drupal

Hopefully you've heard the news about the Drupal Association's new D8 Accelerate grants program, and the fundraising drive we have currently going on. If not, the gist is that the Drupal Association has created a central fund, managed by the Drupal core committers, to fund both "bottom-up" community grants for things like targeted sprints or "bug bounties," as well as "top-down" spending driven from the core committers on larger strategic initiatives that help accelerate Drupal 8's release. All D8 Accelerate grants that are provided are tracked centrally at https://assoc.drupal.org/d8accelerate/awarded, including what the money was used for, how much was spent, to whom it went, and a report from the grant recipient(s) that outlines the work that was accomplished.

However, it can be a little hard to parse from that format the larger meaning/context of this work, especially if you don't spend upwards of 30 hours per week in the core queue like most of these folks. :) As Chief Wearer of Many Hats™, I sit on both the Drupal Association board as well as the committee who manages these funds. This puts me in a good position to provide a bit of "behind the scenes" info on how the funding process works, as well as provide some of the larger story of how these funds are benefitting not only Drupal 8 core, but the larger Drupal ecosystem.

TL;DR I passed. :P Here's a run-down of what the experience was like.

Up-front disclaimer: I work for Acquia. However, I was not involved in the creation of Acquia Certification and had no insight to the test beforehand apart from a single sample question. I'm also writing this on my personal blog, rather than Acquia.com, because these are *my* thoughts/impressions, and haven't been vetted by anyone else. :) Carry on!

(Sorry for spamming Drupal Planet with this, but a few people on IRC were saying it might be a good idea for people to get a wider heads-up, given the number of Drupal community hats I wear.)

In a week, we're heading down to Minnesota to pick up our new addition to the family, and so starting May 6 I'll be on maternity leave for 3 months, until ~August 1 (thank you, Acquia!!).

Here's an outline of how that may or may not affect you, and who to talk to instead:

This was originally posted to the "The influence of subtlety" thread on the Drupalchix group back in 2010, but since that was awhile ago now, and since I'm giving a talk on How to Create Ravenously Passionate Contributors at DrupalCon Sydney (and this experience played a huge part) I figured I'd post this to Drupal Planet as well.

Here are some highlights from my first DrupalCon (Vancouver, 2006).

The Spark distribution is a Drupal 7 distribution which aims to prototype cutting-edge authoring experience improvements that we hope to propose for inclusion in Drupal 8 core, announced back in May. Please download the latest release and check it out, and give us lots of feedback! (And/or patches! ;))