Community Discussions Findings and Webinar

Over the last few years, many of us have seen the need to evolve community governance. Up until now, we had to focus on other priorities, but now is the time to address our needs for community governance especially in light of recent community events.

Our project has matured greatly and participation has expanded from developers and site builders to also include more content editors, designers, and marketing managers who work not only as freelancers or at Drupal shops, but also for large digital agencies or system integrators. We want all community members to be included in these community discussions so the redefined community governance serves everyone. This is an exciting time to create an even healthier future for our ever-growing community.

The Drupal Association is committed to staying in a support role as the community determines how to best evolve community governance to support everyone’s needs. We started helping by hosting Community Discussions that were mediated by Whitney Hess. There were 7 sessions at DrupalCon Baltimore and 7 virtual sessions between April and May. You can find the meeting minutes here.

The Community Discussions surfaced several common needs and identified several strategies for addressing those needs.

The most commonly shared needs of the community are (in order of frequency):

• Awareness

• Participation

• Transparency

• Clarity

• Contribution

• Healing

• Trust

• Understanding

• Communication

• Connection

• Empowerment

• Process

• Progress

Strategies to address those needs ranged from clarifying the responsibilities and boundaries of the leadership roles throughout the Drupal project, determining how and where to communicate community decisions, improving processes for community management, and providing easier access to documentation about leadership roles and clearly communicating what is expected of Drupal community members.

In terms of next steps, the participants were in agreement that we need to come together in a Governance Summit to start architecting improvements to today’s governance structure. However, the community did not define the best way to hold this meeting. It is still unclear when and where it should be, and who should participate and facilitate. We will send out a community survey next to get input from you to answer these questions.

Attend The Webinar

We invite to you attend a webinar on July 6 at 11 am ET / 1600 BST / 8:30 pm IST hosted by Whitney Hess. Whitney will review the findings from our Community Discussions in more detail. We will record the video and share it with you afterwards, along with a written transcript.

Dial in details are below:

Video:

   https://zoom.us/j/589988397

Or Telephone:

   Dial: +1 646 558 8656 (US Toll) or +1 408 638 0968 (US Toll)

   Meeting ID: 589 988 397

   International numbers available:    

   https://zoom.us/zoomconference?m=KQN5xFuem0PrbwaqFQC3HJyEWuwQ7QHT

Thank you for your patience and participation as we tackle these big questions and move forward together as a stronger community.