The state of Drupal Community Health in 2022

The Drupal Community Working Group (CWG) enters its 9th year in 2022. Through this article let’s walk through the initiatives taken by the Drupal Community Health team. But first, what is CWG Community Health Team?

What is CWG Community Health Team?

In the year 2020, the Drupal Community Working Group expanded, and the Community Health Team was formed. The mission of this new team was to prioritize community health tasks that included workshops and knowledge transfer. 

As a refresher, the Community Health Team was asked to look after the following tasks:

• Community Event Support – To provide resources and support in relation to the Code of Conduct for Drupal events.
• Community Health – To provide opportunities in order to educate and train community members to be more effective contributors.
• Membership - To help recognize and recruit community members for the CWG.
• Ambassadors (subject matter experts) – To provide expertise and advice in relation to geographic, cultural, and other differences both inside and outside the Drupal community.

To your surprise, the team also worked on the following proactive community-health-related projects:

• Initial work on a Drupal Code of Conduct update.
• Continued development and monthly meetings of a group of community health representatives from other open source communities.
• Ongoing Code of Conduct contact workshops. 
• Initial authoring of the Drupal Event Accessibility Playbook. 
• Blog posts related to community health.
• "Nudges" for Drupal Slack Workspace and issue queues.  

In fact, to accomplish the long-term goals, the Community Health Team continues to include providing an on-ramp for the Conflict Resolution Team and recognizing and presenting additional community-health-related workshops for the community.

Familiarizing with the Conflict Resolution Team

The Conflict Resolution Team welcomed its newest member, Donna Bungard in May 2021.  In fact, the team is looking on to add multiple new members to the team in 2022. 

The Conflict Resolution Team happens to work on ongoing and new Code of Conduct-related issues. During the weekly meetings, they usually work on three types of tasks:

• Internal business – In this, the examples include recruitment, public blog posts, and presentations, Aaron Winborn Award, event organizer requests, and other non-conflict-related requests from community members.
• External, old business – It includes ongoing conflict resolution tasks that are generally brought to the Conflict Resolution Team from community members.
• External, new business – It includes new conflict resolution tasks, that are generally brought to the Conflict Resolution Team from community members.

What kinds of conflict resolution issues do they work on?

Well, the conflict resolution team decided to perform a quantitative analysis of the number and kinds of conflict resolution issues they work on by comparing data from 2019 and 2020 with data from 2021.

The team’s methodology enabled them to assign one or two of the following categories to each new issue they received during 2019-2021:

• Social media conflict
• Issue queue conflict
• Drupal Slack workspace conflict
• In-person Drupal event conflict
• Virtual Drupal event conflict
• Not CWG domain
• Other – In this, the examples include content issues on Drupal.org, issues related to local Drupal communities (but not directly related to an event), and interpersonal issues occurring in areas not covered by any of the other categories.

Talking about the overall number of incidents they continue to observe fewer new conflict-related incidents, with 14 reported during 2021 (in comparison with 35 in 2019 and 17 in 2020).

• Not a surprise, that the number of conflicts reported from in-person events was zero.
• There were zero incidents reported to the team from social media conflicts between Drupal community members.
• The number of issue queue conflicts was down to 6.

Let’s see what 2022 holds 

It’s time to take a look at what exactly the Community Health team holds in 2022.  

Conflict Resolution Team: Membership

Having served more than 3 years on the team, the multiple current resolution team members look forward to adding new members to the team. This seems to be one of their major goals for 2022. In fact, they have been interviewing multiple candidates already in 2022 and wish to have an announcement soon.

Also, one of the goals of the Community Health team is to offer an on-ramp to the Conflict Resolution Team. The Community Health team will ask all the potential Conflict Resolution Team members to join the Community Health Team as a necessity.

With the addition of Donna Bungard in 2021, they could document and formalize their onboarding process for new conflict resolution team members. Also, during the onboarding period, new members mainly shadow the team and have very limited access to historical conflict resolution reports.

The new members at the conclusion of the trial period will either become regular members or won’t be able to be a part of the team any longer. And all the trial members need to be approved by the CWG Review Panel as per recommended by the team’s charter.  

Community Health Team: Code of Conduct 

The Community Health Team strongly plans to focus on the aforementioned Drupal Code of Conduct update, assisting with the expansion of the Community Health Discussions group from multiple open-source communities and continued support for the other proactive community health initiatives in this year 2022.

These videos also can give you better clarity on the contributions made by the Drupal Community Health Team. 

Learn more on:

• The role of Community Initiatives to help Drupal evolve
• Drupal for Every Industry: Serving Needs and Fulfilling Demands
• The new features and improvements in Drupal 10

Hoping that this article really helped you in getting a proper understanding of how the Drupal Community Health Team is taking initiatives in building a secure and friendly community for all aspiring Drupalists. 

You also get to learn about their future plans and endeavors which can possibly help them in creating an atmosphere where every contributor can grow and reach their desired career goals with ease and convenience.