As we've seen over the last year, having continuity plans is important because when Things Happen, we all have heightened fear, anxiety, stress, and uncertainty.

Challenges discovered over the last year:

• Teammate health
• Teammate is caregiver to ill person or children
• Work is impacted by life

Planning benefits:

• Anticipate risk
• Protect teammates
• Recover quickly
• Better communication/trust
• Turn stress into assurance

When bad things happen, knowing what to do makes things easier.

In practice:

• Be empathetic (build and foster psychological safety; avoid frustration and discouragement)
• Control what's controllable

Planning workshop framework

• Who do you interact with when doing X?
• Does someone authorize it?
• Who might be blocked if you can't do X?
• Where's the documentation for X?
• What internal/external systems do you work with?
• What other colleagues know this system
• Impact on your work?
• Description of impact
• Who do you meet with (clients)?
• How often?
• Other teammates present?
• Impact of these meetings?
• Description of impact?
• What could slow the team down?
• What key milestones are at risk?
• What blind spots did you uncover while working through this list?

This can help you see the possible risks and what you need to plan for. Then do a pre-mortem of about 50 mins:

• Review all risks team identified
• Determine mitigation strategies
• Look ahead at other possible challenges

Finally, share and compare:

• Make the environment safe; encourage transparency, openness, and support
• Share plans with other departments
• Make sure the plan works across departments

Speak about your lived experience, which might not look like anyone else's. Be willing to speak honestly, and apologize honestly if you cause harm (this is up to the person who is harmed, not you - impact over intent).

Feeling safe in a job search:

• Applicants want to feel seen, heard, respected, and valued for themselves and their contributions (not just because they tick a box)
• Applicants aren't just applying as "Firstname Lastname" - but as "Firstname Lastname, a black/queer/disabled/neurodivergent woman/man/non-binary person" - you can't separate these things from their work life, they're part of people
• Don't expect minorities to help you with future diversity hires, unless you're hiring them for a position that expressly does that

As a company you need to have hard conversation about safety, inclusion, intersectionality. Build a foundation to support diverse staff.

At Kanopi they weed out applicants who aren't willing to be dedicated to diversity and inclusion with a statement right above the "start the application process" button. If they select "no" they're disqualified and can't proceed.

Tips for building inclusive hiring teams:

• Be willing to address failings, learnings, and next steps
• Be willing to openly discuss questions without getting defensive
• Use inclusive interview teams
• Operate transparently

Understand that people with certain intersectional identities are usually the only one of their "type" in the room or even in the organization.  

Understand that not all applicants have the same background or access to tech and education.

Check diverse tech communities - Black tech Twitter, Black Girls Code, Latinx tech Twitter, etc.

Don't expect your diverse hires to answer these questions or remind you of things - self-educate! Your behaviors are your responsibility. You can RESPECTFULLY ask someone if something you read sounds good but back off if they don't want to answer.

Foundational best practices:

• Align company with inclusivity
• Openly discuss DEI
• Hold space in hard times (be empathetic)
• Create intentional internal mechanisms
• Align benefits with DEI practices
• Support orgs that elevate underrepresented
• Create internal guideposts for inclusivity
• Evolve and be teachable

Presenter Donna Bungard grew up as the only abled member of her family.

• Assume positive intent - Even if you feel there's room for improvement in your team or organization, don't assume they're acting in bad faith right away. Get to know them and where they're coming from. Thank people for trying. Everybody has a lot going on. Give the grace you want to receive.
• Build accessibility into planning. A project isn't "done" until it passes accessibility checks.
• Make sure your personas and tests are inclusive. Your persona list should include "users" with various disabilities.
• It's hard to account for unknowns, but you have to - disabilities come in a wide variety, and every person is different. Build in a little space for uncertainty to account for whatever might pop up.
• If people start to get tired of hearing about it you can remind them that "once accessibility is what we do, we won't talk about it as much."
• Common problem areas - navigation, forms, headings, alt tags, skip, carousels, captions, contrast. Understand these and avoid "flying monkeys" (unexpected trouble).
• Accessibility is not just for visually impaired users.
• Any testing is better than no testing.
• Inclusion matters.
• There are no shortcuts to accessibility. Advocate for patience.
• Practical accessibility helps more. Don't do things for users - do things that help users do things themselves.
• When working with new clients, introduce accessibility as part of onboarding.

Helpful tools from the chat:

• Personas -
  • https://accessibility.civicactions.com/playbook/roles
  • https://www.microsoft.com/design/inclusive/
• Color contrast -
  • https://eightshapes.com/articles/color-in-design-systems , https://contrast-grid.eightshapes.com/
• Why overlays and other "quick tools" are bad -
  • https://overlayfactsheet.com/

Developer relations is, basically, caring about developers and investing in them with education and growing the dev community. This is especially important in the open source community - developers are at the core of every open source project.

Exemplary communities for dev relations: VueJS, ReactJS, Gatsby, Drupal

Tips:

• Provide feedback avenues
• Provide and encourage great documentation for the project
• Encourage collaboration with other communities
• Provide more tutorials and use cases
• Organize talks and webinars

Day 1

Welcome Session

The event is being hosted on a platform called HopIn, with a single browser page interface with an event wide chat, dozens of concurrent event rooms, and networking spaces. It is a bit overwhelming at first and too easy to post a message in the wrong chat, but overall a giant step above other large events I have attended hosted on WebEx or others. Will add more thoughts on this at the end.

The turnout is large, a few thousand, and quite diverse and international.

Heather Rocker, president of the Drupal Association, and Dries Buytaert, the creator of Drupal, opened the event with a quick presentation. Two of the strategic initiatives they hope to advance at this event are making sure the Drupal community is diverse and inclusive, and preparing Drupal to be decoupled and work with JavaScript, or other, frontend platforms. Theses initiatives are related because they recognize the create strength of Drupal is not the technology or even the create number of site around the world that use it, but it is the community and the contributors and that community is stronger and smarter when all are included. Opening Drupal to the much larger ecosystem of JavaScript developers will help it evolve and remain on the forefront of web development.

Sessions

Views cookbook - advanced recipes for every web occasion - Anna Mykhaillova

This was a very brief overview of all of the pieces that work together to create and render Views on a Drupal site. There is already a tremendous amount of configuration available in the Drupal interface to set up views, and up to this point I have not run into any requirements on a project that needed custom configuration, but when that occurs, this presentation will serve as a great roadmap to know where to dig in and get started.

Building Frictionless Customer Journeys with Drupal, Mautic & Unomi - Leen Penders

The focus here was mainly for marketers, but the personalization concepts could be a solution to help us manage our very diverse audience types.

Unomi (https://unomi.apache.org) is an open source customer data platform that complies with all of the latest global privacy standards. It can be used to collect user data and create audience segments. When integrated with Drupal each component can be customized for each segment and when a user of a specific segment visits the site they will have a personalized experience.

Of course, personalization is not new, but how user data is collected and tracked, and the minute control over the personalization is what is unique here. Worth checking out.

Enable Drupal content creators to support cognitive accessibility - Rain Breaw

Rain has been helping to draft the new W3C Guidance for Users with Cognitive Disabilities (COGA guidance).

This has been challenging due to the difficulty of measuring the effectiveness of these solutions compared to the WCAG guidelines regarding visual, auditory, or mobility issues. The list does set some very clear standards that will most likely impact all users.

Webforms: Choose Your Own Adventure Workshop - Jacob Rockowitz

Jacob is the creator and maintainer of the Webforms module. Webforms is a super powerful form builder and I have been a bit overwhelmed by it and have not dug into it yet even though it is part of the ITS collection of modules. This presentation combines each of the presentations he has made over the many years that Webforms has existed, so even though it is a great overview, it is also a bit overwhelming. Here are a couple of concepts to encourage me to dive in:

• WebForms ships with default settings, so set up and use can just be a couple of clicks.
• Jacob always recommends seeing if the core contact form module will suit the needs of the project before expanding into WebForms.

Day 2

Decoupled Menus Initiative Keynote - Baddy Breidert, Gabe Sullice, Liam Hockley

This initiative sprang from the call last year for an initiative to bring the JavaScript frontend development ecosystem into Drupal. The team is working on a menu component that can be exported and included into frontends built with JS frameworks. The main purpose, however, is to help advance Drupal.org from being simple a repo for the Drupal application code base to an ecosystem that can maintain component libraries and the code base for other tools such as Drush.

This presentation set the tone for many of the others that followed on this day with a focus on decoupling to allow Drupal to really play to its strength as a data management platform and allow the community to take advantage of the advances in frontend frameworks and the much large pool of developers that can now work on Drupal projects.

Sessions

An Iterative Approach To Decoupling Your Existing Drupal Site With Gatsby - Brian Perry, Matthew Ramir

The team at Bounteous wanted to build a decoupled version of their company site and decided to experiment with just building out a portion of the pages while continuing to present the rest with Drupal. This is a tempting option since completely rebuilding a frontend can be complex and time consuming, and difficult to justify for the performance enhancement that is the main reason for using a JS presentation layer.

The results are impressive as can be seen on their home page (https://www.bounteous.com) with a quick load time and slick animations, but most of their discussion revolved around the challenges of serving up a mixture of Drupal and Gatsby pages (solved by some clever routing using the .htaccess file), and trying to explain to the marketing team why it would be difficult to combine components from each on a page.

This was a very detailed presentation and I will definitely refer back to it for tips, but my main takeaway is that it makes more sense to develop a parallel decoupled site, or app for specific functions, along side a full Drupal site rather than try to combine sections...

Decoupled Horizons: Drupal's next decade - Gabe Sullice

Gabe used this time to ask some big thought provoking questions rather than make any bold predictions. Kind of a refreshing change of pace from the minute details of these other presentations, but not much to share about it here.

What we learned from migrating 80+ sites during uncertainty 

This was a debriefing of a major migration project by Trinity University and a Drupal design firm called ImageX. There are many lessons to be learned from their experiences, but the key takeaways are the importance of a well structure team, division of roles, understanding of what areas require a deep level of institutional knowledge and which require a fresh outside perspective, and most of all, a Project Manager to organize and lead the process.

Building decoupled informational web for Czech government

A great example of decoupled Drupal can simplify and speed up development. This pandemic related project provides information and resources to the Czech people. With Drupal as the data repository behind a firewall, it could be managed safely and securely. The frontend displays an exported version of the data. This set up allowed for two different teams to work independently at the same time, and also allowed for a hand off to the Czech government where development has continued. 

Manually Curated Solr Search Results

This was a brief overview of the site search platform that can be integrated with Drupal.. There are some powerful tools to control search results, but even in the presentation it was clear how this can easily become complicated and have unexpected repercussions. I don't believe Solr is an option for us on the ITS server, but really the main takeaway here is that managing search results using SEO tactics rather than configurations will always be preferable.

Day 3

Easy Out of the Box Initiative Keynote

This initiative is about ensuring that Drupal remains simple to use with "low-code" options for new users. This includes projects like Layout Builder, the Claro admin theme, and the Media Library. As the team gave their updates I got the notion that this might be the right area for me to contribute to the project. These are the parts of the Drupal experience that can either be inviting or turn new users away. Even though I don't necessarily use these features now, I fully understand how important they are in creating that welcoming open door.

After the session I enrolled in the contributors meeting in the afternoon.

Driesnote

Dries Buytaert is the creator of Drupal and his keynote address is always a highlight of DrupalCon. He opened with some statistics about the increase in the number of site globally built with Drupal and made a special note of that three of the big four Covid-19 vaccine producing companies use Drupal. 

He discussed the four initiative, that each have their own keynotes during the week, as well as the Diversity and Inclusion Initiative, and then proposed one more for a "Project Browser" to simplify the installation of modules. This is really part of a bigger concept of making Drupal more inviting and easier to get started building sites. This is exciting to witness because this is how new ideas get introduced and sometimes take Drupal into new and unexpected places. I am sure there are plenty of suggestions over the years that went no where, but sometime a call-to-action and many volunteer hours designing, developing, and testing lead to something that inspires a whole new crop of Drupal users to create great things.

Sessions

Strategic User Experience for Stanford's Fingate

Stanford University's financial management web site had gotten out of hand. The audience types that make use of the site were very different, but could all agree that the site had become a difficult maze. ImageX was hired to help them with user testing to understand better how the users envisioned the service and how best to label and organize content and features. 

Easy Out of the Box Initiative Contributor Meeting

I have been seeking a way in to start contributing to the Drupal project for as long as I have been using it, and every time I make an effort I run into a road block or get too intimidated as describe in the Driesnote (see above). This experience was not different as the challenge just to enroll and find the breakout rooms was a challenge. Even the mentors were having difficulty, so instead of finding someone to help me get started, they were all just trying to learn how to navigate the "rooms". 

Day 4

Automatic Updates Initiative Keynote

This is a vitally important initiative, although it is not one that I really understand the nuts and bolts behind it. The idea is to be able to perform automatic updates to Drupal core and modules in the way it is done in the WordPress ecosystem. The biggest issue here is remaining secure, so being able to push security updates in a timely manner will help prevent attacks.

Sessions

Habitat for Humanity: Building a foundation for digital success - Caroline Self, Vicky Walker, Will Rusk

Habitat for Humanity had a really out dated site overrun with content. The worked with ImageX to migrate the site to D8 served on Aquia. The transition allowed them to perform a content audit and archive a good deal of old stuff. Most importantly, they have had a great step up in performance providing better service for their users. It has opened up many new opportunities as well, such as interactive apps to help get their message out to more people.

Accessibility for Deaf Beyond Video Captions & Sign Language

Day 5

A few notes from Hallway conversations:

• Training Drupal developers really needs to be by training them as Drupal site builders so they can create mental models how how nodes and views are put together with contextual relationships.
• Talked with the project lead for the Oliveto core theme about becoming a contributor. He showed me a few small issues to get started with and will mentor me through the process of committing my first patches.

Drupal 10 Readiness Initiative Keynote

D10 is coming next year, but just as it was for the arrival of D9, it will be a bit anti-climactic because most of the new features will be in place well before that time. The team has learned a great deal about how to make these big version updates go smoothly. The process can become complicated by the number of contributed modules each with their own set of dependencies that can cause conflicts, but they have some great tools in place to report on these potential problems, automate the changes that are needed or suggest a manual fix.

Sessions

The war on PDFs - Danny Bluestone (Cyber-Duck)

Danny began the presentation with that fact that 25% of the global population experiences some form of disability, either temporarily, situationally, or permanently. We must take this in to consideration when we design and build digital experiences. One report showed that the experience of accessing a PDF on a mobile devices for a visually impaired person can be excruciating. The same report showed that HTML on a desktop can be much better, but much of the remainder of the presentation went on to make the case that PDFs are not going away, and that when created properly can be Accessible. 

The takeaway for me is that we should always ask ourselves if a document really needs to be a PDF or not. If it does, then make use of the Accessibility tools right from the start.

Add a robust Events Systems to Your Drupal Site in Minutes - Martin Anderson-Clutz

This was a demo of a new contributed module called SMART DATE (https://www.drupal.org/project/smart_date). It includes some great enhancements for date input and display, and a reoccurring event feature that seems really well thought out. Can't wait to try this out.

Conclusions

There were some technical challenges, and some difficult user-interface puzzles, but nothing that wasn't overcome with a bit of patience. In the end, it wasn't anything more than we would have encountered with two long days of travel and a giant convention center to navigate, so this did not take the place of an in-person event, but there were some great benefits. The event-wide chat and the built in messaging system made it easy to reach out and meet people. Even though the contributor session proved to be a road block, I managed to have a one-on-one conversation later that had the same result of getting me up-to-speed.

The official theme of the conference was "Contribution", but the unofficial topic for a good portion of the presentations was "de-coupling". This is still only a glimpse into the future as it can be difficult to balance the benefits against the added complexity and development time. The best examples were not versions of "headless Drupal" but multi-headed Drupal. There is a great use-case for building apps alongside a tradition Drupal site. Another exciting use is to consume data from a variety of sources to be displayed quickly and efficiently in a modern front-end. In this situation, Drupal can play to its strength as a content manager and not be left behind as front-end development evolves and advances.

For me, the success of this DrupalCon will be determined by my ability to make my first commit to the Drupal project and finally become a Contributor. I managed to get my foot in the door, now it is time to walk through and get to work!

DrupalCon 2021 Higher Education Summit 

Drupal Summits are gatherings of special interest groups that happen around the same time as DrupalCon. We joined the Higher Education Summit on the Tuesday following the main event for a few presentations and roundtable discussions. Most of the attendees were from institution going through large-scale migrations to Drupal and managing wide-ranges of content creators and editors. This was a great opportunity to make note of specific methods and tools others are making use of in these situation, and to make connections with teams at other universities developing solutions that may be of interest to us as our project evolves.

https://archipelago.nyc/irun

Software that extends and builds on Drupal

Rethinking Drupal nodes as metadata fields, presenter created the "Strawberry Field" - a JSON blob, plugins that expose JSON/values as Field Properties; when you attach a Strawberry Field, any bundle becomes a Digital Object; events, subscribers, logic, computed fields, JSON API, Search API; mediates Files/Storage; ReactPHP background processor

Includes custom linked data webform elements; LoD reconciliation endpoints (Wikidata, Library of Congress, etc)

Twig based self rendering Drupal Entity - transforms JSON into any metadata schema on the fly; Twig output as endpoints; formatters for 3D, images, audiovisual, books, archived websites, etc.

Tabular UI/UX batch-driven importer/updater

Can generate files, new JSON, do OCR

28 deployed instances currently - small community of libraries and other institutions, metadata catalogers, vendors, developers, students

Trinity University presenters

"Web Champions" / "content owners" in each department, responsible for their department's website content - good strategy, but watch for outdated/decentralized content.

Used "Marie Kondo" method to focus on what helped end-users and improve info architecture.

Worked with ImageX https://imagexmedia.com/ - Trinity worked on the sites that required a lot of institutional knowledge, let ImageX deal with less visited and more common pages

They had a 6 month timeframe for all of this! a 3-person team!! with other projects to do as well!!! No time for wireframes, so they built a design system and reusable web components. This helped clients visualize what a site would look like without having to have a full-scale mockup. Also used forms to help report what exactly needed to be transferred, what the page's goals are, etc.

Biggest challenges: resources/staffing; prioritizing; knowing when enough is enough/preventing scope creep; scheduling meetings with 80 sites' stakeholders

All of this during the pandemic. Had to work on patience and grace and understanding where people were in their own work-lives. Empathy, respect very important.

presenter https://twitter.com/byronwoodfork

Unsurprisingly, POC find it more difficult to find mentors and employment opportunities. Desired changes: diversity recruitment, task forces to combat existing bias, 1-on-1 support from existing employees.

Challenges for mentoring POC are different than for mentoring majorities. POC's path is different, they will need different training than what's worked for white/male employees.

Career trajectory - POC are promoted more slowly, if ever. Women POC have the highest rates of being passed over. POC work is less valued in general. Eventually they lose interest in their work. https://hbswk.hbs.edu/archive/the-truth-about-mentoring-minorities-race-does-matter-in-mentoring

Providing a strong network of mentors can help break the barriers down. A single mentor leaves mentees alone and vulnerable if that one mentor leaves. A network also allows for a more diverse mentorship - you don't want to only have white-mentor-POC-mentee situation. Build a network of different teaching and learning styles. Include admin. Allow for open discussion of how race/ethnicity has affected mentees' experience at your organization - don't just talk code.

POC in tech can feel like outcasts. Mentors need to be both coach and counselor, ready to handle emotional issues to some extent. Build trust. Seek to understand why mentees are on their career path, why they were assigned the specific work they're doing. Listen, without speaking, especially when you are a majority and your POC mentee is venting.

Provide good feedback and a clear path forward. Give specific suggestions. "No clear path forward" is the biggest barrier to POC women getting promoted. Watch for "protective hesitation" - refraining from giving suggestions/feedback to POC/underrepresented for fear of being perceived as racist/sexist/etc. If you aren't sure, check with a colleague to ensure you're not speaking from bias. (Another way a mentor network is helpful!) 

Mentoring is hard - give yourself grace, learn from mistakes.

If you are planning to document a team's work, invite yourself to meetings. Be accessible and flexible. Have a process.

Presenter Alanna Burke uses a tool that allows her to create Jira tickets by posting a specific emoji in Slack.

Plan, but don't be so rigid that you can't adapt.

Monitor everything - watch tickets and pull requests, attend meetings. Remind your team that if they do something that would affect documentation, they need to document it, or let you know so you can.

Sometimes you will feel like the "bad guy" for bugging people about documentation. But everyone wants there to be documentation, and everything needs to be documented.

Breaking changes - don't discuss until you're calmed down and not annoyed; discuss with the team.

When you have to catch up, prioritize - what do users need to know immediately? is anything broken?

Stay organized - use a system that makes your work searchable.

Make sure what you write is useful. If it isn't, don't bother writing it. Don't make more work for yourself without need.

https://www.amazon.com/Product-Docs-technical-documentation-development-ebook/dp/B085KHTV95  - recommended book

Routines are essential

Protect everyone's time

Be available to connect in person if possible

Be mindful of everyone's communication ability and desires

Invest in people - make them feel like they're still part of the team even though they aren't in a specific building. Train them. Get them to conferences.

Document everything - keep nothing in a single person's brain

Work as groups

Remote work is good for workers and employers - there are challenges but so many benefits