The Boston Initiative in DC

Last night, a handful of us in DC got together to discuss bringing the Boston Initiative to DC. My notes are on the DC group, with links to lots of additional info for those unfamiliar with the project.

I expected a pretty quick planning meeting: how often can we do sprints, where can we hold them, who wants to help organize them, etc. Instead, we quickly got off on a tangent about the merits of LearnDrupal.org and concerns about the content, how it's structured, and whether it's just duplicating existing training materials.

I was a bit frustrated by the way it went, but after sleeping on it, I'm really happy it did.

See, I went into this with motives of my own. The whole point of the Boston Initiative is to get more developers involved in Drupal core development, but I hoped that holding some training sessions ("learn sprints," in the parlance of the initiative) would help to attract other, non-Drupal developers into the fold, and maybe even non-developers who are just interested in learning more about Drupal. I figured that even if people only made it up the first few rungs of the Drupal Ladder, it would at least get them started and involved in the community, and we all know that there is a serious need for more Drupal site builders and developers.

With the benefit of hindsight, I can admit that this was pretty stupid. I was trying to co-opt the Boston Initiative to make it fit my own goals. I think that my own expectations probably helped to push the conversation in that direction last night, but it was the wrong way to be approaching this project. There are plenty of existing training options out there for Drupal, but this initiative is not about training people to use Drupal: it's about getting developers involved in the Drupal core, with clear step-by-step instructions and milestones.

So I'm glad it went that way. I know now that when planning learning and issue sprints, I need to make sure that I'm clear about what kind of learning can be expected—or perhaps more importantly, what should not be expected. It would still be great to get more people started with Drupal, but that's a task for a different initiative.