Changing my role in the Drupal Community

For the past 18 months or so, I've been the official leader or co-leader of the Drupal project Documentation Team, and I've been an active member and organizer for several years more.... Today I announced the end of my tenure in that role in the Drupal community, and I wanted to say a few words about my plans.

First off, I want to be clear: I'm still planning to contribute a lot of my time to the Drupal project! I will be staying on as the Documentation Maintainer for Drupal Core, so I'll still be reviewing and committing changes to the Drupal Core API documentation. I also plan to keep maintaining the modules on Drupal.org that I'm currently maintaining, including the API module (which runs the http://api.drupal.org site), and to keep working on improving other tools and infrastructure on Drupal.org for documentation and programmers. These are all fun tasks for me, and I also feel like my contributions in these areas are very well appreciated by the Drupal community, so I see no reason to stop contributing in these ways.

On the other hand, the role of "team leader" had evolved to a point where it was not as much fun for me, for a couple of reasons. First, one of the main responsibilities of the team leader is to recruit, motivate, and retain team members to write and edit documentation -- and I'd really rather be writing, reviewing, and editing documentation myself than working on building a team (I'm also not sure I was very good at the team building role). A second responsibility of the team leader is to make sure the tools and processes are in place so that community members can write documentation. I feel like Ariane (my co-leader) and I really accomplished a lot in that regard during our tenure as leaders of the team, so I felt this was a good time to step down from having final responsibility for tools and processes. A third responsibility of the team leader is to set policies and mediate disputes, and I was simply growing tired of having that responsibility.

In volunteer-driven projects like Drupal, people burn out if the work they are doing in the community is not fun or not appreciated... So, this change was basically a choice on my part to focus on the contributions I could make that are the most fun for me, and that make me feel the most appreciated. I think/hope that I've left the Documentation Team better off than it was when I started the job, and I am looking forward to this shift in my position in the Drupal community!