Shadab Ashraf

In technology, the concept of teams vs. communities is often blurring. As a community manager for the longest time of my career in tech and now the head of community for a Drupal company, my major goal has been to dissolve this fine line. Brining in transition of management thinking from creating a system of control to a system of collaboration. Also, driving participation in online communities from laggards to active contributors and active contributors to raving fans. This can only be achieved when we can successfully create a ‘sense of belonging’ in a diverse group of people.

It has been analyzed that “even with the same technologies available in all communities, owners and members will make differential use of those resources to achieve strikingly different organizational forms and outcomes”, the same applies for Drupal, making diversity and inclusion a celebration factor even more to improve effectiveness, innovation and leadership. This celebration of Intersectionality helps us all achieve far more.

Diversity + inclusion within Drupal, when combined with the opportunity of how our collective efforts can bring change to society at large, is endless. One example I can share on the same is when I requested a group of specially abled artists participate and sell live paintings at DrupalCamp Delhi 2019. These artists who painted from their elbows and feet, raised approximately $600 worth of sales in two days. Now this amount, in many countries and economies, might not truly showcase the impact made to their lives - but this was huge for them. This is a very tiny example on how we can celebrate people: https://twitter.com/shivanijha94/status/1139926813809840128

My proposals include (some already in progress):
- Creating, promoting and encouraging LGBT+ diversity within Drupal.
- Dedication to creating pathways to educational, professional, and entrepreneurial success using Drupal to innovate the economy for underrepresented minorities.
- Help support refugees and asylum seekers in their aspiration to become Drupal developers.
- Drupal Pledge for companies - Businesses that take this Drupal pledge are committed to implement and publish goals to advance diversity, annually publish data and progress metrics on the company’s diversity, and invest in partnerships to develop and support talent from all backgrounds. Include such parameter in their marketplace rankings on D.O.
- (Offline Event) Women in Drupal - Women specific Drupal events globally for evangelism, knowledge sharing and propagating our message
- Hackathons specifically for students in junior college who are from groups that are underrepresented in tech.

Hi Mike -- The idea is to focus on inclusivity and focus on the growth of Drupal community - understanding how our community grows is fundamental to propel Drupal into existing and new markets. The health of existing community, combined with strategies to grow Drupal community further should be a key cornerstone in the overall success of Drupal.

1. Creating a plan that monitors health of small/mid-size Drupal shops that thrive in the ecosystem to get more business and in return sponsor/contribute more to the growth of Drupal as Dries highlighted here: https://dri.es/who-sponsors-drupal-development-2018

2. Re-think our efforts around accessibility of Drupal globally. e.g. highlighting Drupal promotion initiative in the OSS community at large.

Thank you so much, Hamad. I really appreciate it. While I reflect on my candidature, I see that I missed out on one more important point that you (and others) would be happy for me to focus on:

As Kaleem Clarkson rightly points out here, http://bit.ly/2SYQjDb, the average age of Drupal community is increasing. We need to continuously identify young leaders, have succession planning and recruit freshers to become a part of the Drupal world.

This year, Kaleem and team in Atlanta Drupal Users’s Group (ADUG) decided to develop the Drupal Career Summit, all in an effort to recruit more professionals into the Drupal community.

As a organiser of at least 5 Drupal Camps, 1 Drupal Developer Days in the next 365 days, this is something I would be taking very seriously in incorporating within our blue print.

Hi Jahan Ara, did you try to post something? Happy to chat here.

Hi Vaibhav, that is a very difficult yet a very important questions to address. To be extremely honest with you, I do not have a correct answer in mind. But let me try nevertheless…

1. Drupal is still a very relevant, upscale and stable CMS. Look at the recent WCM report from Gartner, where Acquia locks horns with Adobe: https://www.acquia.com/resources/whitepaper/2019-gartner-magic-quadrant-... (for six years straight now in the magic quadrant). We shouldn’t be worried much about the competition here.

2. That said, broadly speaking, there are three major aspects to a CMS, features and customization, ease-of-use, and security. Our special attention needs to be on ease-of-use, one area which might not be our strong suit. Our current and future audience attracts more of non-developers creating/operating Drupal sites. Low-code, no code approach helps these people become Drupal advocates.

3. Ideation - Any product or service, needs to innovate continuously. Launching ideation program on Drupal.org would help us crowdsource ideas that becomes a platform for Drupal’s continued success.

4. As Henry Ford said, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses”. Our innovation has been homegrown from within the community, we need to trust in our people to continue doing so. The way we do that is simple, continue to stress on our community efforts, build on newer Drupal communities and onboard new champions.

To the second leg of the question, adoption can only be reached with awareness and evangelism. As a part of my latest experiment, we partnered some of the biggest tech communities, namely Linux, JS, React, GoLang, Python, Women in Technology and many more, to be a part of DrupalCamp Delhi 2019 (http://2019.drupalcampdelhi.com/). The goal was to get these developers excited about Drupal by showcasing our work. We would continue to do so in the coming years.

Hi Javed, here are some of my thoughts and current/ongoing projects that help us tackle this problem:

1. Drupal Layout Builder: Introduced in Drupal 8.7, Layout builder serves several use-cases: from templated layouts that can be applied to dozens or hundreds of pieces of structured content, to designing custom one-off pages with unstructured content. The Layout Builder is even more powerful when used in conjunction with Drupal's other out-of-the-box features such as revisioning, content moderation, and translations, but that is a topic for a future blog post. Many of Drupal's competitors don't allow such a templated approach to be designed in the browser. Their browser-based page builders only allow you to create a design for an individual page. When you want to create a layout that applies to all pages of a specific content type, it is usually not possible without a developer.

2. Drupal administration UI & JavaScript Modernisation Initiative: Introduction of a new design system build from scratch that defines a complete set of principles, patterns, and tools for updating Drupal's administration UI. We've already seen the alpha release of Claro and we should definitely be looking forward to the next gen admin UI which is clean, accessible and powerful, that the UX and UI team look to rollout. This would be an exciting update and the reimagined content authoring/site administration experience. A huge change in Drupal core for sure, with a high contrast and modern look!

3. Events to learn more about Design: This is a place where I see improvements. I might be wrong here, but I am not aware of a Drupal design only event. I know there are design hackathons, tracks for web design in almost all camps/cons. However, I do believe that 'Drupal design in a day' type standalone trainings can benefit many (including myself).

Hope that helps.

Hi Pradip, glad you could join us at DCD :) Contributing to Drupal is one of the best ways to improve your technical skills. Drupal is not just PHP, it has many design patterns and programming practices. An opportunity to learn how people on a very large open source project collaborate and work. Now, it is important that I stress this here, Drupal contributions are not only code contributions. There are tons of it online, for both where you can start contributing. I would try to list a couple of contributor tasks:

Tasks for new contributors (technical)
1. Backport a Drupal core patch - https://www.drupal.org/contributor-tasks/backport
2. Review a Drupal core patch - https://www.drupal.org/contributor-tasks/review
3. Write up a change record for a Drupal core issue - https://www.drupal.org/contributor-tasks/draft-change-record

Tasks for new contributors (non-technical)
1. Identify duplicate issues - https://www.drupal.org/contributor-tasks/duplicates
2. Edit a Community Documentation page - https://www.drupal.org/contributor-tasks/edit-documentation-page
3. Contribute to translations - https://www.drupal.org/contribute/translations

Everything else to starting off, here is a comprehensive guide: https://www.webfx.com/blog/web-design/getting-started-with-drupal-a-comp...

My last recommendation would be to being involved with Drupal events in India, you can reach out to me on 88103 02718 to discuss volunteering opportunities in the coming months.

Javed, FYI, one unique event that I missed out on the same subject is 'Design 4 Drupal' that has been happening for the last 11 years: https://design4drupal.org/

Thank you, John.

Thank you for your consideration, Rifat!