What a difference a year makes.
A year ago, we had people interested in project management, but not a whole lot of people actually doing it in Drupal. This morning, we had the Project Manager Birds of a Feather session in a room that ended up being standing room only. Sure, there were a few laptop dwellers (and sometimes I’m one of them), but with roughly 40-50 people there, it’s the biggest PM BoF I’ve seen in the year and some change of getting really involved in Drupal community. So thanks.
We also had a panel today on The Care and Feeding of Project Managers, which was a lot of fun. The hour went by fast, with conversations about backgrounds, where we come from, but how we’re all sortof on the same page about how we build our processes.
The four of us (myself moderating, Wendy Iguchi, Chris Strahl, Crystal Williams, on the panel realized that project managers in Drupal haven’t really committed much back to the project itself. Just because there isn’t really a space for that in drupal.org is, realistically, no excuse, and I’ll be the first to say that I haven’t done a good job of putting my own work anywhere useful to folks. To paraphrase Dries, ‘Talk is silver, documentation is gold’.
I’m not sure where things will go from here, because the firehose of crazy projects + conferences + life is totally here, but I’ll be spending some time in the coming months on giving back.
Hope to see some of you in the Managing Expectations talk tomorrow morning, too early!