Latest thoughts, if any, of Rachel Lawson...

As Community Liaison, I find it important to liaise face-to-face whenever I can, and an opportunity presented itself to visit a community I have not been able to spend time with until now; that in India.

This was going to not only be the first time I’ve worked with the community in India but also my first time in India. I couldn’t help but wonder, “Will I see any elephants?”

After spending a great Saturday at @nwdug’s Unconference in Manchester at the weekend, I found myself reflecting upon what actually makes a great Drupal Camp.

I’m going to keep saying this — these are my personal thoughts — not those of my employer.

2017 has been a really interesting year for me in our lovely Drupal community. I think I have learned (or realised that I have yet to fully learn) a few lessons that have helped me along the way.

I want to just list them for the time being and then come back to each one over a few weeks to go into detail about what they mean to me.

So, this year (or maybe the last couple of years) I realised:

I am happy to see that many people are doing a really good job of writing up about what happened at DrupalCon Vienna 2017. I can’t do a better job than that already done so I’m going to try and take a different approach and talk about how all the things that happened made me feel. Buckle-up, this might get emotional…

Or, why Dries’ interesting article is missing incredibly valuable data but that’s fair because that data is really hard to collect…

I’m very happy that Dries had had the opportunity to update his blog post, “Who sponsors Drupal development?” as it does create an interesting picture about the project and community I care so much about.

I don’t think it will come to the surprise to many, though, that I am left feeling frustrated that it concentrates on code-contribution, though.

My Drupal user profile says I have been around for ten years now. It’s a bit of a lie in some ways. You see, there is a very big difference between using Drupal and being part of the Drupal Community…

May 2011 was when I really entered that community. I had not that long come out (L, B, T, Q; one or more of these, I‘m easily confused) and remember being dropped off outside the venue of Drupal7Camp in Leeds, feeling absolutely terrified whether I would be accepted by the people inside etc.

As freelance web developer, my day usually involves working from home and, simply to make sure I speak with real, live human beings during the day, in local cafés. So, why not do the same but from another country, whilst riding my bike at weekends? Here goes...