Director of UX, Digital at Pegasystems. Love food, my daughter, Post-it notes and dot-grid notebooks. I make things that help people get their work done.

Mar 2, 2016

#DrupalVote: Meet the Candidates Round 2

Voting for the Drupal Association Board begins March 7, 2016 and lasts until March 18. If you want more information about my work in the Drupal community, visit my candidate profile on Drupal.org.

On February 26, me and several other Drupal professionals met to discuss our candidacies for the Drupal Association board. Below are some of the key questions asked, along with my answers.

What kind of steps would you take to increase the diversity in the Drupal community beyond your typical engineer?

I do this every year, with Design 4 Drupal. We bring together designers, project managers and people who run Drupal businesses to talk shop and share knowledge on what it means to be a non-engineer in the Drupalverse.

When I think about increasing the diversity in the Drupal community, I also think back to growing up in Providence, RI, and seeing so many in my family struggle to pull themselves out of poverty. Drupal was one of the key things that helped me finally pull myself out of poverty, and I will always feel a debt of gratitude for that. I feel if more Drupal shops opened apprenticeship programs that specifically catered to low-income communities, it could be a major force in helping to relieve income inequality, and increase the volume of Drupal contributors.

In what ways can we use Drupal to make Drupal better?

If we really want to use Drupal to make Drupal better, we should start by making it easier for people to actually contribute meaningfully to the project. I think back to someone sitting next to me at the Drupal Meetup in Boston, trying to contribute to Help documentation and learning that she would need to learn how to push and pull from Git, put up a local environment, and both write and roll a patch in order to change a few lines of documentation. I think of the designer who wants to help redesign a particular module’s UI, but isn’t clear how to approach the maintainer in a way that will actually encourage the developer to engage in the collaboration involved in making it better.

When we create complex, code-driven processes that govern the entire contribution process, we lock out people with essential, non-code-driven skills. Project managers, UX designers, technical writers. People who help shield developers from busywork and let them focus on what they do best. We have to find better ways to invite these people into the fold and get them productive without requiring a huge investment in learning new processes and complex architecture.

This brings me to one thing that greatly annoys me in open source communities: the idea that open source is a “doocracy” or a “meritocracy.” When you put unreasonable barriers in front of people who want to contribute, you make it clear that only a small percentage of people — no matter how talented — get to contribute (see this excellent post by Ashe Dryden for more). Not everyone has the privilege of being able to devote hours and weeks to the work required to do open source contribution; we need to find easier ways for people to make a meaningful contribution in the time they have available.

What do you think is the most critical issue facing Drupal today, and what should we be doing to help address it?

As a UX designer, one of the things I’ve noticed with Drupal is the fact that we tend to drastically change the interface and development paradigm with each major version. While in many ways, each version is better than the next, people build up knowledge and mastery of an interface over time. When each new version looks drastically different (things get moved, navigation changes, etc.), each new version creates a huge learning curve that is difficult to add on top of an existing workflow. This leads to a reputation for being overly complex, leading some to choose other technologies.

Mature software products understand this and find ways to continuously improve the interface without boiling the ocean.