Blog de pcambra

Drupal

TL;DR: I’m requesting members of the Drupal community to help my research about the need for a bookmarking tool by responding a super quick survey.

As part of my dissertation work for my bachelor’s degree, I’m unsurprisingly working in something related to Drupal. After a lot of consideration regarding a project that could be within a reasonable scope but also allowed me to contribute a little bit to the Drupal ecosystem, a chat with Cristina and Christian helped me decide to work in the shortcut module, and try to make improvements before it is marked to be removed to core – and try to avoid that because I believe it could be a useful tool for both the navigation and the dashboards initiatives.

But first things first.

One of the elements I am looking to explore the most in my research is the full process of the contribution, from identifying the issue to solve, get quantitative data through a survey in the community to establish that the problem is worth solving it, then propose a solution and get feedback on it.

I would appreciate it a lot if you could help me achieve my goal by answering the survey I’ve prepared.

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Dear Drupal community:

I'm sad to announce my resignation from the Drupal Association board. I was elected by the Drupal Association members back in 2020 with a single task in my program: try to revert what I considered an unjust and unjustified decision to restrict the vote to only Drupal Association members.

When I say I considered the disenfranchisement of community voters both unjust and unjustified, doesn't mean that I don't feel this way anymore. I can now say I was not presented with any document or record that would justify such a change, specially with the voters going down from 1050 in 2019, 920 in 2020 and 540 in 2021. I've tried to get the meeting minutes for all meeting published and I've requested so in almost every opportunity I've had, but no updates have been made (besides removing the link of the minutes from the pages it had it). Minutes are still accessible but last update is almost 2 years old.

I've tried my best to find or create a space that would be suitable for the board to reconsider the broader community participation on the elections, but also the community to participate in this decision, and the best option that I considered I could pass a vote for was the request for volunteers issue.

Unfortunately, I have not been able to keep the community engaged in a way that encourage enough people to volunteer for this task force. I wish I had done things differently and try to find a better way, specially in a more timely manner.

I don't consider myself the right person to lead this effort anymore, and I hope someone else takes the lead on reviewing the election eligibility. As the resolution has being approved, there should still be ways to make this work.

I will take the opportunity to thank everyone that has supported me over these year and a half. Personally, I am planning to take a break from the community for a while, as I feel quite burned down after this experience.

Note: This blog has the comments disabled, please feel free to send me a message through my contact page if you need to discuss anything related to the community and the Drupal Association. You can also tweet at me or find me in Drupal Slack or the distributed matrix network as pcambra.

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As per my last update on the board resolution related to the at large director elections, on the community committee, we’ve decided to create a Drupal.org project to open discussion with the community in subjects and areas that require it.

You can find more details on the task-force attributions on this Drupal.org issue, and we’re hoping to recruit a diverse group of volunteers to drive the conversation and come up with a recommendation. Everyone is welcomed to join the discussion at any point.

If you’re interested, please do self-nominate by commenting on the issue!

Note: This blog has the comments disabled, please feel free to send me a message through my contact page if you need to discuss anything related to the community and the Drupal Association. You can also tweet at me or find me in Drupal Slack or the distributed matrix network as pcambra.

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A new term for the Drupal Association board has started on November 1st and we just held our first meeting on December 7th after ratifying the new members. You can check the directors for this term here.

I’d like to congratulate once more Mike Herchel for winning the 2021 elections and gaining a 2-term seat as a community/at large representative. This means that the term for Leslie Glynn has ended, and she’s joined the board alumni list, many thanks for all your work with the community, Leslie!

Among the first things that the board needs to do is form the committees for this 2021-2022 term, and I’m very excited I will be acting as the community committee head this term. As soon as all is set up and we agree on the list of things we want to accomplish (hopefully January), I will update a new blog about it.

I was able to pass a motion in our last board meeting regarding revisiting the election process for the at large directors, I am happy the board reached a compromise and a new task force will be created. This task force will be engaging with the community in open conversations to come up with a recommendation on how the elections should look like moving forward.

We will be posting an announcement soon so community members that are interested in being part of this group can nominate themselves. One of the concerns shared on the board is that this task force needs to be diverse enough to have all the voices represented and bias is reduced to a minimum, and I wholeheartedly agree with this statement.

Once the task force comes up with a recommendation, this will be voted in the board and whatever result applied for the next election process, providing the Drupal Association has enough engineering resources to allocate on this.

I am pasting below the contents of the charter for the new task force that was approved on the board meeting:

Authority

The Community Elections Task Force is an advisory committee reporting to the Drupal Association Community committee.

Responsibilities

  • Open discussions with the community at-large, using the means available such as social networks, groups.drupal.org, Drupal community channels, Drupal events and user groups, etc.
  • Consult with other open source projects that have similar needs in terms of elected members of the community in their associations/foundations.
  • Report periodically to the Community Committee with the progress.

End goal of the working group

Produce a recommendation that will be reviewed by the Drupal Association Board in a timely manner to apply for 2022 elections.

Composition

The Committee shall be composed of at least three, but not more than six members with voting rights.

These members are self nominating and designated by the Community committee. The Community Elections Task Force shall consult with Drupal community members at their discretion and criteria regarding diversity will be applied.

Meetings

The committee meets virtually with the frequency needed to accomplish its task.

Note: This blog has the comments disabled, please feel free to send me a message through my contact page if you need to discuss anything related to the community and the Drupal Association. You can also tweet at me or find me in Drupal Slack or the distributed matrix network as pcambra.

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The self-nomination period for the Drupal Association Board has already started. There are two At-Large positions on the board that are filled by an election process that used to be open to the community and since last year requires a Drupal Association membership to vote. One seat will be elected for the 2021-2023 period in October.

As the Elections page from the Drupal Association states:

Simply put, the At-large Director position is specifically designed to ensure community representation on the Drupal Association board.

The self-nomination period is open up to September 27th and you need to fill this Google form to be considered as a candidate. Please make sure you check the eligibility, legal stuff and responsibilities before running for the seat.

All the information and dates are available in this article: https://www.drupal.org/association/board/elections/election-2021-dates-and-candidates

As a personal note, I want to bring up that I wanted to move a vote to revert the election process to its previous form that didn’t require a Drupal Association membership to vote, but life comes at you fast. I want to keep bringing it the matter on next board meetings, as it seems that creating a task-force to open the communication with the community and review the issue could be on the table.

Note: This blog has the comments disabled, please feel free to send me a message through my contact page if you need to discuss anything related to the community and the Drupal Association. You can also tweet at me or find me in Drupal Slack or the distributed matrix network as pcambra.

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DrupalCon NorthAmerica starts tomorrow, but it is still not too late to register! There will be quite interesting content and networking activities and there’s a Drupal Association Q&A session where the floor is going to be open for the community to reach out the DA board and staff.

I’ve requested to be on the line up and I’ll be participating, so if you have any questions, please take your chance!

I don’t have a massive amount of updates from this last weeks regarding my board participation. I’ve been attending the Community and Finance committee meetings and there are some outcomes from there that I’ll be publishing about soon.

I’ve requested that the board minutes page is updated more often, and I’ll remind this to the person in charge of doing so.

I am preparing some proposals that hopefully will be addressed to the board regarding some considerations and process on the disenfranchisement non Drupal association in the elections issue. I hope to have updates on that too.

Note: This blog has the comments disabled, please feel free to send me a message through my contact page if you need to discuss anything related to the community and the Drupal Association. You can also tweet at me or find me in Drupal Slack or the distributed matrix network as pcambra.

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The past couple of months have been very eventful in the Drupal Association, I can say I've been on boarded and I'm ready to participate in several committees and the general board meetings. The next being this upcoming Tuesday the 23rd at around lunchtime.

I'd like to start with a couple of updates I want to mention:

How's been like in the past 2 months

First board meeting

On December 15th 2020 I attended the first board meeting, and although minutes for this one or the October 2020 one are not available yet, I'll try to sum up a little bit. Both myself and Tiffany were presented (again) to the board. We got a quite extensive introduction by Heather, the DA Executive Director, regarding staff updates and current teams and what they do. There was a surprising amount of sales focus on this update, including a special mention to the #DrupalCares fundraising campaign which has been fundamental to the continuity of the organization during the pandemic. The new merge requests and issue forks feature on Drupal.org also was part of the update. This is supported by GitLab and it is one giant step forward for contributions. We also discussed a little bit about the Drupal steward program, a mashup between the Drupal Security Team and the Drupal Association that provides a WAF service and has the aim to explore this area where the DA can facilitate these kinds of services and be less economically dependent of DrupalCon. The program is still very new for definitive conclusions but the update was a positive one. There were other topics on the table such as the Drupal 9 update roadmap for Drupal.org, core initiatives and financials.

Additionally there was a DrupalCon Europe update, which had around 800 participants and some suggestions were mentioned for this year's but it is quite early to know what DrupalCon Europe 2021 is going to look.

I was assigned to two committees, the Community and Governance one, which I am very happy to participate in and then the Finance committee, which I was very reluctant as I don't know if I can add much value there but after two meetings of the committee I am very happy to have been included in those discussions.

Finally, I was able to include a discussion for next board meeting (23rd of February) about the voting eligibility issue. I've prepared a couple of proposals and I hope to give an update next week about next steps.

Community and Governance committee

You can check who's on what committee in this page. Leslie chairs this one and we're discussing quite a bit on how to communicate effectively to the broader community. There's going to be a survey to get suggestions and I will promote it as soon as it is ready.

Since my last update, this committee has met twice (some committees meet monthly), and I think the second one went way better than the first one, I am really looking forward to work more on these initiatives.

One of the main focus of this committee I think is to identify opportunities of early communication regarding the DA programs so information is clearer and more adequate for the larger community.

This committee has discussed regarding the voting eligibility issue and I have been given the opportunity to present some of my ideas and proposals previous to the board meeting.

Interestingly enough, Rachel Lawson brought the topic of community cultivation grants and whether we have the chance to restart the program, which I think if the budget allows, it's an excellent initiative.

Finance committee

This committee meets also monthly and Angie gives a thorough update through the finances, how the year is progressing and things such as audits and reality vs projections. Baddý chairs this committee. As mentioned, I was reluctant about being part of this one, but I think I can give some valuable input despite not being my specialty at all.

Really good news came out of this committee last month. The upcoming DrupalCon was originally set in Boston and it is going to be celebrated online due to the pandemic, the DA was still accountable for cancellation fees with the venue but the staff has been able to get a waiver for that!

Community Working Group

I also had the opportunity to meet with the Community Working Group a few weeks ago, they are really nice folk who have a huge impact in our community and the nature of the chair I have in the DA board puts me in a position where I overlook the group and if there's an escalation issue, me and Leslie would be responsible of dealing with that. This is something that has never happened so the less I see this very fine group of people, the better :). We will meet annually for a quick check in.

There was something very interesting to mention, ever since we don't have in person events, they are less busy. I think this is something for us, as in the whole community to reflect on.

Upcoming board meeting

For this upcoming meeting, there's a big agenda, but the voting eligibility issue will be in it. I will make my case and hope we can get to a resolution that can bring some closure and sense of reparation to the community.

Anything you want to ask me or if you want to share concerns and comments, please do get in touch with me.

Note: This blog has the comments disabled, please feel free to send me a message through my contact page if you need to discuss anything related to the community and the Drupal Association. You can also tweet at me or find me in Drupal Slack or the distributed matrix network as pcambra.

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As at large community elected director for the Drupal Association, I want to make an effort to communicate as openly as I possibly can, even if there's not much to update. In these past few weeks since my last update about the onboarding process, there hasn't been much going on in what the Drupal Association Board concerns, but I think it is still useful for me to keep the lines open.

The first matter that is occupying most time for many people is the final steps for the DrupalCon Europe organisation which in the current climate, it's being a hard challenge. If you haven't registered yet, you're still on time, there are day passes if you can't attend the whole thing. The event starts on Tuesday 8th and finishes on the 11th.

What has happened on the past few weeks.

I was ratified by the board on November 1st. This means that there is a new board with directors coming in (like myself) and others leaving their seats. If you're curious to see who's in the board for the upcoming year, you can check this page.

In case you're curious, the tools that seem to have more activity are a Slack channel, which is under the Drupal Association account (it's not the regular Drupal one) and a Google drive folder with meeting minutes and other official documentation.

The first meeting will happen on December 15th at my lunchtime and I'm very excited to meet everyone and get officially introduced to the rest of the board. I don't think I've received a board package yet, so I will be looking forward to review it as soon as I get it. I will post an update in this blog after this first board meeting.

There are committees in place to deal with more specific initiatives but I haven't been introduced to them so I haven't had the chance to get on-hands yet. I would really like to get involved with the Community & Governance Committee.

I am now actively reaching out to different board members and Heather (Executive Director for the Drupal Association) to get as many information and points of view regarding the voting rights removal decision – which was the center of my campaign – but it is still too soon to make any public statement on my side. I ask for a little patience while I can produce something a bit more elaborate and useful for the community. I've already requested for this subject to be included in February's 2021 board meeting as it seems too late to include it in December's but I will raise the topic if I'm given the chance next December 15th, in case there's a space open for questions and comments.

More from the Drupal Association

Worth noting that for the last video – the “Ask Me Anything” session at DrupalJam – I was not invited to the panel even though there's a question regarding the voting rights around minute 38. I am assuming that given this was done on November 4th, there might not have been time for this, but it definitely surprises me that there was no conversation with me whatsoever.

Anything you want to ask me or if you want to share concerns and comments, please do get in touch with me.

Note: This blog has the comments disabled, please feel free to send me a message through my contact page if you need to discuss anything related to the community and the Drupal Association. You can also tweet at me or find me in Drupal Slack or the distributed matrix network as pcambra.

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I want to make my Drupal Association tenure as open as possible and even if my appointment doesn't start until November 1st, some processes have already being started.

How does the onboarding work

A few days after the voting was closed, I received series of emails from the DA representatives. I was notified on October 2th that I'd won the elections and I was requested to accept the nomination, which I gladly did.

On October 6th all the candidates were notified and on October 13th, it was made public. Here's the announcement and my acceptance speech.

A little bit after that I got a few emails from a couple of the current board members and Audra Martin Merrick and I spent some time in a video call as an introduction. This was very nice of her and it was a very similar process to what I'd experienced on 2012.

Yesterday (October 23rd), I had the onboarding call with Heather Rocker, who is the Executive Director of the DA. This call included some other board members such as Audra, Baddý and Leslie Glynn who was elected as community director in 2019.

Alright, but how does the onboarding work

We spent 90 minutes in a video call reviewing the Drupal Association mission and values, how many staff works in the current programs, who they are and where they're located. Fortunately, the DA has moved forward a lot in the past years and not everyone is in Portland, with a couple of members in Europe and India.

There was a lot of content regarding to how the DA wants to support the community (drupal.org, DrupalCon, support to the security team, and a lot of other stuff, some of it can be found in detail in the DA “what we do” page.

Then we moved to an overview of how the finances work, most of it is public due to the 501c3 status of the DA and can be found in the accountability page.

I did ask some questions at this point regarding the new Drupal Steward program and how the revenue work. I need to gather more information but this is something I'd like to get more light on.

There were some slides and quite some discussion about the goals and objectives of the Drupal Association, I did find this part lacking of more goals towards the community at large but there was a latter part where Leslie, who is taking over the leadership on the Community committee went over the initiatives in progress. I am obviously really interested in getting started to collaborate on this committee and offer more information about it.

The board itself was presented, including new members that will be announced on November 1st and some obligations and recommendations were presented.

As a director, you need to serve in at least one committee for your term and the committees organize as working groups and meet often, while the whole board meets more or less bimonthly for what I understood. There are between 11 and 15 members at one given time, 2 of them being selected by the community (or Drupal Association members in this last election).

We discussed very briefly about the next three year plan for the DA, and we talked quite a lot about the #DrupalCares program and future of DrupalCon.

I found very refreshing being informed to what Directors are expected to do and the myriad of opportunities to add value that Heather described, I was really lost on 2012 on this area and this was really good to hear.

Things such as going thoroughly about the meeting materials before meetings or being an ambassador of Drupal were always clear to me, but I am looking forward to these additional opportunities to help.

Finally, Audra presented the board member agreement, which is available in the DA information pages and it was very similar to what I signed back in 2012.

Please mind that some of the contents of the onboarding are confidential and I am not able to share those yet.

What now?

This is what I want to know too. The board will meet before November 1st to ratify the new seats, including the community one (me), and from then I will be on my seat for 2 years.

I want to start gathering information as soon as I'm able so I can present some answers to the community regarding the election process and why the right to vote was removed from the community at large, this is my main goal and I am optimistic in getting responses.

Anything you want to ask me, please get in touch with me.

Note: This blog has the comments disabled, please feel free to send me a message through my contact page if you need to discuss anything related to the community and the Drupal Association. You can also tweet at me or find me in Drupal Slack or the distributed matrix network as pcambra.

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As the Drupal Association publishes today, I've been elected to serve 2 years as at-large elected director.

You like me, you really like me – Sally Field, Oscars 1985

I want to thank the 360 Drupal Association members that voted for me, but also the 560 that didn't put my name in their ballot. I'll do my best and I hope I don't let you down.

If by any chance you're one of the 2289 eligible voters that decided not to cast a vote, and you'd like to share your reasons with me, please don't hesitate in reaching out.

My goals for my 2 year term are the following:

  • Get a clear answer and documentation background regarding the disenfranchisement of community voters and share it with the community.
  • If that the answer is not aligned with the values I think the Drupal Association brings to the community at large, I will move to revert this decision.
  • I want to review the programs aimed to engage with Drupal community at large.
  • I will channel the voice of the community, keeping the communication open for everyone that needs answers or wants to raise issues on anything pertaining Drupal Association matters, the community will get an answer from me.
  • I'll try to reach out and discuss the challenges of non native English speakers related to the DA programs.

It has been a bumpy election, it has had way too much hostility and I will add fixing this as part of my goals as a director. I don't feel that some of the events surrounding the election are the way forward for our community.

If someone ever tells you that your or their vote doesn't count, that no one wins elections by one vote, it seems that this one has been one of those times, ain't it.

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