Who are you?
I'm a software developer located in Los Angeles. I've contributed some modules and even a little code for D11.
What does building community mean to you?
It means expanding the community by reaching out to developers and users of other CMSes.
What does advocating for Drupal mean to you?
It means explaining to various audiences what Drupal can do for them. That starts with having a system that can be used by a wide range of people, not just experts.
Why are you running for a board seat at the Drupal Association?
I have three goals (expanded on below):
- Try to move Drupal in a more ideology-neutral direction. A software project pushing an agenda opens up a can of worms (example); Drupal should be an honest broker.
- Try to reclaim some marketshare from WordPress. Reach out to WP developers and encourage them to use Drupal for some of their projects. Try to encourage some WP site owners to jump ship. Drupal can't survive without a bigger pool of likely users.
- Urge large organizations that use Drupal to donate some of their developers' time to the project.
Why should members vote for you?
I'm already trying to make Drupal more usable by a wider range of people. For instance, I'm trying to make the permissions page easier to understand. I'm also the author of a wrapper for composer. That lets users run composer commands without having to learn how to use the command line. Having to deal with composer, SSH, etc is one of the main reasons why many won't use Drupal. An insecure configuration where the web server can write to code directories is not the answer.
What is your favorite Drupal moment or memory?
Although my contribution to D11 is small, it's one of my favorite memories of this project.
Additional info
To expand on the above, if people want to put messages on their profile pages or on the pages for projects they administer, they should feel free to do so. However, Drupal itself shouldn't take a stance on political issues. Another aspect of this is opposing censorship, brigading, in-fighting, etc etc. Well over a million people have signed up for Drupal accounts but, as issues languishing for years shows, there aren't enough active developers already. Let's work towards increasing that number.
As for the second item, I personally wouldn't be doing the developer outreach but would help recruit ambassadors/evangelists to promote Drupal as an option on various forums and so on. Representing themselves as ambassadors, they could correct misconceptions; for instance, some years ago I saw several people on a forum who thought that Drupal was intertwined with Flash.
For the third item, the U.S. government and other large organizations make extensive use of Drupal and don't contribute as much as they take in many cases. Asking them to contribute money is problematic because it would favor some over others. The best thing is to ask them to contribute in the issues queues. Those ambassadors can reach out through various channels and urge such participation.
