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A Different Kind of Drupal Community Contribution: Mentoring
The Drupal community has a problem, or perhaps it's better to say a perception problem. We tend to look at contributions to Drupal through code-tainted glasses. This isn't really all that surprising, seeing how we are an open-source software project. We'd be nothing without the plethora of talented developers who, over the past 12 years, have helped make Drupal one of the top content management systems available today. It's also fair to say that two other types of contributions are well-known: documentation and community organizing. Both play a vital role in the health of our project. Without strong documentation it would be (even more) difficult climb the Drupal learning curve, and without community organizers, I doubt anyone would argue that our growth wouldn't be nearly as fast. But there is another huge contribution that needs to come into view. It's one that I'd argue is equally as important as code, documentation, and community organization if the project is to grow and develop; and that is mentoring. A lack of guidance among newbies is creating longer paths to proficiency, and we are destined to keep struggling with seasoned-talent shortage if we, at least some of us, don't shift our priorities a bit. We've got plenty of awesome code, but it's no small issue that our supply of developers, at the level we are all looking to hire, is becoming a handicap to the development of Drupal. We feel it is so key to Drupal's future, that we've made it an integral part of our 10-week Drupal Career Starter Program. tl;dr version: we're looking for mentors, you should apply.
DCSP Students Going Big with Drupal Community Contributions
We're a little over halfway through the second edition of the DrupalEasy Career Starter Program (DCSP) , and in addition to learning the Drupal basics, our twenty students have also been learning how to leverage the various "satellite technologies" in the Drupal universe (Git, IRC, SSH) to interact and contribute to the Drupal community. In case you're not familiar, the DCSP is a 20-week program that is aimed at jumpstarting our students' Drupal careers with 10 weeks of classroom training followed by a paid internship with an organization that uses Drupal. We call it "multi-modal" training because in addition to the classroom training, students are also assigned a community mentor, participate in mandatory lab hours, contribute back to the Drupal community, topped off with real-world experience in the form of an internship with one of our WE Drupal host organizations.
20 Rock Star Mentors, 20 Eager Students, 1,000 Hours of Community Contributions
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The second edition of the Drupal Career Starter Program kicked off last week with 20 out-of-work, eager IT professionals looking to jumpstart a new career in Drupal. They’re looking forward to spending 10 weeks learning the fundamentals of Drupal in the classroom, working their way up the Drupal Ladder during their lab hours, and transitioning into a paid internship with one of our Work Experience (WE) Drupal hosts . As if that wasn’t enough to jump-start a Drupal career, we’ve also matched each student with a DrupalEasy Community Mentor that will help guide the student in their 5 mandatory hours of community contributions each week. 20 students and mentors multiplied by 5 hours per week for 10 weeks equals 1,000 hours of community contributions.