Add emma.maria as Bartik maintainer

Giving the experience demonstrated by Emma contributing and mentoring in several Drupal core sprints, and also that she counts with the supporting of Seven's maintainer :P I think she's the best candidate for that. Any thoughts?

BTW Emma, we love you! :)

+1 for emma.maria

I was going to volunteer and then saw Emma's name above. Far better candidate!

Of course, I'd be happy to be considered if that wasn't possible. :-)

My input is that I am happy to be considered for this.

Sorting out the code for Bartik to get it inline with the Drupal coding standards and having someone organise/manage the issues for Bartik has been a long term bug bear for me.

I understand the level of organisation that the issues need. I have worked on this for Seven (prepping issue queues, tagging, distributing issues) and helped mentor/part-lead frontend sprints at events. I also very lucky to be part of a very strong team of frontend developers that work on Drupal core. We all believe in the goal of improving things no matter which project so I know that there will be a lot of support for this goal of Bartik too.

Finally I also agree with Jen here #2372045: [META] The plan for Bartik. Jen holds the designer maintainer role and leads everything in that department. I want to take on more responsibility on something related to frontend development in core and focus on getting Bartik's code to the level it deserves so it is easy to maintain.

So that was my two cents about this. Thanks for all the support so far you all rock :)

Ok, so should we move this ahead?

You have to make a patch. Was it determined whether Jeff Burnz wanted to/should be removed?

emma.maria++

I've been thinking about becoming the maintainer as well. As a result, I created and started working on #2375673: Split Bartik's CSS into SMACSS style components. Never the less, I think Emma would be a great maintainer. Two woman being the maintainers of the theme can be a really interesting thing. As long as we can fix Bartik, I'm happy. I'd love to help :)

I've seen also sqndr's work and I don't technically see any reason why he couldn't work as a maintainer for Bartik. Are we in a situation where we have to vote or can we choose to add two maintainers there?

I wouldn't mind being a maintainer together with Emma. If it would come down to one of us, I'd like to step aside and let Emma do this. As I mentioned, more woman as maintainers would be great.

Any thoughts?

If Jen, @emma.maria and @sqndr all agree, I think it is fine to have multiple people in maintainers for it.

Be sure you know what you are agreeing to. :)

https://www.drupal.org/contribute/core-maintainers#component

• Monitoring their subsystem's issue queue (also known as "issue queue farming"). When a new issue is submitted, this involves verifying that it's a valid issue and taking appropriate action (tag as "Novice", change the status if more information is needed or if it's not really a bug, change other issue parameters, move it to a different issue queue, etc.).
• Mentoring new contributors who are working on issues related to that subsystem.
• Being the point of contact for that subsystem's contributors.
• Reviewing proposed patches to that subsystem.
• Acting as an expert on the workings of that subsystem (answering questions that come up, and being involved in discussions of major overhauls and re-architecting).
• Translating strategic thinking about their subsystem into actionable items and issues.

It's not so much working on issues, but reviewing them and providing guidance.
You can still additionally work on any issues you want. ;)

I don't think we need multiple people. It is less about having people to do the work than it is about having a single point to make decisions.

Whether it's just Emma or both Emma and sqndr, count me in for Team Bartik :-)

I agree with David, there needs to be only one maintainer for development. Two development would require a lot more communication at the high up decision level, extra decisions etc.

Also I agree that the maintainer's highest priority is facilitating work for others (as it says in the guidelines) and not focussing on getting all the work done themselves.

I'm not an expert on the matter, that's just what I have learnt so far from other maintainers :)

So if people want Sander instead that is fine with me :)

I suggested myself as I know from experience of trying it out, that I really enjoy the facilitating for others and moving things forward role much more than working on all things all the time.

Don't get me wrong here. I also agree that facilitating work for others is more important than focussing on getting all the work done themselves. I may have phrased that incorrect in my comment. I created the issue while the new maintainer issue opened up, and it got me thinking - not the other way around. This issue was also moving really fast and someone asked me why I didn't take I chance, so … :)

I disagree on the multiple maintainers… Of course, it could only be done if all the maintainers agree on this matter. So that's not an option.

As I mentioned before, I don't want to turn this into a vote; because I myself have voted for Emma as well. She's great with people and I'm sure she will be great at moving things forward. ;)

If it would come down to one of us, I'd like to step aside and let Emma do this.

Just like Rachel, I'd be happy to join Team Bartik with Emma as the new development maintainer and get stuff done! The sooner, the better! If Emma has the confident, we can move this issue ahead. :)

Ok, thanks Emma - I think you'd be a great addition here too.

Sqndr - thanks for gracious concession here - Emma will need a team to support her with issue triage, and actual dev.

go "Team Bartik"

I LOVE Bartik :-)

Also, Emma, please verify that your personal details in the patch are correct.

My only problem with the patch is whether or not it's premature to actually remove Jeff as a maintainer?

I think we should wait a little, and perhaps attempt to reach out to him in other ways before doing that.

I just left this message on his contact form at Adaptive Themes

Hey Jeff,

Are you still interested in being a maintainer of the Bartik theme going forward with Drupal8 ?

https://www.drupal.org/node/2375225

People are looking at some plans for the theme, Jen Simmons has indicated she's willing to stay on as a Design lead, but not the Dev side. A couple of others are willing to step up if you don't have time for this anymore, but I wanted to be sure you'd seen that first.

cheers
Donna

And am also about to reach out via twitter.

Wow so much love for front-end development :)
+1 for emma.maria
Go *Team Bartik*

+1 for emma.maria

Also willing to help as a member of Team Bartik.

I agree with @kattekrab that we might have been really fast with moving this forward. As an example, Jeff has commented ob issues for Bartik recently, like #2193693: Improve theme description and screenshot alt-text for usability. I don't know if anyone other than @kattekrab tried to get Jeff involved and ask for his opinion?

Contact was tried with both current maintainers by @lauriii when the original discussion happened here #2372045: [META] The plan for Bartik. Jen replied pretty much instantly, she was concerned about her role in Bartik.

Also I think it has been rushed because history might be repeating itself when Seven changed hands, plus the long evidence of missing dev maintainer for big chunks at a time.

C'mon Jeff give us something :)

I contacted both Jeff and Jen on Twitter regarding the meta issue. Not the most official way to contact but it was the easiest way for me.

I might have been a bit inaccurate in my previous comment where I said there's no technical difference between these two people. I'm still supporting Emma 100% and I think Emma has wider range of experience on leading and mentoring people so I think she might have deeper understanding on what we are expecting from her. So if we have to choose between these 2 great people I would give my support to Emma. I just wanted to say that if we need multiple maintainers there, sqndr could be also suitable for that work.

It would be nice to hear also Jeff's thoughts on this.

OK, I am here now, I did not get any email about this btw, but I did get the tweet! Cheers :)

Have one maintainer only, they are the single point of decision making and have the final say.

Let me be very clear about one thing - there has never been two concurrent maintainers for Bartik. Jen Simmons left the Bartik project 6 months before D7 shipped, I took over and ran the team that fixed and repaired the theme into some semblance of working code. I wrote some patches but it was mostly cat herding.

For that reasons I think both the current maintainers should be removed and emma made the sole maintainer. The rest of us can write patches which I am actually pretty happy to do, I would rather write patches than drive the process, indeed I only became the maintainer because no one else was doing it.

This should free up the process and allow emma and the team to forge ahead, which at this stage is vitally important. There is way enough cat herding in that process already and having to deal with another maintainer will merely cause delays and not really win us anything.

IMO there is no single arbiter of style, regardless of who contributed the original designs for anything in core. If Jen wants to be involved, great, but not with a veto position, Drupal has moved on from this idea and there are many vested interests in the design, colors etc and how this works for a great many audiences such as the visually impaired, screen reader users and so on. These aspects require hard experience in a specialised area. Bojhan has shown us this many times with his input in UX, e.g. should Mike Gifford and Bojhan be maintainers also? No, but called in when and were required to advise.

Right now the design should not change that much in any case and where it does it's mostly driven by accessibility or responsive design requirements. Other design changes are likely to be marketing driven, meaning small changes to perhaps the Drupalicon or such things. These are community driven changes, again no one arbiter of style needs to be appointed.

Of course we always have my beloved frenemy Bojhan to kick our asses when design goes awry ;)

The maintainer needs to be a bona fide front end developer - these people have design backgrounds for the most part, so you get all in one - coder who understands design, there is just no need for two maintainers, in fact if there were, something is seriously wrong.

I think emma.maria will do a great job, so sure, go for it!

Please note guys, I have not been entirely dormant, I worked many hours earlier this year on the Bartik header gradient accessibility issue, and I have kept up with all the major issues, I may not always comment, but I am following them :)

Probably, late to the party,

+1 for emma.maria for maintainer.

Passion, facilitation knowledge, cat herding are the skills which are paramount, aside to the frontend knowledge and design competence...

Emma has stacks of all the above.

*go team bartik*

Yay!

Thanks all :)

RTBC++

Sounds good to me! However, I am worried about the bus factor of our themes with Lewis + Emma being maintainer :)

I think being maintainer of a theme is not so much about design vision. Its more about being able to maintain a vision once its set. When Seven was initially design Mark had a lot of ideas, however these never fully made it into the project and over-time the space it was in changed. We created a revised vision - which from on the conceptual part was 3 man effort, but in execution was one of many which required a lot of attention to detail and oversight from an active maintainer (Lewis) and many community members.

I think the job of a maintainer is to make sure that the component keeps moving and improving. Significant overhauls could be part of that maintainers job, but not necessarily to lead. I think its good to note that the design overhaul that Seven got, was not initiated by the maintainer. But it was carried and brought to execution by the maintainer.

I think emma encompasses many of the skills required, but to manage the more "stressful" parts should also be aware of Larry's presentation. Meeting the handbook defined requirements is key to being a responsible maintainer. But its not easy; you do not magically get resources, when essential people fundamentally disagree (you have to discuss your way out of it), being point of contact - mostly means being point of complaints.

However the one thing that you do get in return, is being able to direct with a (tad) bit more weight when it comes to most of the issues like #2020081: H4 element not distinguishable from rest of text (P element) - which is frankly what most of the issues resolve around (small changes).

There are many components, modules, topics, etc in MAINTAINERS.txt with more than one maintainer.

YesCT thats because they are huge systems with many moving parts, Bartik is a simple theme, actually a very simple theme as far as Drupal themes go. Also, to be clear, I am not against having more than one maintainer, what I am against is appointing an arbiter of style, or whose ones sole purpose is to veto or direct stylistic change. Maintainers are cat herders who keep everyone focused on an agreed course of action, they don't get to set the agenda, but rather implement it.

Everyone here is agreeing that @emma.maria should be the maintainer so committed 8c3365d and pushed to 8.0.x. Thanks @Jeff Burnz for your dedication and hard work as Bartik maintainer.

Thanks @Jeff Burnz for all of your work so far and the support with this. We can raise a new issue about some of the points you made.

Also thanks again to everyone who has commented, I have honestly been amazed at the amount of support and kind words.

Most importantly it is so so great that this has led to rallying people together and sparking fresh enthusiasm and willingness to work on Bartik.

So Team Bartik look forward to many pings and updates on issues very soon :)

Jen Simmons left the Bartik project 6 months before D7 shipped, I took over and ran the team that fixed and repaired the theme into some semblance of working code.

and from https://www.drupal.org/node/2372045#comment-9347787

I would rewrite the whole shebang... That's me though, discard all tech depth and wipe the slate, do it properly instead of the last minute rush job we were forced into in D7.

Sigh. I've been silent for so long. I've walked away over and over instead of responding. But I'm tired of letting people repeat derogatory and inaccurate comments like these. So this time, I'm going to respond.

This idea that the theme didn't work and needed saving to become "some semblance of working code" — this is deeply insulting to me and to all of the many people who worked on Bartik. It's insulting to Angie, who committed it. This idea that most of the work on Bartik happened after Bartik was committed to core is utterly untrue. Bartik was in fantastic shape when it was committed to core.

And this idea that Bartik's code has always been horrible — also not true. We can all hate Drupal's div soup, rightly so. I'm very glad to see so many people working so hard to improve Drupal's markup. But this idea that Bartik is an especially low point for D7 — where is that coming from? Batik's code is very much inline with the rest of Drupal 7 core, and an example of best practices.

Jeff, you did not write the code for Bartik, and you certainly were not "forced" to write it in some kind of "last minute rush job". There's no need to purge every line of code I ever wrote in order to rescue Drupal from me.

I know that there is a belief shared by a small handful of very powerful core contributors that I didn't do much of the work for Bartik, I just took the credit. That I abandoned the project. That I didn't work hard enough. I was shocked when I was told in 2011 — by someone with a lot of power — that this is what people say about me. Perhaps, Jeff, this is what you say about me. I was told I was not welcome in D8 because this is what people say about me. The truth is that I worked incredibly hard on Bartik. Most people have no idea what it took to create Bartik. Bartik was 98% done when it was committed to core, and never would have been committed if it hadn't been ready. Plus, right after Bartik went into core, I was hired by a company to travel to China for two months to lead their front-end development team. I was in an opposite timezone, working very long hours, stuck behind the Chinese firewall (blocked from IRC, Twitter, sometimes Google, & much more), where I got incredible ill — to the point of going to the hospital. More than once I thought I might just die in China. Of course, I knew there would be last minute Bartik bugs to fix. I trusted the Drupal community as a whole (and all the people who I'd cat herded for months — don't lecture me on cat herding) would have my back and could finish things up. I had no idea a new group of people would take over and become so vicious, creating this bogus story about me. I don't remember anyone reaching out to me and saying "hey, where'd you go?", "hey we need your help", "hey, Jen, we miss you". And I have no idea why doing an incredible amount of work for many many months, followed by not being as involved for a few months while I took care of client work (as a freelancer who was never supported in any way to work on core), ends with core leaders trashing my reputation.

I know I got credit for just 1 CVS commit when Bartik went into core. And only 2 or 3 commits (or maybe 5?) in total for all of Drupal 7. I know the people who fixed bugs in Bartik after it was committed got dozens of commit 'points' for those bug fixes. And I know commit points is the main (only?) metric Dries uses when valuing core contributors. But commit message credits do not reflect how much work went behind each commit — especially in CVS. Twelve months of work, over 500+ hours of time, got one point. Believing that is equal to the amount of work that goes into fixing a bug is inane.

I left the Drupal community because of The Story of How Jen Didn't Work Hard Enough, She's Actually A Bossy Bitch Who Just Likes To Take Credit For Things She Doesn't Deserve. (And also because I'd been violently threatened by members of the NYC Drupal group while most of the Drupal leadership did nothing about it, and some even encouraged those who were committing the felonies. In fact, some of the core contributors who were trashing me were close friends with the men who were threatening to hunt me down and rape me. Note, none of this would have happened if I were a man.)

Jeff, your comments lead me to think nothing has changed, and it's a mistake for me to get involved again. Is this what you want — to drive me away again? Three years ago, it was clear a tiny powerful group did want me out. In the end, honestly, it's not worth fighting for the right to volunteer tens of thousands of dollars worth of free work to a piece of software that is owned by those who stand to make millions, while the rest of us do not own any equity, all the while being treated with such contempt. There are better places to take my skills. People who respect what I contribute. I truly do not know how I could collaborate with a "co-maintainer" who hates me so much and has such distorted ideas of who I am.

Of course, publishing this comment right after Emma's cheerful comment #37 just makes me look more like a bitch. It's easy to take a shot at a negative comment like this one and blame the writer. What a total downer this comment is. But honestly... truly... even many years later, I get deeply upset about what happened, what apparently is still happening. I have no idea why. I didn't work hard enough? I pushed too hard for the vision I had? Anyone who knows me or saw me working with others to create Bartik knows these things are not true. I've written many cheerful and helpful comments like Emma's above. It's just apparently not enough.

I am deeply grateful to all the people who've been very encouraging to me over the years. I have heard you, I continue to hear you, and I have been deeply encouraged by your support. Thank you. There were many people who were greatly supportive while I was being threatened with assault. Some of those people are very high up in Drupal leadership. Thank you. I contributed to Drupal in the first place because of the amazing sense of community and togetherness. I still cherish the times when that's what it was about.

Meanwhile, apparently Drupal still has all the same problems with the way people are treated. Especially women. Especially designers. Especially people who contribute huge amounts of work that's not easily quantified when counting commits. And I sadly don't see this getting fixed anytime soon.

Jen. I am so so sorry. I knew some of this, but not all of it. I don't know all the who's, hows and why's. I probably don't need to, but I am really sad to read your words.

I'm also really thankful to have read them. It's not easy, but too often things go unsaid, and great people feel it's simpler and safer to walk away with issues like this unaddressed and unresolved. Thank you for being brave here Jen. Really.

With my "community working group" hat on, I'd love to see if we can find a time to chat in real time (irc, skype, hangout, whatevs)

Obviously I can't change the past, but I am committed to working for a better present, and a very different future.

- Donna

#38: Thanks for your hard work, Jen! And thanks for speaking the truth.

I don't know what happened in the past or why, but I do know that those people are loosing more and more power.

Also what are you all talking about "single point of responsibility" and "decision making"?

This is still voluntary open source software and it is about freedom, not restriction or power battles.

We want to create great software and have fun? Or not?

I am a strong believer in teams, but I honestly don't care if there is one person responsible (and decision making) or many.

Before we (the twig initiative) took over the theme layer the then-current theme maintainers had not been very active (at least not as far as I could see).

Did anyone call them out? - No!

So why the lecturing on all the hard responsibilities for new maintainers?

If someone leaves the Drupal project tomorrow there is _zero_ you can do. If half of core's maintainer.txt decide to leave, you cannot do anything.

And still Drupal will live on.

And if Emma decides she would like a co-maintainer (even if only setting design direction) then that is fine.

If she later decides, woah, I really would love to have a team, that is great, too.

So could we please keep the drama, etc. out of this (not you Jen!) and have some fun?

It is pretty clear there have been hard feelings about some of this. From an outsiders perspective it looks like:

- Jen put in lot of work to get bartik done -- we all know that creating something from scratch is more difficult than re-building something existing. You always know better ... afterwards. She decided to put in the 500 hours to create that theme and get it committed.

- Jeff took over and might have felt there was a lot that could be done better. He apparently decided with the new team that this needs to be fixed to be ready for D7 release. He might have felt abandoned by Jen (who was busy in real life).

Both have _chosen_ to do this. No one ever forced them.

And no one forces you (the reader).

We all have our motivation for why we work on Drupal 8 (or 7). It might be job, curiosity, performance, etc.

But in the end anyone can choose to leave any day.

As Greg Dunlap put it (sorry paraphrased - don't have the actual phrase ready):

"If the software burns out the contributors, then I'd rather see it (the software) burn and die, than live on and do that."

If this is no longer motivating, if this is no longer fulfilling a purpose, just don't do it, because you feel, you are "obligated to" or "must". You can do something else, any time. Do it for "love of Drupal", not the "obligation".

Yes, it would be a problem, if half of core's subsystem maintainers left, but motivated people would come afterwards and continue it.

Maybe in a different direction, maybe in something, those who do the work now, would never think.

But as long as the Software is great, it will live on - in some way or another.

So lets have some fun, value freedom and maybe think about what motivates each of us for why we work on Drupal 8.

Thanks!

Thank you Donna @kattekrab. Sure I'd be happy to chat. Email me through http://jensimmons.com/contact.

And thanks Fabianx.

I've chosen over the last 3–4 years to not talk publicly about these experiences in detail. I haven't named names, for instance, and am not doing so now. Mostly because I think the ensuing drama of she-said/he-said, finger pointing, and 'no I didn't!' would not be helpful or constructive to anyone. And because, while I've been deeply hurt and frustrated, I don't think any of this is important enough to warrant hurting anyone's personal reputation. There are plenty of times when people in the larger tech industry have done things that should be publicly called out (especially over the last two months, see Gamergate, Uber, etc). I just don't think any of this bullshit rises to that standard of evil. Honestly, most people don't care. My saying so-and-so did this, and this-other-person did that just seems petty and dumb.

That said, I have talked to many people privately. In 2011, I told people in core leadership exactly what was happening, with all the detail. Face-to-face in person, not in text. People who could have done something have known all along exactly what was up. As far as I know, nothing was done. I got no apology. No one reached out. No one attempted to correct perceptions. Sides were chosen, and I wasn't on the right side.

It is what it is. Priorities have been defined. People have made business decisions to benefit them and their companies. There's just no room for me at the table, given the difference in our values. It's clear I'm not the only person who doesn't fit at that table. I'm not the only one who's walked away. Many, many people see what's happening. There's the story about how everyone is equally valued and has equal opportunity to contribute. That there's no power structure, no obstacles to participation, no hidden agendas. That this isn't about money, it's about doing good for each other and the world... And then there's the actual truth. A lot of pretty bad behavior is tolerated because those in power have consciously decided to allow it and exploit it for their own financial gain. There's a huge imbalance between those who are paid to contribute to core, especially in stock options, and those who are not — particularly for those who don't get a salary from any employer and sacrifice billable hours to contribute. And there's a small group of core contributors who have a tremendous amount of hidden power and wield it ways that are anything up open, free, or fun.

That said, I don't want to discourage people from jumping in to contribute. I'm glad I did. I learned a ton. Met incredible people. Spoke at many DrupalCons to packed crowds. Got to work with amazing clients. Took my career up a notch or three. I just think it's important for people to protect themselves. Don't over commit. Keep your eyes open. Don't sacrifice sleep. Don't neglect other areas of your life. Realize that there are other places in the tech world that aren't nearly as sexist or hateful or two-faced as Drupal core. There are projects out there that are genuinely open-source. We don't have to risk our safety or sanity to contribute something good to the world through tech. And if one day you are being strung up, remember, it's not just you. You're in good company.

UPDATE: I had a chance to chat with Donna/kattekrab, and it seems like actually there's been more change and more open dialog about some of the issues I'm hinting at then I knew about. That the Code of Conduct discussions have led to some decisions about how to better shape the culture of the community. That some people who were causing grief have been asked to step back a bit, take a break. I'm really glad to hear it. I should have more of an open mind, and learn more about how things are now, rather than assume they are like they were three years ago.

Lets look at some facts:

@Jeff Burnz, there is a _HUGE_ difference in what you wrote in https://www.drupal.org/node/683026?page=1#comment-3166780 and now:

Let me be very clear about one thing - there has never been two concurrent maintainers for Bartik. Jen Simmons left the Bartik project 6 months before D7 shipped, I took over and ran the team that fixed and repaired the theme into some semblance of working code. I wrote some patches but it was mostly cat herding.

I have worked quite extensively on Bartik for some months now, including some of the large difficult patches and smaller easy patches - so I know the code very well and know that its solid and at all times careful attention has been paid to not do anything silly - we're trying not be too intrusive or code ourselves into a corner. From my perspective I've tried to think well beyond core when writing patches as this theme needs to support many different modules and I have been testing with Views and a bunch of other contrib modules for D7 for quite some time.

...

Bartik is the first theme built for core that really took RTL and accessibility seriously and focused on them as key objectives. A lot of time and effort was spent developing solutions that were cross browser compliant, as lightweight as possible and didn't do anything silly.

...

Many elements have nice style - tables, fieldsets and other form elements get nice, clean treatments - again without going overboard and messing with those elements too much (again taking into account the theme must work with the likes of Views and many other contrib modules quite apart from the basic requirement of support core).

Jen and all the team has done a fantastic job - especially the new color schemes which are just the best I have seen in a colorable theme. I think Bartik will be super popular.

As for the code changes, the diff to look at is:

$ git checkout 7.x
$ git diff -w 790da7b3cc...7.0 -- themes/bartik
$ git log -p 790da7b3cc...7.0 -- themes/bartik

May everyone judge for themselves how much fixing was actually needed and how much was nice to have (but which still improved it to be even more awesome).

My conclusion:

It started as an awesome theme with 40+ contributors and evolved into something more awesome.

Thanks Jen and thanks Jeff Burnz.

I hope the CWG can help fix the remaining problems.

I completely agree with what @Fabianx pointed so I'm not going to add anything else about the drama that happened a few years ago, when I was a newbie and didn't understand what was going on.

I can only say that I'm pretty happy to see that Jen wants to come back and share all her experience with us and continue contributing to Drupal so Jen, you are very much welcome and thanks for joining the incredible Drupal Front-end/Twig Team!!

Let's keep rocking and keep the drupaldrama away!

Fabianx - yeah, my point was that we can do it differently these days, compared to back then, what was good back then is OK today but we can do better, think about how you wrote a theme for IE6 and now against IE11, chalk and cheese.

So lets have some fun, value freedom and maybe think about what motivates each of us for why we work on Drupal 8.

Right on! For me it's mostly about having fun and contributing something that is good for humanity, since I work and volunteer for a lot of NGO's who use Drupal who could otherwise not really afford such technologies, and to make Drupal better for everyone, which is why I have a long interest in accessibility and worked very hard on D7 in this area, but for D8 I had during this time two kids so, yeah, no time to contribute much this round.

Jen wrote

UPDATE: I had a chance to chat with Donna/kattekrab, and it seems like actually there's been more change and more open dialog about some of the issues I'm hinting at then I knew about. That the Code of Conduct discussions have led to some decisions about how to better shape the culture of the community. That some people who were causing grief have been asked to step back a bit, take a break. I'm really glad to hear it. I should have more of an open mind, and learn more about how things are now, rather than assume they are like they were three years ago.

Jeff wrote

Right on! For me it's mostly about having fun and contributing something that is good for humanity, since I work and volunteer for a lot of NGO's who use Drupal who could otherwise not really afford such technologies, and to make Drupal better for everyone, which is why I have a long interest in accessibility and worked very hard on D7 in this area, but for D8 I had during this time two kids so, yeah, no time to contribute much this round.

It's important we remember we are all volunteers, and contributing time and expertise when and how we can. Sometimes we critique that effort without understanding the impact of the critique, or fail to appreciate the effort that went in when rejecting a particular contribution. We also have to acknowledge that time is a limited resource, and unequally distributed.

Be gentle with each other. Value diversity. Value respect. Being respectful, and feeling respected means understanding we have different viewpoints, and that's ok. The thing we share most, is passion and passion drives Drama for a reason. Conflict itself is not a bad thing, but it is kind of like playing with fire.

The community working group is a work in progress. Patches welcome! :)

https://www.drupal.org/project/issues/drupal_cwg

Jen, Jeff, Emma, Fabian, Ruben - thanks for sharing your thoughts.

Emma - Lead on!! :-)

D.

Those are good points kattekrab, I would add that language is a barrier to understanding also, I have seem this many times where a comment is made and no end of intent and interpretations are spun off from it, all based on word, or misuse of a word or poor English grammar. Seek clarification, ask questions, most people are good, hard working honest folk, so don't presume the worst intentions - instead assume the best and seek to understand, not to react.

Yes. Language can be tricky.

For me using the word drama to refer to terrible things that happened, or refer to talking about them,
makes me worried we are not acknowledging experiences and conversations seriously. I want them to not be dismissed.

As a community, I believe we are now in a place where when people are cruel, dangerous, or inappropriate, or other violations of our code of conduct, they are not protected by the number of commits they have, or their place in any inner circle. We can make sure that our current and future environment was better than what @jensimmons and others had to deal with.

Apologies @YesCT - I shouldn't have used the word Drama like that. I was a drama major, and I forget it means something different to most people.

I certainly didn't mean to diminish or dismiss the experiences people have been discussing here.

Sincerely sorry to anyone who took that meaning.

To rephrase - when people care deeply about something, and contribute their time and expertise, it's common for tempers to flare, and feelings be hurt, and for misunderstandings to fester. I was trying to point out that we share a common passion for Drupal.

Thanks Cathy for pulling that up. Good point.