Episode 35: Why The Drupal Community Cares with Rachel Lawson

May 8, 2020

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Panelists

Justin Dorfman | Allen “Gunner” Gunn | Richard Littauer

Guest

Rachel Lawson
Drupal Association

Show Notes

In this episode, we have Rachel Lawson, from the U.K., who is the Community Liaison for Drupal Association. She is going to tell you all about the Drupal Association, what role she plays, and what she does. Since DrupalCon has been canceled due to COVID-19, there are some major things going on with sponsors that are still contributing money, the founder of Drupal making an unbelievable donation, as well as some other campaigns and match donations happening!

[00:01:08] Rachel explains about working with Drupal in the U.K. and also talks about how many people are using Drupal to power their websites.

[00:02:50] Justin has noticed that Drupal has a very big adoption within government, and he wonders why is that? Is it a security thing? Rachel answers this.

[00:04:14] Rachel tells us how Drupal gets paid as an open source product. She also talks about what’s been going on since DrupalCon has been canceled in May.

[00:10:37] There is a list of sponsors that are still contributing money to Drupal, despite the event being canceled, and a HUGE SHOUT OUT is necessary to them, so please see the list below! ☺

[00:012:01] The Founder of Drupal, Dries Buytaert, made an unbelievable donation and Rachel talks about what it was and how it affected everything. It is AMAZING!! There have been some other match donations mentioned as well.

[00:16:16] Governance is brought up by Gunner and he wants to know the civilian’s version of how governance at Drupal works and how the decision-making works that others could learn from and Rachel explains.

[00:23:00] Rachel explains her role with Drupal and what she does.

[00:25:00] How does someone join the Drupal open source community and how does Drupal capture all the contributors, not just the Devs? Rachel explains.

Spotlight

[00:33:01] Justin’s spotlight is The Ruby Blend Podcast-Episode 9. Listen to it!
[00:33:49] Gunner has two spotlights: Qubes OS and Subgraph OS and the Tails Project (tails.boum.org).
[00:34:39] Richard’s spotlight is the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation).
[00:35:33] Rachel has two spotlights: A pub in Leeds, Yorkshire where she was attending a Drupal event. It made her reflect back to being there before and how much it changed her life. Also, OS FEST in Lagos, Nigeria, that she recently attended. It was a huge experience for her and truly incredible.

Quotes

[00:20:54] “We’ve been going through a process at Drupal association about raising money and we have a campaign on at the moment called Drupal cares (#DrupalCares) and you will notice there is quite a lot going on with that.”

[00:23:33] “If just downloading Drupal or downloading any open source projects isn’t enough, you need the services around it, the support around it, regular security updates so where you can work on new code and have thousands and thousands of thousands of continuous integration tests run every time you say, “Hey, I propose that we do this new thing in Drupal!”

[00:25:18] “Do you want to give a shout out to those sponsors that have done that because that warmed my heart! You know, the sponsors that said, keep our money, we believe in the project, we know we won’t get any real value out of the event not being alive. Please, give them some props.” (They are listed below.) 👇

[00:40:41] “I said look, if you’re going to do this, call it a Community Liaison. It’s a liaison between the wider Drupal community and project and the Drupal Association. It was later on and I said all those things and I’m actually quite fond of the job now!”

[00:42:13] “The single most important thing we changed was that getting attribution for work doesn’t just apply to code. We celebrate, we recognize, and we attribute work for all different reasons. If there is one thing we have done that has transformed Drupal into a wider thing than just a piece of software, it’s that.”