Community Spotlight

Veronica Vedia (veronicanerak) organized Women in Drupal at DrupalCamp Bolivia in 2014 alongside Karen Da Cruz and several other women. Veronica shared the story of how she went from anonymous Drupaler to community evangelist over email with the Drupal Association. Parts of this Community Spotlight have been transcribed from a medium.com article that Veronica wrote on her experience coordinating Women in Drupal.

For our June community spotlight, we’d like to highlight the efforts of two men in Uganda who are working hard to grow their local community and bring more university students into the Drupal fold. In 2014, the two were awarded a Community Cultivation Grant for their Uganda University Drupal Tour program, which will be discussed in today’s spotlight.

It’s time for another community spotlight, and this month, we’re highlighting a community member who has made huge contributions to the success of the Drupal project and of DrupalCon — and not only through code.

Paul Johnson (pdjohnson) of Manchester is currently the Drupal Director of CTI Digital, and is the social media lead for most DrupalCons. He also maintains the @Drupal Twitter account. Paul has grown the DrupalCon social media program from a small following on twitter to a set of huge, engaged channels.

The Drupal Association sat down with Paul in late January to talk about some of his accomplishments and passions.

Since joining Drupal.org in 2007, Lee Rowlands (larowlan) has been an important contributor to the Drupal project. A major core contributor and Drupal 8 advocate, Rowlands has become a well-recognized and celebrated member of the Drupal community.

Rowlands is an important Drupal figure in Australia, and has spoken at DrupalCamp Brisbane 2010, Drupal Downunder Melbourne 2012, DrupalCon Sydney 2013 and Drupal South Wellington 2014. An occasional mentor during Drupal Office Hours in the Australian timezone (GMT+10), Rowlands is also a well-recognized figure in the international Drupal community for his involvement with core and his contributions to a huge variety of projects on Drupal.org.

How did you get involved with Drupal?

Jim Morrison and a naked native american came to me in a dream and told me it was my destiny. Just kidding. I started up my own IT consulting business and I'd built a couple of Drupal 5 sites.

Jess (Drupal.org username xjm) is a Drupal developer, core contributor, module maintainer, and mentor, and just plain all-around awesome! She is a web developer for the University of Wisconsin's Department of Family Medicine. She also volunteers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Arboretum.

Jess has made many contributions to Drupal, including roles as:

• maintainer of the Taxonomy Access Control and Taxonomy Lineage modules, among others.
• co-maintainer of the Taxonomy module in Drupal core.
• active participant in the API documentation clean-up sprint happening in Drupal 8, as well as efforts to clean up the entity system.
• co-lead of the Clean Up Core community initaitive.
• friendly and knowledgeable mentor to new contributors.
• organizer of the twice-weekly core office hours to help get new core contributors involved.

Despite Melissa Anderson (eliza411)'s low user number on Drupal.org, she was a relatively quiet contributor until about halfway through the Great Git Migration, when she took over as project manager of that huge undertaking. Melissa’s scope, focus, and competence [editor’s note: a dreadful understatement!] continue to amaze everyone, and she is generally accepted as a fundamental reason that the Git Migration was completed on schedule and to such great reception.

Hailing from a small Alaska town with a background in education, Melissa is now officially co-lead of the Git Project with Sam Boyer. Randy Fay, Sam Boyer, and the entire Git migration team have nominated Melissa in honor of her incredible contribution.

To get to know her a little better, we asked Melissa a few questions:

How did you get involved in Drupal? Seems like it was a while ago...

I needed a solution for managing information in a public way. I tried Postnuke, but it was a complete #fail. Some very interesting friends recommended Mambo (now Joomla) and Drupal.

Ariane Khachatourians (arianek) is a tireless contributor and maintainer of the Drupal.org documentation. She's the single most active person in setting the direction for the Documentation, and by far one of the biggest contributors. Take a look at her tracker to see where she's been lately.

She is...

• Co-Lead for the Drupal Docs Team
• Admin for the Vancouver User Group and Drupalchix
• Hugely involved in the Drupal core issue queue and was at one point the 27th highest D7 patch contributor

And to top it off, a really nice person who just keeps working to make Drupaldom a better and happier place. And who is succeeding at that.

He may not be known to everyone yet. Henrik Danielsson (TwoD) suddenly appeared out of nowhere approximately 18 months ago and started to post a couple of pretty solid patches to Wysiwyg module's queue. In case you do not know the Wysiwyg module yet: It allows you to integrate any kind of client-side content editor (WYSIWYG) with Drupal by building a communication layer between Drupal forms and the actual editor(s). Thus, working on the project requires a solid knowledge and highly advanced expertise of Drupal's Form API, Filter API, JavaScript, and lastly every individual editor library.