Newest Drupal Rockers - Fall 2010

In his great keynote presentation at the Pacific Northwest Drupal Summit Josh Koenig (CTR level 6) had a lot of great quotes, but one that really struck me was that

the smartest, most creative person in the room may be the guy who just walked in.

His point is that if we only look to current members and contributors to lead us then we will lose out on the people who will really grow the project in the next 5 years.

One thing that I think is really interesting about the Certified to Rock Scores is looking at people who have a high score and are new to the project.

Certified to Rock and New to the Drupal Community

• AlexisWilke: 6
• mr.baileys: 5
• RdeBoer: 5
• mcrittenden: 5
• fearlsgroove: 5
• Everett Zufelt: 5
• jpmckinney: 5
• lisarex: 5
• falcon: 5
• iLLin: 5
• span: 5
• rsevero: 5

This list shows people with a score above 4 who have been a member of drupal.org for less than 2 years when the score was calculated. There are lots of great people on this list. I immediately recognize Lisa Rex who is a member of the Growing Venture Solutions team. Everett Zufelt who quickly became Accessibility Maintainer for Drupal 7 after giving a great presentation at the Drupalcon San Francisco Core Dev Summit. mr.baileys is a member of the Drupal Security Team, so I know him from there, but has also contributed in other ways.

And of course the profiles of the other folks speak for themselves...

Certifications don't have to be exclusive of newbies

Sean Larkin wrote a great blog post on his thinkshout.com about some of the problem he perceives with Certified to Rock. One of them is about how the scores are used and whether the system might serve to exclude people rather than pull them in:

3. We are flooded with ourselves.
We are largely a self-taught community. Part of why Drupal is so popular is that it's an easy framework to pickup and learn without familiarity with other development tools. If we focus on hiring developers strictly based upon Drupal experience, rather than plain-old software engineering experience (or God help us, rather than with folks that have been working in Rails or other equally-to-more robust development frameworks), we will miss learning opportunities and we'll become the stereotypical Royal Family - and a little too close to close to kissing cousins.

This echoes a concern that Bill Fitzgerald raised and I addressed: Certifications are mostly useful if your time of engaging with the individual is very short. If your engagement is likely to be long (like with an employee) then you are better off hiring the person with the right personality and teaching them Drupal.

That said, Certified To Rock is a scalable automated system based on publicly available data and someone who gets active will quickly find their Certified to Rock score is sky high.

We plan to keep releasing data about new Drupal rockstars as we update our algorithm and hope that this will help encourage new contributors to get involved quickly.