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Recently, I had the opportunity to present my core conversation, Pain Points of Learning and Contributing in the Drupal Community, at DrupalCon Los Angeles.

drupal 8 logo isolated CMYK 72My co-presenter Frédéric G. Marand and I talked about the disconnect between Drupal and api.drupal.org on core and some of the pain points to contributing and learning in the Drupal community. We also spoke little bit on the benefits of continuous contribution and sporadic contribution.

The open mic discussion brought up some interesting issues, and so I have compiled some links to answer questions.

Audience Suggestions and Responses

  • Stable release of Drupal 8 will help people start on client work and support contribution. The Drupal community needs to recognize contribution not just in the form of patch, but mentors mentoring on IRC during core office hours, credit to code reviewers on the issue queue, recognize event organizers and have people edit their profile on Drupal.org and list their mentors at the end of a sprint.
  • We now have an issue on Drupal.org to allow crediting for code reviewers (and other non-coders) as first-class contributors.
  • Make profiles better on Drupal.org. Here is an issue for that – [Meta] new design for User Profiles.
  • Event organizers could get an icon on their profile page. You can read more on that – Make icons for the items in the list of user contributions to be included on user profiles.
  • Another issue to read – Reduce Novice Contribution differences and consolidate landing pages, content, blocks.
  • Explanations of what needs to be done could be a big time-saver. For Drupal 8 there are pretty clear outlines of what could be done for core.
  • There was a suggestion to provide video and audio documentation instead of just text, walking people through issues. There are four or five companies that make videos and we have core office hours for walking people through the issue.
  • A few people expressed that its hard to keep up with IRC and are looking for easier ways to communicate. I have created an issue for that and you can read more here – Evaluate whether to replace Drupal IRC channels with another communication medium.
  • Another audience member suggested that we need to make sure that communications that happen in IRC are summarized and documented on issues, so more people can get familiar with the discussion.
  • There were some suggestions for core mentoring that have been proposed but haven’t panned out such as Twitter or hangouts (privacy concerns, less office-friendly).
  • Someone suggested that those who don’t like to get on IRC, can get core updates via email (This week in Drupal Core) which is a weekly-to-monthly update on all the cool happenings in Drupal 8.
  • Users can also subscribe to issue notifications in email on the issues/components they want to follow on Drupal.org.

Overall it was an enlightening core conversation and it was amazing to hear from the community about their pain points and suggestions they made.

To see more of our discussion watch the presentation and view the slides.

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