Proposal: D8 Contrib Office Hours

Proposal

Now that Drupal 8.0.0 is nearing its final release, the next task in front of the Drupal community is porting ALL the contributed projects! Luckily, this effort is very much underway, but the faster the majority of big modules are at least usable (ideally with stable releases), the faster Drupal 8 adoption will take off.

After talking to numerous project maintainers, including those with multiple Drupal 8 core commits, it seems like many would find value in having dedicated times during which to collaborate with other people porting projects to D8, get questions answered, get advice on sticky problems, and figure out where best to help.

So to that end, in the same vein as the original core office hours, this proposal is to establish a "contrib office hours": dedicated times in #drupal-contribute in IRC for folks who are porting projects to Drupal 8 to collaborate together and get unstuck.

Goals

There are a few different goals:

• Get architectural advice on how facet X of a project should be ported: for example to services or to plugins or what have you.
• Ask for help on weird D8 errors you're getting while porting your project, and pointers to resources.
• Provide a way for a maintainer to raise a blocker, and for others in the channel to help get them unblocked.
• Give those who want to help with D8 readiness but don't know where best to jump in to be pointed at projects/issues to help with.

What will happen during "contrib office hours?"

This is very open to discussion. We could start by going around the room and seeing who has things to talk about, then figuring out what priority/sequence makes the most sense. Or, we could just leave it open for people to raise things if they have them anytime within the 2 hour block. Whatever works for the people willing to act as mentors.

Any insights raised during office hours regarding project readiness will be captured in the contrib_tracker issue queue for public record.

Who's needed?

To have effective office hours, we need at least the following kinds of people to be around:

• Those who are familiar with core APIs should be available to answer questions that come up.
• Those who have knowledge of where various projects' progress is at and are able to raise blockers/point out places to help.

We also need to promote the office hours, so that people who are interested and/or those who can help show up.

Volunteers sign-up

If you fall into one of the groups above, and are interested in helping with these, please add your name here...

• Tim Plunkett (@tim.plunkett) - very knowledgeable about D8 APIs, working on Panels, Page Manager, Field Collection modules.
• Kris Vanderwater (@EclipseGc) - very knowledgeable about D8 APIs, working on CTools/Page Manager modules.
• Adam G-H (@phenaproxima) - very knowledgeable about D8 APIs, wrote Drupal Module Upgrader, lead efforts on D7 -> D8 migration, working on Media stuff.
• Adam Balsam (@balsama) - I’m tracking the progress and trying to help align efforts for module porting across teams - so I have a good idea of where many of the D8 Contrib modules are at.
• Ben Dougherty (@benjy) - knowledgeable with D8, worked on Migrate and core, now working on contrib
• Lee Rowlands (@larowlan) - knowledgeable with D8, maintainer of comment, contact, block_content and forum in core, now working on contrib that interests
• Darryl Norris (@darol100) - knowledgeable with D8 theming layer and Drupal Console/ I have been porting Light Skeleton into a D8 theme. Also I speak English and Spanish.
• Roy Scholten (@yoroy) - UX, interaction, information design.
• Lucas Hedding(@heddn) - knowledgeable about D8 migrate, Field API, Drupal Console and speaks English & Spanish.
• Valery Lourie(@valthebald) - knowledgeable with D8, maintainer of data, metatags_quick, nodeorder, now working on contribs that interests, and speaks English, Russian & Hebrew.
• Chris Leppanen(@twistor) - knowledgeable with D8 apis. Entity/field things, plugins, stream wrappers. Working on porting Feeds and creating Flysystem.
• Mike Ryan (@mikeryan) - knowledgeable about D8 migrate.
• Kevin Kaland (wizonesolutions - knowledgeable about D8 APIs as they relate to contrib. I speak English, Spanish, and Norwegian.
• Joe Shindelar (@eojthebrave) - good at finding answers to questions and explaining things, working on creating/updating documentation for all things Drupal 8.
• Bojan Zivanovic (bojanz) - Familiar with core APIs, wrote the Composer and extension patterns documentation. Working on Commerce, Address, Profile, Inline Entity Form.
• Nick Wilde (@NickWilde) - Fairly good knowledge of converting APIs between D7->D8 - almost done converting AdvAgg and have a few D8 modules (more private/project specific than public but anyways.)

• Your name here (@your_username) - what you're able to help with / what you're working on

...and please fill out this doodle with your availability on a typical week:
http://doodle.com/poll/5eup88wp4kk2uy69

I'll try and compile these results and propose some times by the end of the week. The idea is to pick a couple of 60 minute blocks of time per week, in different timezones for better global coverage.

Thanks!