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!

1) Write on your badge. If you’re doing new cool things, put it on there! If you’re hiring, and I think a few people might be, put that on there too.
2) Perform the Ceremonial DeBadging as you’re leaving the venue. While it’s funny to be branded with this weird blue alien that stares at people, don’t let that out in public.
3) Look at the schedule, see what you want to go to.. and then spend the rest of the time in the Hallway track. That’s where you’ll learn the most, from meeting with people.
4) See if you can’t brush up on actual names instead of drupal.org usernames. I haven’t seen the badge designs yet, but usually, first names are on top and are most visible. (Crell is actually Larry, etc.)
5) Go with the flow. Drupal’s moving and changing, and this is one of the points in the year where we get to talk about where we’re going, where we’ve been, and what cool things we want to see happen.

Saturday was sessions all day, with highlights include: Josh Konig talking about Drupal in the Cloud, Sam Boyer talking about Panels, Damien Tournoud talking about Drupal 7, and Bill Fitzgerald talking about Views. An international rockstar DrupalCamp, clearly. (There were also great conversations over sushi, showing out of towners more of the beautiful city of Portland, and appreciating Portland’s great microbrews.)

Yeah, I gave a session on project management.

I’ve spent the last few days in San Francisco deeply buried in Drupal and the future of Ubercart, and am flying up to Vancouver this afternoon to work with the D7CX initiative. We’ll be posting more about that in conjunction with BadCamp and the Drupal 7 Contributed Module sprint this weekend.
In fact, in almost every region of the US and Canada, there’s a Drupal event going on. Drupal Events Calendar
No, I’m serious.

See you all in Vancouver!

In retrospect, this is one of the best choices I think I’ve made. It has also been one of the most frustrating and rewarding choices.

I was fortunate to come into Drupal with an open mind, enough web development experience to ask the right questions, enough project management experience to not really screw up. At first. I got better at screwing up later on. It’s a really valuable skill: recognize when you’re screwing up because you didn’t ask the right questions, because you’re in the wrong position or when you didn’t answer the right question. I’m still getting better at that.

It’s frustrating because as a non-developer, getting into the Drupal communities has an extra layer of complexity to it. It’s like learning a foreign language where the first three weeks that you’re listening in, you’re trying to distinguish what sounds are words.

It’s frustrating because as you’re learning, you’re not quite sure of the questions you’re asking. You’re learning the vocabulary with the technologies. You’re pretty sure that when something doesn’t work like it intended, there’s a good reason for it, but you’re ignorant of the starting place.

But once you get past that whole learning curve part, there’s a whole bunch of people who are genuinely amazing and want to see more people get involved. They want the CMS project to succeed, and they want it to be useful. They want to use it to build easier to use websites, websites that scale better, websites that are easier to design for and still have the immense vastness of possibility that Drupal has.
That’s the rewarding part, and it is why I keep doing this.

It’s why I go to the DrupalCons, and interact with as many people as possible. Developers, project managers, business-side: we’re all living in the same sort of washing machine. DrupalCons are about trying to add as many new points of light to your own Drupal resource universe, whether that’s people or modules or integration strategies or new companies to partner with. It’s about being able to meet up and discuss hard problems in person, where communications are easier and you put faces to familiar names. And then I come back to Portland and play with the open source communities and try to figure out what other places do better, and what Drupal has to learn. (Also, what Drupal has to teach to the open source communities.)

This is why I do project management for a living, and community organizing for fun. Somewhere in here the stories of being an independent project manager will come out, but in the meantime, this is a ‘happy to be here’ post. DrupalCamp Portland kicks off Friday night, but that deserves its own separate post.

I’ll be chilling as the sponsor contact of the team around, so if you see me around the Oregon Convention Center in sessions, in the speaker lounge, in the expo hall, say hi. If you see me in the Hacker Lounge, say double hi. If you see me on the Max, pretend you don’t know me… Actually, random public transport conversations are some of the best things about Portland.

I say 1.0 because this is the first one, and it’s bound to get better from here.

10 hours, 28 minutes, and 17 seconds. Here we go!

Drupal: Install theme. Discover that it’s not really what I had in mind. Want to tweak things. Stare at css and php files and wondering where I left the roadmap for which things cancel out the others and which one is actually for real. Change one little thing. Thank God for Firebug so that I can find it again. Change other thing. Watch nice rounded corners go sideways, and wonder what I have offended to cause the computer to hate me so. Rinse, lather, repeat.

WordPress, you’re cute and funny and easy to play with, but why did you have to slack off in school?

Drupal, I love you and I know we’re in a committed relationship and all that, but baby, why couldn’t you see it my way? I will write you angry love songs, how’s that?

However, I am still amazed by what happens when you get folks in a space to be able to talk about community, both in the technology sense and the physical sense. It’s a tremendous amount of work to put on, I’m not going to lie. The Legion of Tech and assorted Sponsors really pull together to put everyone in the same space, feed everyone, build the scheduling tools, and hundreds of other little things that no one ever talks about.

That being said, there are lots of tech events that happen in Portland, and it’s entirely possible that you could spend every single day, all year long, interacting with the same group of people who love to get together and talk about technologies. This is fun. But there are plenty of other neat things that happen here in Portland that we aren’t always aware of.

Stephanie El Haj and I put a session together this morning (notes are here): Fun in PDX (And I Don’t Mean Tech): A Thinly Disguised Intervention.

So don’t say we never gave you anything. There’s also plenty of other great stuff going on, I’m sitting in a session about encouraging women in technology and there are so many people here that are listening too. Today’s not even half over yet.

Here’s how I got here:

At the end of September 2008, I moved back to Portland to take a project management job with OpenSourcery. The first weekend that I was here, I started hunting around on Upcoming for ‘places that new friends might be’, and Side Project to Startup at Cubespace came up. The last time I had been in Portland was for OSCON 2007 and 2008, so I knew that it was a sweet place for Open Source development, so I was stoked that I had come back just in time for an unconference. (Little did I realize that this was a normal occurance for Portland and there were unconferences almost every weekend.)

One of the sessions at the unconference was relating to the loss of OSCON from the Portland Tech calendar, and how disappointing that was, and maybe we could do something here with this great community we have. I foolishly chose to go to a session where J-P Voilleque talked about connections between government and open source. (Or maybe that was a different unconference. Can’t remember. )

But this idea of an all-volunteer run conference stuck around, through the work of Audrey, Reid, Jake, Selena and Rick. I dropped into the background from this point, so that’s a different story.

My point is: I’ve never quite seen anything like it. Side Project to Startup spun off two events, CyborgCamp and OpenSourceBridge. CyborgCamp was a ridiculously useful time. We’re working hard to make sure that OpenSourceBridge adds value as well. Sessions are officially announced this week, and we’ll begin a different conversation that brings together speakers and attendees.

This is the ‘about me’ part. This is the personal website of Amye Scavarda, a ridiculous web citizen. I’m currently based out of Portland, OR involved in the open source community. Things that are near and dear to my heart are: community outreach, project management, and how to make people’s dreams of websites come true.

My current projects include OpenSourceBridge and all things tech conference related, understanding Drupal, WordPress and other open source CMS technologies, and making them more useful to users. Expect to see more of the same, interspersed with hilarious stories about life in Portland.