The Drupal.org Software Working Group (drumm, eliza411, tvn, webchick) was chartered to provide vision and direction for Drupal.org by working with the community on Drupal.org software in a number of ways. The first duty on our list is establishing team leadership for all areas of *.Drupal.org, to establish clear decision-making processes.
Back in November, we worked with the community to establish a proposed structure for Drupal.org Development Tools: https://groups.drupal.org/node/368148. Based on feedback from a number of contributors, we established a set of roles to fill that would allow the leadership team to collectively set the direction/roadmap for all facets of the development tools area of the site and help ensure that both DA staff and volunteer contributors have a clear set of decision-makers to talk to during feature development.
After several weeks of talking to community members, we hereby announce the following as the initial structure for the developer tools team. Note that in most cases, we chose to go the route of "blessing the do-ocracy"; that is, appointing people already doing the work to each position, in order to both ease the transition to the new leadership structure, and also to respect the contributions made by our awesome Drupal.org contributors. Where there was more than one person doing the work, we first narrowed it to people interested in accepting the responsibility, then chose based on availability.
Product Owner
Neil Drumm (drumm)
Neil is the Drupal Association’s Senior Technologist and the most familiar person with how Drupal.org works. Since he was involved in all parts of the Drupal 7 Drupal.org upgrade, he has familiarity with much of the code and functionality. He also has a lot of availability, given that making Drupal.org awesome is his full-time job.
The hope is that Neil's appointment here can be temporary and that given time, with the help of this team, more community members will become involved in the development tools to the point where this position could be filled by someone with more of a product management focus, and less of a technical focus.
Neil can be reached on IRC, username is drumm, and via his contact form. He is usually available 9am to 5pm US Pacific time.
Project Manager
Shyamala Rajaram (Shyamala)
Shyamala has technical knowledge and has worked on a large number of Drupal projects, including the Drupal 8 Mobile Initiative and the Accessibility initiative. She's great at extracting information from developers and sharing it via blog posts and updates, and she was able to encourage more people into the mobile initiative by speaking at DrupalCamps and groups.
Shyamala can be reached on twitter @shyam_raj or using the d.o contact form. Usually available evenings (IST) or weekends on IRC (Shyamala on #drupal-contribute). She is looking to establishing an office hours time and or google hangout meetings to connect on a weekly basis with the community.
User Experience Lead
Bojhan Somers (Bojhan)
Bojhan is the Drupal 8 UX lead, and wants to unstick the UX work for Drupal.org that the community has been waiting on. There are so many changes, even small changes, which can greatly improve the lives of contributors. He wants to provide a consistent dialogue between the community and development efforts, and in the end, to make our tools much more friendly to both expert users and beginners.
Bojhan can be found on IRC (Bojhan in #drupal-contribute), if not he can also be reached through his Drupal.org contact form and is usually available in the evenings European time.
Technical Lead: Project
Neil Drumm (drumm)
Neil has been working on Project module as it relates to Drupal.org for the last year, including packaging, issue queue, project downloads, and search API.
Technical Lead: Version Control
Marco Villegas (marvil07)
Marco was a key player in Drupal’s Great Git Migration and instrumental in porting Version_Control* modules to Drupal 7. Marco will be reviewing version control issues and patches on weekends. You can find him in IRC in the #drupal-vcs channel. Also feel free to leave messages in that channel, he will read them.
Technical Lead: Testbot
Jeremy Thorson (jthorson)
Jeremy is very familiar with the current testbot code, and got his start in PIFR/PIFT trying to expand it for use in automating project applications. He has big plans for modernizing the testbot environment, using a mix of custom Drupal modules and industry-standard CI tools.
Jeremy can usually be found lurking on IRC (ping jthorson in #drupal-contribute), but if not online, can also be reached via twitter (@jeremythorson) or through his Drupal.org contact form. Due to $dayjob commitments, most testbot related support activity will occur on evenings (CST) and weekends.
How will the team be working?
The Developer Tools team exists to help make decisions and unblock progress in the area of Drupal.org's developer tools. Team members will be in #drupal-infrastructure during their available hours, as well as their more focused area-specific channels outlined above. Decisions will be made asynchronously, as-needed on any urgent matters, and each month, the team will hold a "scrum" call to sync up with each other and make any other non-urgent decisions. The team will also use the Drupal.org changes tracking tool (coming soon!) to provide transparency around things that are actively being worked on and slated for deployment. Use the tag "Needs DSWG Dev Tools Team feedback" in order to escalate an issue to their attention in the queues.
What next?
As a next step, the Developer Tools Team will be meeting and looking through the existing backlog of issues related to development tools (including ideas captured at https://groups.drupal.org/drupal-org-2014-roadmap-brainstorming/popular) and working to get them un-stuck where possible, as well as proposing to the Drupal.org Software Working group an overall roadmap for the developer tools section of Drupal.org.
The Drupal.org Developer Tools team will talk with the community through channels such as the future Drupal.org changes tool and https://groups.drupal.org/drupalorg to discuss the big changes that need to happen in their areas.
Please join us in congratulating the first formal Drupal.org leadership team!