t=5793).
How can your knowledge or experience of diversity & inclusion help the Drupal Association meet Dries' call to action?

realityloop:

Comment:

@rachel_norris

As a mentor since 2013 one of the primary goals has been to ensure that everyone that attends has a good experience, as Dries highlighted gnuget raised that 21% of those that have a bad experience stop contributing.

Furthermore we make a concerted effort to communicate that the first time contributor workshops are targeted at the full diversity of people that can contribute, this is not just programmers, in fact we absolutely need non-coders as contributors for the project to remain sustainable.

At contributor workshops multiple times I have worked with attendees, that were from non english speaking backgrounds, working on issues to do with RTL text placement, translation, documentation and more.

When I was Deputy College Head at Monash University Halls of Residence I had to allocate rooms for all of the students in my hall, the primary methodology I used was to create as diverse a mix of residents as possible on each floor. This method was very successful at ensuring that exchange students mixed and interacted with their local peers. I am a firm believer that the best way to break down perceived barriers in this context is to increase interaction.

My interest in Usability and Accessibility that began the late 90's, my time as a lead tenant with intellectually disabled people, my role at Monash University halls (with students on my floor over multiple years that had both physical and visual disabilities), time working in theater where I met the first people I knew as open GLBT (who are still very good friends), and having friends and relatives that are GLBT, International travel where I have lived with locals for extended periods, Being married to someone from an ESL background.

All of the this has given me a frame of mind that is inclusive of diversity. I have respect for, empathy, consideration and care about the inclusiveness that we create for everyone.

Here are my wedding vows, written by me in 2009. You can see that this mindset has been part of my being for some time now:

"With these rings we unite our hearts in tenderness and devotion. We will honor each other's cultures as we join customs to form a trusting relationship. We will protect, support, and encourage each other through life's joys and sorrows as we create a loving future. We promise to establish a home for ourselves and our children shaped by our respective heritages; a loving environment dedicated to peace, hope, and respect for all people. From this day forward our lives will be intertwined forever, blessed in faith, filled with compassion, understanding and love."

I believe that the more diverse the interaction you have with people, the more understanding and inclusive you yourself become.

I aim for a time where we actually don't need to talk about inclusiveness at all, because it is so ingrained that we no longer need to discuss it.

realityloop:

Comment:

Apt that I saw this on Reddit while commuting home tonight:

"Mark Twain said about travel being the enemy of prejudice. You don't even have to travel somewhere. Just taking the time to get to know the people you were prejudiced about can wipe away a lot of the hate."

realityloop:

Comment:

To be clear "hate" above was in the quote from the source. not something I ever had personally.

sime:

Comment:

The DA was initially (IIRC) set up to protect the Drupal trademark and run DrupalCons. That scope has changed over the years. What do you think the role of DA should be?

realityloop:

Comment:

@sime

I believe the DA's current Mission and goals are good https://www.drupal.org/association/mission

I think the current goals are good also https://www.drupal.org/association/work

Personally I think the key goal the DA should be to ensure that the Drupal project remains sustainable.

I believe the best avenue to this is improved documentation/processes that make interacting with the project/community, using and contributing to Drupal simpler. And the paths to do this clearer. I see this as having the largest impact on bringing on new contributors and keeping the project inviting for existing community.

mherchel:

Comment:

As a board member, you would be responsible for directing strategies for the DA. What changes would you like to make? What strategic initiatives would you like to start/continue/discontinue?

realityloop:

Comment:

@mherchel

The two main initiatives I am most interested in starting/continuing to progress are:

Increasing adoption through improving the platform for the customer, where my main avenue to this is making learning and using Drupal easier through better documentation pathways. I see this as the primary way to achieve longstanding sustainability for the project, and something that touches on all 4 of the 2019 goals listed at: https://www.drupal.org/association/work

I'd like to investigate what we can do to improve the environmental sustainability / reduce the environmental footprint of the DA and Drupal project.

rivimey:

Comment:

I am concerned for Drupal in two ways at present:

- that the project is becoming "enterprise only" (the small users and SME users are being forced out by Drupal's development costs c.f. Wordpress / Wix / ...)

- that contrib projects, even "important" ones, are being left unmaintained far too often, usually because the maintainers are busy earning money elsewhere. This is perhaps a symptom of the first point.

How would you meet these challenges?

realityloop:

Comment:

@rivimey I think these are both pretty difficult questions, but thanks for asking them.

I was initially against Drupal's move towards being more enterprise ready, but as I thought about it more I realised it was a necessary change to help grow Drupal adoption, there is a finite limit to people who will use Drupal as a hobby, and small enterprise has more limited resources to put towards module development and monetarily to the project through memberships and sponsorship. Drupal being more enterprise grade increases the chance of adoption by students wanting to get experience before they are in the workforce. Large enterprise is in a much better position to sponsor development of modules, employ staff to work in both core and contrib space, sponsor events, and generally expend resources to improve Drupal.

As someone who has been working with Drupal for a long time this change has certainly given Realityloop the company the opportunity to get work from larger clients, we were engaged by Deloitte locally when they had no internal Drupal team to help deliver a project and build their local team, worked on projects with local universities, and continue to land government projects. All while still doing work with local not for profits. I'd argue that not many other CMS's would make this possible.

I also think the change to OOP makes it easier for beginners as interfaces are similar, meaning you learn something once in one area it makes it easier to pick up how something works in another area.. Yes it means those of us who come from procedural background have to learn new stuff.. but we were always going to have to learn new stuff anyway.

Unmaintained projects is primarily a problem because so many modules are people scratching a temporary itch.. once scratched they often have neither motivation or funding to continue maintenance of a module, I think/hope that the move to GitLab will help here as once we have pull request functionality on d.o it will make it a lot easier for other interested parties to contribute to existing modules, effectively lowering the barrier to entry for contribution.. this is going to be huge!

As director of a small Drupal development company this will be big for us as between myself and our lead dev we created/co-maintain over 150 modules.

I also think what we have seen with core incorporating contribs is a positive sign that the project is aware of this problem and strategically trying to address it in some part.

I truly believe lowering the barrier to contribution will be huge for both core and contrib, so in my position as a board member I would be making decisions based on helping accelerate that.

I don't know if I've answered your questions totally.. but I hope I have, and I don't know if you saw it in my bio.. but I was the first person to suggest gitlab when the DA was looking for CVS alternatives :)

realityloop:

Comment:

To clarify a little further, I think the best way to do this is with better and clearer pathways to learning, and better documentation.

rivimey:

Comment:

@realityloop, thanks for your thoughtful reply. My concern is not based around oop/procedural, but about the time and effort needed to use Drupal to build something compared to other solutions. This is not an issue of itself, but becuase of Drupal's history of depending on a large number of hobby and small-scale users to bring in new people, maintain modules, find and fix bugs, and enthuse about Drupal in forums and meetings.

If we let Drupal become enterprise-only, those mechanisms will disappear and we need to have something to replace them, or Drupal itself will wither away through lack of investment in core (not Core) requirements. If Drupal can replace these mechanisms appropriately then Drupal has a chance of surviving as an Enterprise tool.

Introducing GitLab may help, as you suggest (though who is the PR gatekeeper and how do we keep modules from becoming mishmash of poorly thought-out contributions?) but I truly do not believe this is a technological problem: it is a social one, and while tech changes can change the nature of the social problem I do not think tech can eliminate it.

realityloop:

Comment:

@rivimey

In my experience it's getting easier to build sites using Drupal 8, but perhaps that is a reflection of the types of sites I'm typically involved in building.

What I will say is that I don't think Drupal is the right choice for every site build.. the way I generally frame it is this "If you are looking for a long term solution that will scale to various functional requirements over time then Drupal is a great choice, if you just want a brochureware site then maybe Wordpress or an static site builder is better for you".

I definitely agree that tech can't solve all problems.

For instance It's almost unknown that there is a very simple process to get maintainer-ship of abandoned modules.. all you need to do is create a comment requesting it on the module issue queue, if unanswered in two weeks you can alert the webmasters team and you will get access. That said this is only useful to those that are able to meaningfully contribute to module development, which is a much smaller subset of the community.

With regard to PR gatekeeping, I think PR's will make review of code changes much simpler than the current patch workflow, which will make it a lot easier for maintainers to address them, it's not a resolution to all issues but should be a step improvement.

At the end of the day if I look back to the first time I did any HTML, back in v1.1 days, it was super simple, but the task has gotten vastly more complex over time. I think there is a direct relationship in how much capability can be given to the end user and the level of abstraction from this complexity. As you abstract to make it simpler for the developer you have to in some way reduce the functionality available.. it's inevitable.

Again I'm sorry it doesn't solve your question :)

realityloop:

Comment:

@rivimey

I think what we may eventually hope for are some distributions targeted at the smaller users that give a good balance of abstraction and available power, the crux is this likely has to come from the community.

I think Contenta CMS that is targeted at starting decoupled projects, is a good example of how this might play out.. essentially like Umami was built by the community for demoing Drupal.

awasson:

Comment:

Hey @realityloop,
Best of luck with the election. I've been diligently reading everryone's bio's, areas of interest and answers to the questions. You've got my vote!

Cheers,
Andrew

realityloop:

Comment:

Thanks @awasson !

Questions for the Candidate

News items

Our community

Documentation

Drupal code base

Governance of community