I’ve been working on chapters for Definitive Drupal 7 about project planning and managing a major project. It’s supposed to come out this fall, we hope!, and this one’s been on my plate for awhile. I’m about half-way through the “Planning a Project” chapter, and I’m noticing a theme in my writing. It’s very subtle.

It goes a little like this:‘Don’t kill yourselves off. You are no good to us dead. Make reasonable goals. Don’t do anything you don’t think you can do.’ Which is fun, because there’s also the theme of ‘Drupal can do almost anything. Be really excited about all of the stuff that it can do.’ (The hard part is figuring out where the hell that ‘almost’ lies, and your own limitations, and what else you’ve got to go learn.)

And then I scurried off to a meeting and sortof lived it. ‘Tell me stories. Oh, holy god, that is more than I can do, you do need an experienced team. Stop right there while I make a call. Ok, these people! Go!’
I had really mixed feelings about calling Uncle and we find someone else to play, because it could have been a lot of fun. But it’s all about delegation right now, finding those things where I’m doing exactly what I’m good at, other people are doing what they’re good at, and it’s sortof like Plato’s idea of Justice is coming alive in the world. (Lyza will appreciate the strange parallels. As near as I remember it, Plato’s ideal of justice was everyone doing exactly what they were meant to.)

But when ultimately, it can work out for the best and you’ve pointed folks down the right path, it’s the point where you invoke the ‘Glass of Wine’ rule and call it off for a bit.

The Glass of Wine rule is a post all its own.

As is how I’m working in Jersey Shore references into the Planning a Project chapter. We’ll see if it stays in.

Cute, neh?

Disasterpiece theatre:
When your life acquires an off-stage director. (Insert wild hair and villainous appearance here.) The normal supporting cast begins to move in ways that are at first merely perplexing, then fascinating. This does not necessarily involve ominous music, men in top hats and British accents. It all works out in the end.

And by ‘Today’, I mean the last 6 months, or so. Give or take.

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’m enjoying a few more days of summer before packing off to DrupalCon Paris, I’ll be in Paris from the 1st through the 5th, and then wandering aimlessly through the south of France into Northern Italy, returning by way of Rome.

I’m missing the Gov 2.0 gathering in DC, but a few days of vacation in Europe and catching up on Italy is more important.

Procrastinate by writing this out. Post on Twitter about how my to do lists and my not to do lists have switched places. Get sucked into twitter conversation. Notice that DrupalCon is coming up. Forget to respond to Aaron about WordCamp. Ask folks who will be at Lunch 2.0 in.. gulp.. Goddammit.
Be suggestible enough to post this on the blog.

To Do:
Move meetings around so I have more time to focus. Bash head against a whitepaper draft that’s mostly written and send back to collaborators. Preen on how awful a job it is. Take whiteboard scribbles and turn them into the ‘puppet show’ of project transition plans. (Laugh at how apt that term is for presentations.) Look like someone that’s more put together. Stop this nonsense.

——
With that, I’ll see some of you at Lunch 2.0.

Ignite 6 will be different. Reid and I are usually the folks behind the code and the people, and haven’t yet taken the stage.

We have to put slides together soon, like before Sunday soon, so expect a post on the alleged decisionmaking process of what goes into an Ignite presentation.

In other news, Open Source Bridge went splendidly. More to come on that one.

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?