Marco Carbone
Tue, 01/08/2008 - 22:24 — mcarbone
What is your motivation for being a member of the Drupal Association?:
I have contributed to the Drupal community over the past year but am not fully happy with my level of activity, especially since I enjoy doing it. I am the sort of person who blossoms in a more formally organized environment, and I expect that becoming a Permanent Member of the Drupal Association will increase my community participation greatly.
What are the primary goals you would like to work on?:
Development, communication, and education. Development: to use my coding skills to improve Drupal.org and other tools and infrastructures of the association. Communication/organization: Helping represent Drupal in-person or online, especially to non-profit/political communities. Education: to participate in online or in-person events in which the purpose is to educate non-technical audiences about Drupal.
What strategy will you employ in order to accomplish said goals?:
I think we need to come up with solid metrics for determining what direction the community thinks the Association should be going, with respect to all three of goals above (and more). This could come in the guise of a monthly survey, ranked polling, or a regular "town hall" meeting on #drupal with the express purpose of hearing the voice of the community. It should be done fairly regularly so that the dynamics of the community's desires can be charted over time. I'd also like to discuss this possibility with others, as there may be a better way to go about it. As for education and communication, now that the Association is increasing in membership, we should take a more active role in going to various universities and conferences to hold Drupal-related sessions. I have no particular connections in this area, but woud be interested in participating in the organization. For development, I will employ PHP and jQuery, mostly :)
What yearly budget would you need in order to accomplish said goals?:
Surveys and "town hall" meetings would require people's times and not much else. There would be travel expenses for traveling to universities and conferences, depending on how many we went to. But overall, time is the biggest expense.
What strengths/experience you have to help you accomplish the goals?:
Besides my Drupal experience, described below, I have been coding, mostly in academic settings, since 1997. After grad school, I spend a year at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society in Cambridge, MA working on a online education project, http://h2obeta.law.harvard.edu, so I have some experience with the online education world (and whatever else comes through Berkman). As a CS grad student at Harvard I spent several years as a teaching assistant and presented at several conferences. I was a senior staff member of a major statewide initiative campaign in Nevada (Question 7 in 2006).
How long have you been using Drupal, and how'd you get your start?:
I've been developing in Drupal nearly exclusively since early 2006, when I started working for a statewide initiative campaign in Nevada. For most of 2006, I used Drupal to build volunteering tools for the campaign. For the past year, I've been a full-time Drupal developer for Advomatic, LLC, and have worked on many small- and large-scale Drupal projects.
Have you made existing community contributions, and if so, what?:
I have contributed several patches to Drupal core (in the current development cycle); I have contributed patches to several contributed modules; I maintain the karma module (seriously, it will work for D6 w/o core hacks); I wrote a fleshed-out proposal for GHOP; I am a volunteer for the ACLU of Nevada; in 2003-04 I was a fellow of the National Science Foundations GK-12 program, assisting teachers at a public high school in Cambridge, MA in the topic of Physics.
How much time can you invest in your Drupal Association work?:
10 hours/month
Apply for Board of Directors membership:
Apply for Permanent Membership only
Statutes:
I have read and understood the Statutes of the Drupal Association. I am prepared to participate by following those statutes.
Comments
I like the idea of "town hall" meetings...
That's an interesting way to help gauge the community's "pulse" and it additionally helps provide more transparency which is something we could definitely use.
This part scares me a little ;)
"I expect that becoming a Permanent Member of the Drupal Association will increase my community participation greatly."
Generally, we look for community activity first, and then bring folks into the Association. We have a couple Association members who are inactive, so we want to be careful about adding more. But hey, at least you're aware of the issue before you start. :)
And an extra set of hands on deck with coding skills for some of the internal stuff would definitely be a good thing.
That's fair, but I said
That's fair, but I said increase my participation, not make it non-zero. I wouldn't say I'm an inactive member of the community, e.g.:
http://drupal.org/node/195161
http://drupal.org/node/198362
http://drupal.org/node/198187
But I'm also obviously not one of Drupal's super-contributors (yet), and if all Permanent Memberships can be filled with such people who are a good fit with the Association, then that's the meritocracy at work.
I was merely trying to be truthful: I think my community participation will increase if I become a Permanent Member, rather than decrease or stay around the same, and that motivated me to apply. My motivation would also be to make Drupal more successful, although I assumed that was implied in everyone's application. Those who have worked with me, in community and non-community projects, will hopefully vouch for my qualifications and consider me a valuable addition to the internal needs of the Drupal Association. But if not, then I'll have to motivate myself to increase my participation in other ways.
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I second the idea of regular
I second the idea of regular town hall meetings -- it can also be an important piece of ensuring the Association doesn't ultimately become detached from the larger Drupal community.