This is going to be the first of what I hope many more updates regarding the Pitchburgh initiative and the projects involved. Some months, and depending on interest, I’ll be talking about innovation in Drupal as well, and I’d love to see this as a space for dialog and discussion. If this feels like something you are interested in, keep reading and watch this space.
Just as a recap, the innovation initiative, Pitch-burgh was held last month in DrupalCon Pittsburgh, and we can confirm it was a success. We received 35 submissions, which ideas and videos the judges reviewed and voted on. This resulted in 7 finalists.
We even got last-minute funding during the Driesnote itself, Lee Walker at Code Journeymen, and Jonathan at Daggerhart Lab, who offered to fund AmyJune Hineline‘s project, 'Contributing and Mentoring the Mentor'.
But the biggest surprise to me was still to come after DrupalCon dust settled. Matt Mullenweg, (Co-Founder of WordPress) contacted Dries, excited about the initiative and about the fact that we are funding Gutenberg, a project born and linked to the WordPress community. In response, Matt committed to funding the full 20,000 dollars requested by the initiative. I can’t imagine a better example of the spirit of Open Source. What in the paper are competing projects, Drupal and WordPress, in practice open source has made them partners, sharing resources towards a common better goal. And the one who benefits more here is, guess who? The final user. Thanks, Matt! This is a great example of what open source needs to be.
Coming back to the goal of this post, providing Pitch-burgh updates, it was noted by the judges and the Drupal Association leadership (as well as the conversations I could hear in Pittsburgh), that two of the projects are following the same goal, modernizing and improving Drupal’s editorial experience. However, they do it in different ways, be it architecture, data model, user experience, etc. I am talking about the 'Gutenberg in Drupal', and the 'Decoupled Layout Builder initiatives'. There is hence an interest, from the stakeholders in this initiative, but from the community as well, for both projects to align.
This has been received pretty well and agreed upon the project leads, and we just started holding regular meetings between both projects, with the idea to share updates, align goals and look for synergies. I hope to provide more updates on this in my next pitch-burgh update.
In the meantime, you can vote or send me your thoughts on this topic.
Talking about Mentor the Mentor, AmyJune is starting a new role, for which we are excited and we wish her much success. Unfortunately, that means as well that she will be potentially stepping back from her countless contributions to the Drupal community. Said that, this is actually good timing, because her work on this project (Mentor the Mentor) is geared towards giving other mentors the tools to continue her work. I have to say that from the DA we have been impressed with her dedication and commitment from the very beginning of the project and the quality of what she's doing.
As it’s as well the quality of what Brian Perry is doing, with incredibly detailed scope and deliverables on his project: 'Drupal API Client'.
The two last projects worth mentioning are 'JSON data and schemas', and 'Policy-based access in core'. Because both of them are requesting merge requests to happen in Drupal core in the scope of their Statements of Work, we are going to need to align with the core team, pretty much from the start. This could potentially prove a challenge, as some MR against core can sometimes take lots of conversations with months or even years involved, which could be completely misaligned with the project goals and timelines. For this, I am grateful to count on Lauri Eskola’s generosity in his new role as Core Product Manager. We are going to need a good flow of communication between the core team and those initiatives where a merge in core is needed, and Laurii is already providing so much value and help on this.
All in all, all projects are progressing well and as expected. To sum up, during the current phase all projects are aligning on goals, timelines, and deliverables with the Drupal Association. This will result in an agreement between both parties, the DA and the awardees, and it will be reflected in a contract between said parties. The final goal is to make sure the interests of the DA and those of the Drupal community are well represented. We would like to have this phase done and dusted, at some point between July and August (and having into consideration that we're entering the holiday season).
Good news as well! If you want to follow on a weekly or even daily basis what’s happening in Pitch-burgh, all the projects decided unanimously that all conversations and documentation should be happening or published in public slack channels and public Drupal.org issues. You are more than welcome to join and follow the conversations, or just wait for my next update where I’ll share all my highlights.
I don’t want to finish this week's updates without mentioning some great catch-ups and conversations that I’ve had with people like Anoop John and Javier Prada from the association “Drupalera” in Spanish. They are all aligned on teaching and or promoting Drupal. What makes me realize as well that those initiatives and the Promote Drupal one are incredibly aligned with AmyJune's Mentor the Mentor. It would be great to find potential synergies and collaboration opportunities. Projects grow old, and contributors get busy with other things, so sometimes it’s good to get help from new contributors with fresh new ideas, if anything at least to keep the original ideas up and running, and stronger than ever, but hopefully to bring as well new ones, and inject new enthusiasm and speed to the original projects and initiatives.
All in all, a very busy start to the Pitch-burgh initiative, everyone feels excited, very committed, and eager to start, and we can’t wait to see what they are all going to achieve for Drupal.