Getting the Most Out of MidCamp

SPEAKER:
Thanks, everybody, so my name is Avi and I am the MidCamp lead for 2021/2022. And we're going to do something new this year and I wanted to give a session. They just kind of talk to you through all of the things that we're doing at Medicare. You're here, you're on Zoom you know, you've made significant progress in getting involved so far. And so congrats and welcome here and thanks for being here. So, being in a Drupal camp for the first time, it can be pretty daunting. And there's a lot that's going on and there's a lot of content and there's a lot of tools. So, I want to just walk through things, introduce you to everything that's going on and kind of help acclimate you to the space. If you like feel free to drop questions in chat or raise your hand and I will get to them. I've got a bunch of stuff, but I want to make sure that I answer any questions that folks have along the way. I'm also just going to check my time and make sure I know. OK, so, the first thing that I mentioned in the introduction this morning is a MidCamp code of conduct.

So, I talked to you this, but I wanted to just go in a little bit further and explain because a code of conduct for a camp might not be something that you're familiar with. So, in general, the code of conduct is here to make sure that MidCamp is a safe, inclusive, welcoming and harassment free space for everybody involved. But if you go to mid.camp/coc, there's a lot more to it. I thought I would take just a moment to highlight a few of those pieces as I turn on the next slide. So, we have a number of sections of the code of conduct, each of those around these principles. So, we're considerate, we're welcoming, we're respectful, we're collaborative, and we lead by example. All of these are just trying to establish the guidelines for a space and make sure that it is as productive and that it is inclusive as possible. We go on to kind of explain what happens if folks in our space are not abiding by these principles, so we very specifically say we do not tolerate harassment of any kind. And we try really specifically to identify all of the potential, many of the potential ways that harassment can exist.

We want to make sure that this is as clear as possible and that everybody who is here understands what is expected in space. We also go on to talk about ways to report that harassment. Finally, we continue with consequences. So, we don't want to assume the worst of people, but we want to make sure that we're laying a clear path forward. So, we would make it clear that this behavior will be tolerated and we make it clear kind of what actions may happen furthermore. These are snippets of that code of conduct and there's lots more in there. And so, we also lay out what to do if you need help. So, we have a code of conduct contacts here and those are listed on the site. We've tried to share that information as widely as possible. These folks Amy June and Andrew have also gone through training. There's a really great code of conduct training that is done by Sage Sharp of otter tech that the Drupal Community Working Group has has worked to kind of coordinate. I went through the training as well.

It's really, really interesting and really powerful and there's a lot of detail in there. So, if you have any questions about that, you're welcome to reach out to us. You're welcome to use that e-mail as well if you have questions about the training, it doesn't have to be specific event but that you're reporting. But if you have any questions that you'd like to ask us, you're welcome to get in touch with folks. And just kind of go on we didn't develop this code of conduct in a vacuum. We try and do all of our things in an open source manner. So, we pulled pieces from a number of other organizations, including the DrupalCon Code of Conduct, but also places outside. We lean on the Drupal community for a lot of things, but we also think it's really important to reach outside and see what's going on in other places in the open source world. So, we have Fordism again, there's a lot here, there's a lot to see. We've built this years and we get to be pretty flexible. We know that lots of people are working.

We don't have the benefit of traveling, being in a new space, being kind of outside our regular bubble. So, we've developed MidCamp this year to be really flexible and able to facilitate you coming in for a little bit of time, dropping in and then stepping away. So, the whole schedule is on midcamp.org. We will be updating that daily with links. But in the menu, there's a schedule drop down and it has detailed information for each day of the schedule. Just to talk through a little bit more detail that I went through this morning. So, we already introduced you to Drupal and the Drupal community. And I'm talking about MidCamp right now. After I speak this afternoon, we're going to speaker workshops. So, these are going to be led by Lonna. She's been on the Drupal diversity team for a while and does a lot of work in the states. And these are an initiative that's been going on for a little while now that are really meant to help you to find your voice and to be confident and comfortable finding something to say.

Showing up to a camp and being here is a really, really great first step. But taking the step from consuming to producing to leading it is a huge, huge next step. You know people say that teaching something is the best way to learn something. And we feel like that everybody has a place to learn in MidCamp and everybody has a place to teach as well. MidCamp is really and most of the Drupal camps are meant to be less intimidating than DrupalCon and less lowering the barrier to entry for events. And we really want to make sure that everybody feels comfortable, even if you're new to Drupal, even if you're new to your career, you probably still have something that you could teach us. You know, I've been doing Drupal for a while and I have not done a lot of other things in that time. So, it's always interesting to hear what other folks are doing. Also, four o'clock today, we've got karaoke. I'll talk about the Socials a little bit later, but they're a really fun time and we're checking on. So, on Thursday, today is kind of the introduction to the whole concept of camp.

Tomorrow is your introduction to the community and to start having this conversation. So, we've built Thursday's activities as a less structured set of sessions that are encouraging folks to be creative and to kind of break out of the standard, like I'm going to talk to you for 45 minutes about some stuff online. So, we have a lot of different sessions and we encourage you to drop in and see what the day has in store for you. So, some of the things that we've got going on, no-code contribution conversation, we've got pets session, we're having... There's a tea time that's been proposed. There's a local development AMA, mentoring conversation, project planning conversation, Drupal coffee, which is always awesome. I'm going to go out for a walk at lunchtime. And I thought it'd be fun just to have some folks turn on the cameras and say, hi. We're going to talk about menus in Drupal, command line and anything else. One of the big things that we're doing this year is we want to make sure that even if you didn't submit a session weeks or months ago or have a pre prepared talk that you have space.

So, on the page for Thursday on the website, there's a link to submit your topic. You're welcome to fill out that form. Submit your topic and we'll get back to you and get you scheduled on the site. Feel free to reach out to any of the organizers in Slack as well. And we can help you get on the schedule. We'd love for you to be an official part of it again. So, in addition to all of those sessions, there's also a workshop about NightwatchJS. So, this is an interesting kind of front end testing framework. NightwatchJS is going to be leading some workshops on that. So, if you are already kind of into Drupal and want to dig into potentially new testing framework and contribute back this is all going towards the (INAUDIBLE) Cantrip day on Saturday. So, that's a great opportunity to learn something new if you're already kind of feeling good about Drupal space. (INAUDIBLE) So, again, we're going to keep things going and keep things loose. And that will be super fun. So, Friday, you've been introduced to the community, you can learn what's going on.

Friday is the day to share your knowledge. So, Friday is going to be run as a traditional unconference. And if you've never come to a DrupalCamp before, you might not know what I've done conferences. So, an unconference is a whole day of conversation built by the people who are there, usually in person this involves a whole lot of Post-it notes. People write their ideas on Post-it notes and put them up on a wall and kind of organize their thoughts. And then the most popular ideas gets, you know, conversations and the conversations kind of sprout from the ideas that happen that morning. There's also this law of two feet. In virtual space that's a little bit it's not quite as relevant. But the idea is that if you don't feel like you're getting something out of the conversation that you're in, you are welcome to move on. This is something that somebody told me a long time ago in relation to DrupalCamp as well. If at any point during camp you're bored, you feel like you're uncomfortable, you don't want to be there, feel free to get up and leave.

You know, it's OK if you're not getting what you want, you should feel more than welcome as well. And again, when you are able to go back to a conference in person, you know, you should feel as comfortable in this. I've had lots of people tell me that it's OK to get up and walk out of the session. And you should feel comfortable doing that too. So, on Friday, in addition to the unconference, we're having a local development environment workshop. This is going to be led by Randy from DDEV. DDEV is one of the local development tools that folks in Drupal communities use. This is going to be really interesting if you've been struggling or if you've never had a local development environment on your computer. This is a really great way to get started with it. And also, if you want to prepare for the Saturday contribution day, this is a way to kind of get started and get prepared for that. There's also going to be happy hour at 4:00 PM. So again, this is just one more opportunity to come hang out, meet some people.

You're more than welcome to join that. You know, no matter whether it's your first time here or you've been doing this for a long time. And there's a lot of fun, folks, a lot of good times those. So, yeah. So, Saturday is a pretty special day, the contribution day is something that happens at most Drupal events and it's a really I think it's a really special thing for our community. As Suzanne was talking about before, Drupal is open source and we encourage everybody to open up the code and look into it. In addition to the code, there's a lot of other things that you can do to give back to Drupal. There's documentation, there is testing. There is just kind of being a sounding board and helping the folks who are living in Drupal and every day make sure that the things that we're doing makes sense to folks who aren't here every day. So, there's a lot going on that day. And again, you don't have to have a local development environment. You don't have to be a coder, anybody can contribute to these initiatives.

So, Amy June at 10:00 AM is doing a new contributor training. And at 11:30, Mark is doing an introduction to merge requests. They're both really great workshops that have been done a number of times. And I did learn a lot from those. So, I talked to the schedule and all of the things that they were doing. I want to take a little bit of time to go through our tools and some accessibility. So, we put together a page that has lots of information about all of the tools that we're using. Again, when you show up to an in-person conference, walk up to a welcome table, have lots of folks around, it's really easy to kind of know where to ask questions and where to get help. In a virtual space, it's a lot harder because we're kind of all scattered around different places. So, I want to talk through where things are and how you can get help. So, first off, it's slack. Slack is a place where we all can have conversations. And if you're not already there, if you've got mid.camp/slack, you can get an invite link.

So, if you're not familiar with it, slack is a channel based messaging platform, there's specific channels. And so you can join channels to see what's going on. There is search, so always search at the top and then lots of emoji and gifts and from there (INAUDIBLE) You can go to slack.com/help and there's lots of getting started guides there. I also really recommend downloading the slack client instead of running it in the browser, if you're able. That helps you kind of have it there all the time and be really accessible. One other thing I'll note is that in Slack and in most of the tools that we're using this week, most of the organizers have this little hatter emoji as you can see in the upper right corner. We're trying to make ourselves accessible and you're welcome to ping us any time to get help, to ask questions if you need. In slack there's also an organizer group. So, in the general channel, if you just type at organizer's, you can ping all of us and ask a question and we will get back to you.

That's right. So, slack also has lots of different rooms. There are a number of places, there's a contribution room, there is random, there's games, there's a lot of different channels that you could join together to join in the conversation. So, using Zoom that's what we're on now. We are leveraging Zoom for all of our presentations. It's really robust video conferencing platform. It has built in captions, as you are seeing here. So, every session on our schedule page has a link to Zoom. So, once you go through the schedule page you have to click into each session and you'll see a link like this that says Go to Zoom, that will take you to a different link in the browser. It'll either open link open Zoom in the browser or pop you out to the app. I do recommend downloading the app as well. It'll prompt you to do that the first time, I believe. But again, the Zoom app is a little bit more fully featured than the browser experience and it will help you get the most out of the day. Zoom also has a lot of accessibility features and they're available at zoom.us/accessibility.

Again, I mentioned the captions and so if you're not seeing captions right now, you'd like to, there is a button in the bottom toolbar of Zoom that says live transcripts. You can click on that to show the subtitles or to show transcripts kind of in the window where you're checked and participants would be. So, live transcripts is a new feature that's really useful and great. (INAUDIBLE) what's the (NAUDIBLE) about. So, that MidCamp has pretty long header in Alice Wonderland theme. And so the header its relation to Alice in Wonderland. Yeah, so the next tool we have is gather.town. This is a new thing that we're using this year and it's a really fun virtual space. You can get there at mid.camp/gather. So, it's a virtual social space. It's this little kind of low-res video game type of situation. Once you join, you'll be asked to create an avatar. And I think it does a little walk through and it'll help you kind of get used to the space before it drops you into town. It's really easy to walk around and use the arrow keys just like you would a game, up, down, left and right.

There's a number of things that you can interact with in there an X key most of the time will let you interact. And then you can just feel free to walk around, explore, talk to people. It's got a town is all proximity based. So, just like in real life, when you walk closer to a person, you can talk to them. When you walk further away from them, they kind of fade away. So, it's a lot of fun. It's been a really great way to kind of bring some of the serendipity back into virtual events. And if you're able, you can check it out. As I said earlier in the conversation, we don't get a town won't work for everybody. And so we do have a separate hallway track zoom. It's called the The River Walk Zoom. So, we show those links in slack and some other places around. So, if you're not able to gather down, you're welcome to still kind of chat with folks through Zoom. And we've got a late addition to our documents. A couple folks figured out how to do live captioning in Chrome in gather town. So, if you want to see that back on the Accessibility and Tools page on our website, there's some really great documentation that June just shared about MidCamp chat.

Last up is Miro. So, Miro is a tool that we're going to be using for our unconference. Apologies, I didn't get the slide together too much, but we've made a video, if we can grab that link. Let's see. Now, (INAUDIBLE) So, I made a little video walk through. Miro is a really cool tool that we're going to use as kind of a virtual whiteboard to put up Post-it notes and organize the sessions. The video is linked on the accessibility and tools page as well. And if you're planning on participating in the unconference, I encourage you to check that out. It's a pretty fun tool, but it helps just to kind of know the ropes. So, again, the passwords, all the things is not hater, it's hatter. Hatter 21, so use that in all the places and that will let you in. We'll share these pictures widely. And we've tried to share that in as many places as we're able. And again, feel free to reach out to the organizers, slack, infowebmidcamp.org, Twitter, anywhere that you're able if you're having problems. And we're happy to help you.

So, that's a lot of schedule. That's a lot of tools. But, you know, it can still be kind of daunting to see all this stuff and try to know what to do. I reached out to some folks on Twitter just to see what folks would recommend to newcomers at a camp that they didn't know. I asked, yeah. I asked what new people (INAUDIBLE) So, a couple of sources here you know, you're going to hear a lot of stuff about Drupal that you probably don't understand. That's OK. You're going to absorb something here even if you don't always understand it all. I know a number of the sessions I went to at DrupalCamp Chicago a long, long time ago were so far over my head I had no idea what was going on. But like five or six years later, I started using those things and I was like, oh, yeah, I remember hearing about this. And some of the things that I listened to in the session started bubbling back in my head. So, don't worry if you don't totally understand, enjoy or find something new. But just kind of being here and being around all of the Drupalness can really help.

Also that he says know that a lot of us here know each other. And it's always kind of like a big family reunion. So, it's always a fun time getting to know people, seeing people that we don't get to see all the time in our work settings. But, yeah, you're here. You're part of this reunion now, too. So, talk to people and get to know people and look forward to seeing it in person (INAUDIBLE) So, just a couple of the notes, come as you are, bring your ideas, plan for lots of opportunities to engage and feel free to take time if you need. Like I said, we planned this whole four days to be really flexible. You're welcome to join when you can, step away, do your work, do take some personal time as you need. Yeah, so the last thing, as I mentioned is Socials, so every day at four o'clock, we've got something going on and these are a really fun time just to kind of hang out, enjoy and take some time just hanging out with folks. So, tonight we have karaoke. We've got (INAUDIBLE) based karaoke.

That's pretty fun. You're going to come and request songs. You can come hang out, listen, grab a beverage. Tomorrow, we have game night. So, we're going to have a bunch of opportunities for different ways you can play games online. I think there's going to be some Jack Box games. I know there's a lot of other places. There's also a whole game room in gather town, so you can go check that out. And then on Friday, we've got a happy hour. Just going to be people hanging out and Zoom chat and have a good time. So, you're welcome to join for those. Yeah, those are my slides. But I just want to take one more minute. You know, I think there's a lot... Like I said, there's a lot that goes on on these four days and. And you should always feel free to reach out to the folks around here. We're here we're not just faces or we're not just random avatars, we're people behind the screen. We miss hanging out in real life and we're here to help you, whether you're feeling super excited and interested or you're feeling kind of like you don't know what to do or overwhelmed or lost.