The power of community collaboration at DrupalCon Vienna

This is a tale of ideation, passion for code & friendship.

Last week I was at DrupalCon Vienna with over 1600 other people from around the world. I’ve heard many times of ideas and collaborations that place, but never with my own eyes and ears.

Wednesday

On Wednesday evening at the CEO Dinner, many people met. During a discussion, Christoph Breidert (1xInternet), Rouven Volk (Acquia) met with Christian Knebel & Lara Knebel from publicplan. Over dinner and drinks they came up with the idea of a module that gives you an overview of the modules installed on your site, with the number of known issues it is, and a quick link to the issues page.

I’d met with Christian and a few members of his team at Drupal Business Days in Frankfurt in May and was excited to find out more about their work on deGov, which of course led to a selfie.

Thursday

At 11am I met Lara at the Drupal Marketing Sprint where we continued to work on the closing session started at 3:30pm. Christian also managed to pop in and contribute for a short period.

Friday

Just a few hours later the following morning, the publicplan team had already decided the name and started working on the Module Status project.

Shortly after they had released their first alpha version of Module Status.

I was amazed to see how much progress they had managed to make in such a short period of time, especially at a DrupalCon with so many other things going on all around them. They earned these well deserved beers.

Saturday

Although the DrupalCon had officially ended on Friday, a few of us were still around. I was glad to see a tweet saying Joel Pittet (University of British Columbia) & Greg Anderson (Pantheon) were organising a sprint in their hotel lobby.

What started off as a seed of possibility resulted in far more of us coming together than I had imagined.

We kept growing in numbers as the day went on.

We even managed to find time to take a break and get some burgers.

While I was sat next to Ryan Aslett (Drupal Association) and we were discussing improvements to Update Manager, I thought he’d be a good person to share the story of Module Status with.

At first I wasn’t sure if I should take the photo, but it seemed like such a great opportunity. Ryan was happy with it, so I did so, and I’m very glad I did with the positive responses (and the speed of them) by those involved with the project.

And this is just the beginning of much more collaboration that hasn’t yet been documented. I’m very much looking forward to learning more about Module Status & seeing more hotel lobby sprints!

Outputs from the contribution sprint included myself giving feedback to Ryan on how I update Drupal 8 websites with Composer as a site builder as he’s planning to improve the user experience with Greg.

Joel also made a lot of progress by fixing some things in Drush 9 (including site-set) and other Drush work. Thanks!

I’m looking forward to sharing more knowledge of initiatives, connecting people and being a drupal event journalist / community manager. I’m glad to have the opportunity to contribute to the community in this way.

What collaborations have you seen take place? Share them in the comments below.