Chris Luckhardt is a familiar face in the North American Drupal scene. An active member of the Toronto Drupal community and a frequent attender of camps, meet-ups, conventions, and more, Chris is a Drupal master in many ways, and an expert in others.
“I’m a Drupal specialist and I do photography on the side,” Chris says of himself. “I tend to do a lot of everything, which is why I call myself a specialist — because I specialize in different elements of Drupal. My favorite areas of Drupal are site building, dev-ops, and front-end development, and I do a lot of agile and scrum project management."
Kate Marshalkina (kalabro) has been using Drupal for three and a half years. A web developer by trade, Kate was approached by a friend who wanted her to do Drupal work with him. After doing some research on the system, Kate agreed.
“It’s quite difficult to learn Drupal without paid work because it requires a lot of time and experience to learn the Drupal way of doing things,” Kate said. “I had joined a security startup, and a security company obviously cares about security on the web. So we decided to use Drupal because it’s a safe, well known open source system. I learned a lot while I was working on my tasks, but I spent a lot of my free time to learn Drupal. Once I started learning, I couldn’t stop— I’d previously worked with other content management with less documentation and information and then I started learning Drupal and... because of the community, and all of the learning resources and videos that are available, I was hooked."
Chris Ohmstede is based out of Los Angeles, California. An experienced programmer, Chris is new to Drupal but already identifies as a skilled persona. Several months ago, Chris discovered Drupal as he was looking for solutions to build a website for hosting a program he wrote.
"I spent a number of years in the banking industry, and in that industry banks are constantly making connections to everything. I was always running in to problems when things couldn’t connect— it was always an issue trying to figure out what was actually going on. Over the years, I wrote a bunch of applets here and there to figure out what the problems were, and my program whycanticonnect is a conglomeration of those applets that work across operating systems, mobile— I’ve got cloud services approaching me about it, too.
In April of 2014, the Japanese Drupal community gathered in Kyoto for their first ever DrupalCamp. Individuals came from other countries to attend the conference, and that was how Keiko Kanda was first introduced to the project.
“I think it might be a bit unusual to get involved the way I did,” Keiko said. “My cousin who lives in Sydney, Australia, married an Australian man. He came to Japan to attend the DrupalCamp in Kyoto and he asked me to accompany him… though some people were presenting in English, he was concerned that he might need a translator.”
“I knew almost nothing about Drupal, even though he had introduced me to what he was working on at that time. But I thought, I would be glad if I could help him out. So I went to the DrupalCamp in Kyoto and it turned out to be a very interesting experience for me.”
Bronwen Buswell is a newcomer to Drupal. Based out of Colorado Springs, Colorado, Bronwen works as a Conference and Communications Coordinator at a nonprofit called PEAK Parent Center, which is dedicated to supporting the families of children with disabilities. While Bronwen’s role isn’t technical, she needs to use her company’s website as part of getting her work done.
“We’re federally designated by the US Department of Education, so we try to be a total one-stop shop information and referral center,” Bronwen said. “Families can call us about any situation related to their child, and we will either refer them to the right agency or provide what they need. We’re focused on helping families navigate the education and special education systems, and we serve families with children ages birth through 26, with all sorts of disabilities, including autism, down syndrome, learning disabilities, and so on."
As part of our mission to reinvent Drupal.org, we’ve been digging deep to understand who uses the website and how. At DrupalCon Austin, we began the process of discovering the personas of users who visit Drupal.org: to do so, we interviewed numerous Drupal.org users and asked questions about how frequently they use Drupal.org, how they use the website, their frustrations with Drupal.org, the things they enjoy about the site, and how we can make it easier for people to learn, use, and connect on Drupal.org.
In our third year supporting the Drupal Global Training Days Initiative, we have seen more training companies, more community leaders, and more individuals participate than ever before.
During the last Drupal Association meeting, the board approved the 2015 Leadership Plan and Budget. We are very pleased to make the related documents available to you in their entirety:
It is hard to believe, but we just finished our second-to-last board meeting of the year. The Association has grown and changed so much in 2014 and the November meeting was a great chance to talk about some of those changes and what we are planning for 2015.
Kate Marshalkina (
Chris Ohmstede is based out of Los Angeles, California. An experienced programmer, Chris is new to Drupal but already identifies as a skilled persona. Several months ago, Chris discovered Drupal as he was looking for solutions to build a website for hosting a program he wrote.
In April of 2014, the Japanese Drupal community gathered in Kyoto for their first ever DrupalCamp. Individuals came from other countries to attend the conference, and that was how Keiko Kanda was first introduced to the project.
Bronwen Buswell is a newcomer to Drupal. Based out of Colorado Springs, Colorado, Bronwen works as a Conference and Communications Coordinator at a nonprofit called PEAK Parent Center, which is dedicated to supporting the families of children with disabilities. While Bronwen’s role isn’t technical, she needs to use her company’s website as part of getting her work done.
We are thrilled to announce that, in collaboration with the 
In our third year supporting the Drupal Global Training Days Initiative, we have seen more training companies, more community leaders, and more individuals participate than ever before. 
It is hard to believe, but we just finished our second-to-last board meeting of the year. The Association has grown and changed so much in 2014 and the November meeting was a great chance to talk about some of those changes and what we are planning for 2015.