Drupal

The Open Source community has been through some interesting times over the last five years. COVID19 created a situation where many of our community who were at greater risk of its effects were effectively denied access to in person events. The community did a lot, frankly not enough at times, to facilitate access with things like mask mandates, remote participation etc. Now, we find another barrier to participation – extreme politics.

Some years ago, after a DrupalCon in the US, I received a direct message. It was kind of shocking and has been on my mind on and off ever since...

It has been interesting talking with colleagues about how we best record things like meetings in the project I’m now involved in, GovStack. 

To encourage contribution, volunteer contributors, especially but not exclusively, need to feel that the decision making in the project is clear and open - there should never be a difficulty in finding how decisions were made.

Once in a while, an opportunity comes along that is so interesting I simply cannot say no. Almost four years ago to the day, that opportunity was to join the Drupal Association as its first Community Liaison. Indeed, I even came up with the title whilst serving on the Drupal Community Working Group.

Working in the Drupal Association has been a wonderful experience, where I have had the pleasure to work with some of the most amazing people I have ever had as colleagues and friends.

I had the absolute pleasure to talk at DrupalCamp Oslo about Core Contribution Mentoring, where we are and what we have learned over the last couple of years of unusual times.

If the slides are useful, you can find them attached. 

My attention was brought to a whole bunch of "page not found" errors in the log of my website tonight. At first, I just thought it was just someone trying scripts to gain access so I sent an abuse report to Linode as they owned the IP address, 172.105.83.62.

Their reply was vaguely interesting, though. They said that they didn't regard it as abuse as it was a "security researcher" at work. Huh? On my website? Seriously? Wow - they need to set their sights higher!!! 

Let's first be honest; this isn't yet a post COVID-19 world and it won't be for some time yet. However, in-person events are beginning to happen and we need to consider what that means, practically.

How do we maintain reasonable levels of safety for those people who attend? What do we do about those who simply cannot attend, either through concerns over their health or the inability to travel? I might not even be allowed into events in the USA at the moment as the Astra Zeneca vaccine I had isn't recognised there.

“Would you like to come to my wedding?” I receive as a Slack message from a friend in the Drupal community.

“Sure! When is it? Where?”

“It’s in November, in Kota”

“Oh - wow - yeah, I’ll come if I can!”

At this point, it seemed like a good idea to look at a map - where on Earth is Kota????