While chatting in IRC the other night, I found that Adam Light and I will be on the same flight through Chicago on our way to Drupalcon. So, if anyone else is scheduled for United 534 leaving Chicago at 1:10pm leave a comment. Adam and I plan to share a cab to the hotel as they are reasonably close and Public transport in a city new to me on a Sunday night after being up 14-16 hours just doesn't seem to hold an appeal for me. I plan on wearing my BADCAMP07 Drupal shirt so should be easy to spot.

On the downside, it appears that ChipIn has been having issues for the past 16 hours and timing out when people try and donate :(. It does seem to be working now so if you are still interested in helping out my travel fund I'd appreciate it.

http://sepeck.chipin.com/travel-to-drupalcon

Overall this schedule does work nicely. My in-laws are coming up to keep my wife company while I am gone (I suspect they are here to visit with the grand kids).

My session on documentation (Documentation - challenges, travails and myths) has been accepted and scheduled for Wednesday 4:45-6:00pm.

I hope to briefly cover some of the history and evolution of Drupal documentation, knowing the history is often important to understanding the present. Spend more time going over some of the present challenges of creating and maintaining documentation and debunk some persistent myths.

While the session is just over an hour, I hope to have feedback and participation, get some more people participating in one of the easiest ways to get started contributing to Drupal.

On Friday there is a code sprint, if you scroll down towards the bottom there is mention of non-developer activities and a documentation sprint so bring your laptops and get ready to participate.

I'd also like to add a thank you to those who have helped me out by contributing to my travel fund to get me there.

This is the result of seeing one too many 'For Drupal to really succeed' posts. Drupal is already a success. There is certainly room to get better and grow more, but Drupal has already succeeded.

When listening to interviews with musicians who have a new 'hit' album/song I often get a sense that the interviewer has this fundamental assumption that the artist just started playing/singing last month. When you listen carefully, you find that the artist has been working at their craft for years. So it goes with Drupal and Drupal's success.

For the time I have been with the Drupal community we have had a steady progression of success. In my first few years, the community took pride in the fact that sites could be built by skilled developers with no indication that it was using Drupal (Yes, many hobbyists often implemented sites that were obviously Drupal). Calls to put 'tagging' into the code to more easily identify Drupal based sites were often met with resistance. The prevailing attitude was to focus on quality and capability rather then count implementations.

Now come the fun part.... whenaremymodulesgonnabeupgraded!

For an initial test, I updated my site on a test site and it went very smoothly. Picked up settings and everything. I tried image module but it turns out that while image module will evidently work on a new install, it's not quite there yet for updates.

I really rely on Drupal core and image module. I can do without the others but Tagadelic is one I've been enjoying, so I may actually take a shot at it with coder module as a guide and see how far I get before it gets update. That does depend on my family, friends and work schedule though so perhaps it's a mere pipe dream.

Theming looks to be way more fun and much easier. My site, while personal has some definite areas, maybe it's time to change the theme in those areas a bit? Hmmm.... so much to do, so much to consider, so little time.

On a personal note, please consider helping my travel to Drupalcon fund out.

Up until this last weekend I did not have any plans to go to Drupalcon. For various reasons I didn't take seriously Kieran's mention of sponsors (partly because I've never done it before, partly because work and family have me a little overwhelmed at the moment). Well he did something about it and got my conference fee taken care of and a place for me to stay (I will be thanking these folks in a later post). I am arranging my flight now and will try that chip in thing he told me about to help mitigate my credit card on that and I should be good to go.

I have two presentations I have proposed.

1. The first is on documentation . Where we are, how we got here, things that we've tried and what people can do to help.
2. The other is on revisiting the current drupal.org forum structure. Over the years we've evolved a new way to collaborate with the groups site but that is not always obvious to the new comers. Also, other forums have developed some differing practices that we can leverage to mitigate culture shock and present resources to new folks.

Should be fun.

Also finally added a Drupalcon tag to my site.

Volunteering for an open source project has been a learning experience.

I have experienced the kindness of strangers
I have been thanked for helping others

I have had the privilege to meet a wide variety of people scattered around this world. This shows me that people have an intense drive to communicate and build.

I have also experienced the cruelty of those protected by their keyboards. This has been the most difficult experience to face. You do something routine, send an off line message you hope to clear things up and then you and others who have spent countless unpaid hours get accused of lying, deception and other random falsehoods from someone who makes money and benefits from your and countless others contributions.

This is the most difficult part of volunteering in an online community. Realizing that those with an ax to grind, an agenda, a fear will lash out and slander you in an attempt to justify their fears and desire for some goal or desire or power. It is even more difficult when these accusations come from someone whom you have provided help and trust in the past but has not been active for the last year suddenly do this.

It is particularly difficult when people use rhetorical devices to cloak their attack. When challenged, they accuse others of falsehoods and consistently ignore questions but answer with oblique mis-directions. It is much like the tactics made famous by Karl Rove.

It makes continuing to contribute difficult, but perhaps that is the goal, to drive out, poison collaboration, distort and cause confusion. That seems to paranoid. Perhaps that is the goal. I don’t know, it’s hard dealing with people’s fears and cruelty.

I am going to try and ignore the attacks and the cruelty but am not sure I will succeed. I don't know that I have that much patience and understanding.