First step in the MIT building, ever!

Yesterday (4Th. of October) I decided to take part of the local Drupal User Group here in Boston. It took place in a room from the MIT university. And faith decided I was lucky because it seemed I was part of an experiment! Lucky might not be the best way to describe it, surely when you don’t know what the experiment is wink

The meetup started out with some lightning talks about successful projects made in Drupal 7 and also some very exciting demo about screen-casting with automatic upload and posting to your Drupal site (Implemented in http://openscholar.harvard.edu/)

Boston Meetup

The Experiment

Bryan Hirsch was leading the meeting and he proposed adding an extra activity to the meetup, namely working on Drupal Core. During last Drupalcon in London it seemed there were some discussions because Drupal did not attract enough new contributors so this initiative is a good start on trying out concepts on how to get more people involved.

Surprisingly it worked, people worked in pairs or groups where novice and more advanced users worked together. The main goal proposed was to actually find bugs in the issue queue, see if you can reproduce them and comment on those issues confirming that you have actually reproduced them mentioning your steps. You can read more on learning to contribute on core or even the feedback that was given

For my part I had a great time realizing we (Randy C and me) actually replied something constructive. Even though we did not fix the bug we documented and reproduced it. Randy has sent me a thank you mail the day after mentioning that it will be helpful for further Drupal Development so my day had a good start and a Drupal core issue got some more love.

Even if you see the image on the issues that were replied / documented / … on just a single hour it was worth it. I would agree if more local Drupal communities just take 1 hour of their time during a meetup to actually work on the issue queue of Drupal core the world would be a better place and I firmly believe it helps in getting more people into the community.

Do you think you could replicate this in your community?