Families Belong Together: Augusta, GA

This afternoon my wife and I went to the Families Belong Together protest at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Augusta, and organized by a few of their members, Progressives for Democratic Reform, along with a few other like minded groups that think tearing families apart is repugnant (at best).

What else should I have asked but haven’t yet?

Every time I go through a job search either as a candidate or reviewing applications I try to learn a few things to make sure I am better prepared in the future and to help friends looking for work and talent. I recently completed a job search, so I want to share what I learned this time around.

I found a great question for a candidate to ask:  “What else should I have asked you?”

This is actually a question my wife and I started asking several years ago when we were buying large ticket items we didn’t know much about – like cars, houses, and HVAC systems. One of us, I don’t remember who, asked one of the salesman if there was anything he thought we should be asking him and his competitors. He gave us a couple small tips – likely things he thought he could answer better than his competition – and it gave us an insight into details he thought were important. Once we asked that question of all the sales people we had a list of questions to ask that covered more perspectives than we would have been able to figure out on our own.

It’s now a staple question we ask when starting anything new. Instead of trying to pretend to be experts we ask people for guidance. Often the answer is “No, I think you covered it.” but sometimes we learn things or are told about discounts, features, or services we would have otherwise missed. Outside of purchasing we’ve found the question can help spur conversations and get people to tell us things we need to know – it’s a question we use a lot as Guardian ad Litems.

Most good interviews include a time for the candidate to ask questions. This should not be a pro forma detail crammed in at the end. If the interviewer is taking your needs seriously they will give you several minutes for your questions that give you a chance to round out who you are as a candidate, this is particularly true when talking with the hiring manager (if they don’t take this seriously you should think about whether or not you want to work for that person). This portion of the interview is a critical chance to gather information about the organization, your potential role, their existing team, and vision of the future. It is also a chance to ask questions that highlight your experience and knowledge. Most advice you will find online will tell you to make sure you have a few questions you want to ask to try to draw out the information you need while showing off that you’re smart and talented. Doing this well can be hard. I discovered that having a simple, and reliably unusual, question that I can ask at the end gives a good last impression and this one has gained me unexpected insight more than once.

The exact wording isn’t important here. I’ve asked several versions:

Are there other things I should have asked but haven’t?

Are there questions you aren’t hearing from candidates that you expected?

What else do you think someone should be asking about before joining your team?

Are thing questions you would ask if you were in my shoes?

The idea is to ask an open ended question that shows you know there is always more information to be gained and gets them to think about things they haven’t shared with you, or with other candidates. The question alone often stands out, and if you get them to discuss something with you they didn’t discuss with others that helps you stand out in their minds even more. It also gives them a chance to talk about things they know and you don’t, which can help give a positive impression of you (this is same idea as dating advice that encourages getting your date to talk about themselves in part because it will make them think you’re smarter).

We all tend to want to know the same things when considering a job. This portion of the interview allows you to fill in gaps in their job ads and the conversation you’ve had so far. But since all job seekers want similar information they are asking similar questions. As for showing off, the hiring manager has likely already pre-selected a group that has shared backgrounds they are looking for so you aren’t going to easily stand out from that crowd of people with similar professional backgrounds. But by asking an unexpected question that puts the creativity on the interviewer you might be able to trigger a conversation that gives you that extra attention.

For me the question worked best in group interviews, because finding good questions is hard for me in that setting and it sometimes triggered discussion and debate within the team about things they wanted to hear candidates asking. It gave me a chance to hear a set of perspectives I wouldn’t have heard otherwise, and to see the team disagree about their vision for what’s needed. The most successful was when they fell into a mode of answer each other’s questions. For 15 minutes I moderated a discussion of what the team needed from their newest members and watched the internal team dynamics and politics played out in front of me. Usually the responses more mundane, but still helpful. Never did I feel like it was a foolish thing to have asked since the worst answer I got was a long pause and “Well that’s interesting, but I think we’ve covered everything I think you need to know.” followed by a quick check list of details the person thought it was important for candidates to know (the details of that list helped confirm why I didn’t want to work for that manager).

The question is also practical in a pinch. One of my interviews was rushed, I had just two hours to prepare after a first round interview so I didn’t have time to think of new things to ask. To add to the challenge the interviewer answered most of what I’d come up with before we got to my turn. I think I managed one or two detail questions that mostly clarified something she told me before I switched gears and asked something to the effect of “What else should I ask about before taking the job?” The question allowed me to stand out to her as asking questions that suggested I wanted to make my career move carefully (which was true and a good thing from their perspective too), and got the conversation into a productive place about the team’s role within a large organization. I start the job from that interview this week.

Escape to Savannah

We took a couple days this weekend to relax and visit Savannah.

Making the invisible visible.

This is a guest post from my wife, and co-Guardian ad Litem, Elizabeth Georgian. You can read more about our Guardian ad Litem work in this previous post.

In a world that at times seems to grow increasingly uncaring, chaotic, and impossible to change, two sets of teenagers, a century apart, living remarkably different lives, may offer us a path forward.

On March 25, 1911, 145 textile workers perished in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. They died of smoke inhalation, flames, or from injuries sustained as they leapt down the elevator shaft or out of the ninth story windows.  The factory owners had locked these young, largely immigrant women in their building so they could inspect their bags as they left and on that day no one remembered to free them.

Two years earlier, the Triangle Shirtwaist factory workers had gone on strike, as part of a larger effort on the part of textile workers across New York city.  As these young women picketed, marched, and struck, police beat them, with the approval of many bystanders. The media paid little attention, except when a small number of wealthy women joined them in their protests.

Few non-working class New Yorkers cared that the children spent their days in factories not schools, immigrants lived in dire poverty, and working conditions were hazardous.  It was only in death that they became human.

From the American Experience documentary about the fire:

Newspapers, public officials, the wider world had begun to attach names to these Triangle workers by then: Rosie Bassino and her sister Irene; Max Lehrer and his brother Sam; Mary Goldstein; the Saracino sisters; Michela Marciano, who had survived an eruption of Mt. Vesuvius before emigrating to America; Rose Manofsky, whose little sister had lost her sole source of support; and Salvatore Maltese, who had buried every female in his household: his wife Catherine, his 20-year old daughter Lucia and his daughter Rosaria, who was – at 14 – the fire’s youngest victim.

Apathy and even hostility towards the labor movement finally changed to outrage, support, and eventually significant reform as these invisible women suddenly became visible.

One hundred years later, the official charge from the family court to Guardian ad Litems charges us with conducting an independent investigation so we can make recommendations to the court.  To conduct those investigations, guardians have a right to sit in on all meetings about the teenagers we advocate for, visit their schools, talk to their teachers and doctors, and see where they live and meet with their caregivers. In doing so, I discovered to my amazement, that I have the power to make an invisible child–often poor, neglected or abused, afraid to open-up, justifiably suspicious of the system, and sometimes openly hostile–appear human. All of a sudden an angry school principle stops seeing a defiant, scary teenager in need of expulsion and instead sees a child afraid of the world and in need of help rebuilding trust.

Recently, while working with the staff in for-profit group homes, I have stumbled on the power of the language of motherhood. While I don’t actually consider the teenagers we work with children, I use that language, I describe them as my children and myself as their mother, at least figuratively.  The effect is polarizing. For a few adults, the reminder that the person they are intent on punishing is a human being and someone’s child makes them angry. But more often than not, that language de-escalates tense situations, helps me refocus conversations around the children’s strengths rather than their perceived failings, and leads us out of confrontation into negotiation or even creative problem solving.

Increasingly I see part of my role as showing the teenagers that they don’t have to be invisible.  That they have rights that deserve to be respected, needs that deserve to be met, feelings that deserve to be honored.  And seeing me stick up for them helps them see themselves as more valuable and also more powerful. Sometimes I am rewarded by watching them learn to successfully advocate for themselves and make a difference in their lives, to see themselves as powerful.

Today, the anonymous victims of textile factory fires are still poor women, still invisible, but this time we ignore them because they live in foreign places that most of us have never seen: India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, even while, like New Yorkers, we wear the clothes they make.

So who else am I still leaving invisible? Who are you making visible?

DrupalCon Nashville Notes

Like last year I’m keeping an extremely rough setup of notes from DrupalCon as a repository of things I’m picking up and tracking of sessions that looked like they would be interested but that I couldn’t attend because I was in another session. I’ll clean then up a bit and add to them over time.

Thank you to everyone who worked so hard to make the event a success.

I’ve assembled a playlist of the various sessions I though were good when I attended, or looked good but couldn’t attend.

Monday I attended the Community Summit, and while I had lots of great discussions, I didn’t take a lot of notes. The biggest two things I noted were that Western New York DUG is doing interesting stuff with online meetings that might be worth checking out and emulating for the SC DUG. And that Mid-Camp keeps a list of all the various channels that have videos of Drupal Camp sessions.

DriesNote:

Roadmap:
The current roadmap looks pretty cool, assuming everything comes together as well as we all hope it will:

Dries showed off some great stuff from the new demo site called Umami. Umami has been committed for 8.6, and we might be able to see it later in 8.5

JS modernization and a new admin interface design are on their way, media library is part of that, but is likely a year out from being ready for prime-time.

Webchick summed this section of the talk nicely:

We are very over due for the needs of content creators, so it’s great to see meaningful headway on some of these processes.

Dries then moved on to start talking about values. It’s something he’s still not clearly fully comfortable doing, but it was good to see him try. The first public version of his attempt to define a set of values is up.

My read is that its well intended and has some ground to cover is it gets revised. I haven’t done a deep dive into its details yet, nor the response, but early reviews are mixed.

Although there was much less discussion today in hallways and informal chatting than I’d expected to here.

And there is definitely some ground to cover on issues that got us here in the first place:

(That’s not related to the DriesNote directly, something she ran into at later session but was on topic of my comments)

JavaScript and Accessibility: Don’t Blame the Language

This was a really good session on accessibility with both a real world set of examples and realistic discussions of what’s hard and what happens when things pass tests but don’t get tested by humans.

Major take aways:

  • Modern tools support JS and it no longer gets in the way of accessibility. WCAG 1.0 said this was a problem 20 years ago, but that’s not the current best practice.
  • There are constraints to the work because of accessibility, but it they don’t have.
  • “There are times that I go to use an interactive calendar on the web and all I hear is 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and so on to 30 or 31…with no indication that these are dates…just a mass of numbers in the middle of the page.”
  • We used to test sites by disabling CSS/JS. Now it makes more sense to try to navigate the site with a keyboard and see what happens. Remember that just because something is possible it doesn’t mean it’s obvious or good. This doesn’t get you to a great site, but allows you to pick off errors before someone finds them for you later.
  • When you tab to things, the visual affordances some designers hate can be put back in as a compromise for people using accessibility tools.
  • I need to spend more time with the iPhone voice over tool so I can test things better.

Things I didn’t go to in this window:

UX for Admin:

This was a really interesting session on the Material Admin theme, and what’s been needed to make it work.  It’s not perfect, and may or may not be ready for prime-time, but it looks like a great idea and show what we can do to make the admin much better.

Related projects:

  • https://www.drupal.org/project/material_admin
  • https://www.drupal.org/project/material_admin_support
  • https://www.drupal.org/project/type_style

Major take aways:

  • We’re behind, some of fixing that is easy, some of fixing that is hard.
  • When you’re UX is bad, people perceive things to be slow even if they aren’t. People think that material theme is faster even though it is demonstrably not.
  • Growth and survival of the project require us to have a better admin.
  • He’s trying to make sure add-ons for the theme/module are pretty standalone and just work. But theme’s can’t require modules which is silly.
  • Contenta uses Material by default on front and back because it provides decoupling well.

Skipped in this window:

Salesforce BOF:

This BOF was a chance for Cornell to show off some great stuff they have been doing with Message Agency. They have done some cool stuff that shows the power for D8 and a good Salesforce integration.

It should go without saying, but it needs saying too much:

A Salesforce is a CRM. Drupal is a CMS.

Use your tools for what they are best at.

The content in Drupal, actions recorded back into Salesforce.

Lessons:
1) Know strengths of each tool
2) Understand user needs
3) Determine how you will use each tool
4) Get the details right: SSO, Data Mapping, etc.

Drupal is much better at providing accessibility, including Form Assembly which is hard. The SF eco-system is mixed on the whole.

One option for multiple databases is Snap Logic (apparently it is “capital intensive”).

So you have a Code of Conduct… now what?

This was a mini session that is worth watching if you’re unsure about the importance and value of having a code of conduct.  The hope had been to have a discussion about the importance of Drupal’s CoC, but everyone who attended largely agreed about the broad strokes of the major issues that have been discussed lately in the community.  We ended up talking more about how to broaden the discussion than about the CoC itself.

Skipped:

Handling a Big Year: ACLU.org in 2017

This session was an interesting look at the impact on ACLU’s D6 (yes that’s right) advocacy site running on Pantheon.

Moved to Pantheon in 2013. And that move dealt with limits of their old hosting solution. Unfortunately some of my old-timey knowledge of why that had that solution was so old they couldn’t tell me much about how they had managed to make that move.

“Crazy things happen all the time”

Slide of Donald Trump and how that effected ACLU traffic

After the their ED made a Rachel Maddow appearance on 11/16/16 they saw an 85x traffic spike. Tag1 was called in to help sort out what happened.

Traffic spiked to just over 500 requests per minute during the interview.

They found it was database bound, which was very common on D6, but still something they see frequently.

Found queries with 3 table join with no indexes on the base table. Able to go from 200,000 rows being scanned, down to 76. They were responding in real-time in crisis response mode.

After the wave passed, they called Pantheon to help build out environments for testing using multi-dev.

During the spikes that followed for the first travel ban, which were even larger they worked to reroute errors to Fastly, which served a PayPal fundraising link: at least the donations kept coming but that wasn’t good enough.

They needed a botnet to replicate the traffic. Tag1 used: Locust to create load tests, SaltStack to organize the bots, and EC2 to be the bots. They were failing at ~600 requests per minute and they were able to get to ~5,000 requests per minute. At that point the payment gateways were also starting to buckle, which isn’t a thing most people see.

The final wave they discussed came after the Net Neutrality lose, which peaked around 1,900 form submissions/min.

ACLU needed more logging, but didn’t want them logging personal information. Turned out the payment gateway’s CDN was detecting a DDOS and blocking them. See curl_log and curl_loadbalance. They also intentionally shift load from MySQL to Redis and PHP(?!?) because they knew Pantheon could scale that are far and as fast as needed to handle the waves, but MySQL was a limiting factor.

Skipped:

Wednesday Keynote by Steve Francia

Creator of Hugo and BFD in the Go community. DA Board member.

He has been helping Google put together documents to help guide their engagement with Open Source communities and projects.

https://opensource.google.com/
https://opensource.google.com/docs/

Things he argues we pioneered in Open Source:
– Distributed leadership
– Collabortive Development
– Community Engagement

Interesting to reflect that its about the process and the community, but not about the technology.

Unrelated:

BOFs Board:

Manage Yourself First

80% of leadership is just showing up. The other 20% is actually caring.

You will make mistakes. How you handles those mistakes will define your success.

Find Trusted Mentors

Do what people think you can’t.

Guide teams to successful outcomes.

People buy outcomes, so do teams.

You must be prepared to react positively to the unexpected

You should read books that speak to you, but you should also read books that aren’t about you or people like you.

Ken really likes even though it is written in the most macho way possible:
Just Listen: Discover the Secret to Getting Through to Absolutely Anyone

Go back to a point for basic agreement, even if that agreement is basic facts and that you screwed up.

Empathy is a great thing that asks you to choose sides even when you shouldn’t.

Your job is not to normalize and enforce things.

Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny
Mother Knight

Skipped:

  • https://events.drupal.org/nashville2018/sessions/dont-trust-your-gut
  • https://events.drupal.org/nashville2018/sessions/organizing-wordpress-community-victories-challenges-and-lessons-learned
  • https://events.drupal.org/nashville2018/sessions/continuous-integration-has-never-been-so-easy
  • https://events.drupal.org/nashville2018/sessions/accessible-editor (https://twitter.com/hanabel/status/984105892911239169)
  • https://events.drupal.org/nashville2018/sessions/new-help-system-drupal
  • https://events.drupal.org/nashville2018/sessions/enforcing-code-conduct
  • https://events.drupal.org/nashville2018/sessions/extending-abstract-class-privilege-outcomes-and-lessons-learned
  • https://events.drupal.org/nashville2018/sessions/community-convos-camp-organizing
  • https://events.drupal.org/nashville2018/sessions/media-module-core-setting-drupal-8-media-library

Salesforce BOF

Mostly a good discussion and a few new ideas. Also good to catch up with old friends and ideas.

Community Convos: Governance Retrospective

(Note: recording was intentionally stopped after the presentation but the discussion continued for quite a while).

Following Con last year Whitney Hess put forward some ideas, but it wasn’t clear where to go next.

It wasn’t clear that the DA should lead this, so it fell to the CWG cause they were last group standing.

Take aways:

  • Governance should evolve over time.
  • Need a values statement
  • Need to define the community and its membership.
  • Clearly document that structures and procedures.
  • CWG needs to improve CoC and enforcement.
  • Community needs to improve its global outreach.
  • DA should set higher standards.
  • Community matters should escalate to groups, not individuals.
  • We need community onboarding.
  • We should engage with other communities to discover best practices.

What’s Happened:

  • Dries stepped down as DA board chair.
  • DA hired Rachel Lawson.
  • DA created an updated CoC.
  • Dries is doing a round table on Thursday.

What’s Next:

  • Trying to figure that out…
  • Need to determine if good feedback was gathered so far.
  • Need to figure out an ongoing and continuous feedback process.

The expected frustrations with Dries and the values statement were expressed. Communication between Dries and other folks continues to be a challenge. The bottleneck of single point of contact is making it hard to stop having a single point of contact.

Skipped:

  • https://events.drupal.org/nashville2018/sessions/continuous-integration-nirvana-tricks-reach-heavenly-automation
  • https://events.drupal.org/nashville2018/sessions/hostile-drupal-tips-tricks-running-drupal-hostile-environments
  • Cthulhu Drupal: Coding with Lovecraft

Drupal for Nonprofits BOF

The main discussion centered around what’s holding back D8 adoption and the ongoing sense that the main forces in the Drupal community no longer concern themselves with the nonprofit sector.  This year’s BOF was small because NTC started today in New Orleans.  From a rough head count if the people I new were in New Orleans had been at the BOF there would have been a similar number of people.

Unrelated:

http://www.ashedryden.com/blog/the-ethics-of-unpaid-labor-and-the-oss-community

https://twitter.com/DrupalBDays/status/984444344437477376

Thursday Keynote: Emily Rose aka Amorelandra

In 2013 51% of internet traffic was “non-human”. SEO industry calls it NHT. By 2014 it was 61%.

Q&A with Dries.

Related Twitter Hastag

Automatic’s Support of Camps and staff to do so: It’s great, but it’s not in the budget (DA budget). He talked about creating it as a DA service that could be self-sustaining, but the WordPress model includes a donation of 8 FTEs.

What if your responsible for 1000 D7 sites? When we will know when there is a concrete answer to the question of the EOL for D7: This is an open issue without a good answer that needs a good answer. Move to D8? (but he doesn’t understand why that’s laughable without more detail).

What about the small shops and builders: He doesn’t feel like they were really left behind. Rachel also checked to what the DA could have done better with the new home page, but the language wasn’t a great choice.

What can a consumer do to preserve the open web: Not use Facebook. People read the web through Facebook like they do with Google. Don’t install an ad blocker.

Why don’t you hear more about Diversity issues from you? It’s important, and we have to do better. We aren’t were we should be, and I’m happy to show more leadership. I could do more by talking more about it in public and on twitter. Wants to think more about it, and doesn’t feel like an expert. He acknowledged his mistake in the DriesNote in Copanhagen. He also commented about shuttingdown after being called out because of how it was done. Wants understanding of the fact that he’ll make mistakes.

When are we moving to Github? A proof of concept is in place to move to GitLab! Our tools are better than GitLab in many ways, but GitLab wants to have our better strengths in their code base. So they are working on doing that for us and for all their users.

Is Drupal 7 Dead? No. Most sites are Drupal 7, and some new sites still launch there. But all the innovation is on 8.

The new values and principles need work to more fully reflect the community. The process: a group together in December to review the community feedback. And it was clear he needed to do this. He’s been working on it since then, and has found it hard work. He wanted to make it Collabortive, but also wanted to put a stake in the ground. He knows that it needs work, but isn’t entirely sure of the next steps. Doesn’t want to the single owner. He would like to assemble a working group with a charter.

Did you create drupal to be modular and community driven from the start or did it change into that over time?

There were other CMSes in the world, but they were a shit show. I was working on the Linux kernel and liked the modular nature.

Why do you think people are hesitant to update their site? Decided to elect minor updates not major. Mostly that it add complexity.

Will the new principles state that destructive beliefs, not just actions, will be banned. He defers to the working group.

Rachel acknowledged the tweet, but didn’t know what to do with the fact that it actually called her out. “I wasn’t paying attention.” and then blamed questioners for not asking questions earlier. @drnikki was given a space, and directed people to DD&I meetings.

A really bad response from the audience calling on women lead. Tim Plunket responded appropriately.

Random Unrelated:

March for Our Lives: Aiken, SC

Yesterday my wife and I realized that there was a March for Our Lives being held here in Aiken. When we saw a friend of ours describe her 3-year-old’s first pre-school experience with an active shooter drill we realized that if the local teens could get up early on a Saturday to speak up for themselves, we could not justify staying home.

So I charged the camera battery, cleared the memory cards, and made sure I’d have pictures to share. Aiken is a small city in a state that’s hostile to gun control, so even a small crowd is an impressive turn out. The turn out was good, the people were energized, and the kids were clear in their ask: they want to be safe at school and they don’t think that should mean they have to be surrounded by armed guards (police or teachers).

Using Composer for Drupal Modules and Private Bitbucket Repos

The next installment in my ongoing set of posts to create a public record for things I couldn’t learn in one Google search is a process for using composer to track a Drupal 8 module in a private repository.

It’s pretty common for Drupal agencies to have a small collection of modules they have built in-house and use on nearly all client sites, or to build a module for one client that has many sites. We are all becoming adept at managing our projects with Composer, but the vast majority of resources are focused on managing publicly available code via packagist. There are times these kinds of internally shared modules cannot be made fully public (for example they may contain IP belonging to the client). We have one such client that needs a module deployed to dozens of sites, and so I sat down a few weeks ago to figure out a solution.

We use Bitbucket for our private repositories, I am sure there is a similar solution using GitHub, but I haven’t worked out its details.

  1. Create private repo for module on Bitbucket.
  2. Clone that repo locally, and structure it to match Drupal.org’s conventions (this probably isn’t required, but should allow your module to blend into the rest of the project more smoothly).
  3. Create Oauth token for your account in Bitbucket. Make sure to include a dumy callback URL; you can literally use http://www.example.com. If you see references to auth.json, don’t worry about that part yet.
  4. Add a composer.json file to the module’s repo (it only requires module name, type, and the branch alias, but it’s good to include the rest): 
    {
  "name": "client/client_private_module",
  "type": "drupal-module",
  "description": "A very important module to our very important client.",
  "keywords": ["Drupal"],
  "homepage": "https://www.bitbucket.org/great_agency/client_private_module",
  "license": "proprietary",
  "minimum-stability": "dev",
  "extra": {
    "branch-alias": {
      "8.x-1.x": "1.x-dev"
    }
  },
  "require": {
    "drupal/diff": "~1.0",
  }
},
  5. Add reference to project composer.json repositories section: 
    {
  "type": "package",
  "package": {
    "name": "client/client_private_module",
    "version": "dev",
    "type": "drupal-module",
    "dist": {
      "url": "https://www.bitbucket.org/great_agency/client_private_module/get/8.x-1.x.zip",
      "type": "zip"
    }
  }
}
  6. Now just run composer require client/client_private_module, and provide the oauth creds from step 3 (note: the first time you do this composer will create the needed ~/.composer/auth.json)

“I can’t think of a single reason why we’re here, except that we’re needed.”

Hawkeye shaking B.J.'s hand for the first time.My wife and I are fans of M*A*S*H. When B.J. first arrives in Korea Hawkeye takes him to Rosie’s Bar and tells him: “I can’t think of a single reason why we’re here, except that we’re needed.” Oddly I’ve found this to be true of a great many service opportunities in my life; often the most useful ways to serve my community seems to require doing a things that should be utterly unneeded.

Often it has been around medical care. A few years ago we had a friend who spent more than a year in long-term respiratory rehab. Her daughter wasn’t able to visit much, and so we started to go most weekends just to see her. Not only did her emotional state improve but because we started to leave markers of loving family (a handmade afghan, photos, window clings, and other similar things) her medical care improved. That these things made a difference to how the staff treated her shouldn’t be true. When our own family members are in the hospital we try to ensure they get as much visitation as possible for the same reason.

Most recently it’s been while supporting children in foster care.

My wife and I serve as volunteer Guardian ad Litems in South Carolina (other states call the program CASA). It means we are court appointed advocates for children in foster care. We are the only people in their lives tasked with being openly biased in their favor. In practice it means we go to lots of meetings with professionals who should be better trained than us, better resourced than we are, and try to make sure they do their jobs the way the law requires. All children in foster care in South Carolina have a right to a volunteer advocate because the professionals who used to be paid to do this work didn’t do it as well as volunteers – nothing about that should be a true statement, but in 2010 the South Carolina Supreme Court ruled it was and from everything we’ve seen it is. So instead of a lawyer, they get us.

With just a few hours of training, that covered lots of information but barely scratched the surface, we were cut loose to help kids fight to make their lives whole again – ideally even better than before. We became part of a system run by underpaid, under-trained, and overloaded professionals. We go to all the meetings that happen in the lives of these children. We go to school and their home(s); we talk to everyone who passes through their lives during their time in the system; we visit the juvenile detention center to meet with our kids and prisons to meet with mom or dad; talk to doctors, lawyers (ours, their parent’s, and DSS’s but the kids rarely get their own in family court), case workers, detectives, probation officers, teachers and principals, parents, grand parents, foster parents, aunts and uncles, neighbors, and anyone else in their lives. Everyone else on that list worries about their own interests (like the parents do), other people in the family (like the case workers are federally obligately to do), are narrowly focused on one aspect of the child’s life (like their doctors are), or have worry about too many other people whose interests may conflict (like teachers must). My wife and I make sure we talk to more people than anyone else on the case, so that we can we represent the child’s interests and desires clearly and accurately.

We work with teenagers who have had all control of their lives taken away as they need to be learning to take more responsibility for their actions. The system is not designed well for the needs of teenagers, and so it falls to us to start helping these young people start to regain at least a little control of their destiny. The law requires us to meet with them once a month, but often it is more frequent (particularly with those prone to getting into trouble), and we become the only people they have who are both honest and unfailingly supportive. We are also too often the only people listening to their opinions about what’s happened and what they want to have happen next.

Our only real power, beyond being allowed into meetings, is that we are required to make recommendations to the court about what should happen. The court can ignore us, although they do so far less than people tell us to expect and the judges always listen with interest to to what we say. The vast majority of our impact happens outside of the court room, when professionals work harder just because they know we are watching.

Being a GAL is equal parts wonderful and infuriating, but at all times useful. We have discovered that just having a totally biased volunteer in the child’s life often makes the professionals more responsive to the child’s needs. Our schools are deeply under-resourced, and frequently seek to avoid providing legally mandated but expensive services so my wife is becoming an expert in education law to allow her to ensure the children’s rights are respected. But she has found that once she meets with the school administrators once or twice, and see that someone believes the kid is worth fighting for, they join us and help ensure the child is getting the support they need. Group homes, even terrible ones that openly allow their staff to beat children in ways that are banned for our prison guards (there is a true story behind that), are more careful when they know a volunteer is watching over a specific child and holding them legally accountable.

Sometimes just having a person around who cares, and thinks someone else is worth caring about, helps people who should do their jobs regardless of what’s happening, do their jobs better.

A Process to create a Drupal 8 module’s Config

One of the best practices for Drupal 8 that is still emerging is how to create modules with complex deployable configuration. In the past we often abused the features module to do this, and while that continues to be an option, with Drupal 8’s vastly improved configuration management options and the ability to install configuration easily I have been looking for something better. I particularly want to build modules that don’t have unnecessary dependencies but I can still reliably include all the needed configuration in my project. And after a few tries I think I’ve struck on an effective process.

Let’s start with a quick refresher on installing configuration for a Drupal 8 module. During module installation Drupal will load any yaml files that match configuration patterns it already knows about that are included in your module’s config/install directory. In theory this is great but if you want to include configuration that comes with other modules you have to figure out what files are needed; if you want to include configuration from core modules you probably will need to find a fairly large collection files to get all the required elements. Finding all those files, and copying them quickly and easily is the challenge I set out to solve.

My process starts with a local development sandbox site that is just there to support this development work, and I create a local git repository for the site’s configuration (I don’t need to connect it to a remote, like Bitbucket or GitHub, or handle all of the site’s code since it’s just to support finding changes to config files). Once installation and any base configuration is complete I export the site’s config to the directory covered by the repo (here I used d8_builder/config/sync, the site itself was at d8_builder/pub), and make sure all changes in the repository are committed:

Now I create my module and a second repository just for it. The module’s repository is linked to a remote since this is the actual product I’m creating.

With that plumbing in place I can to make whatever configuration change I need included in the module. Lately I’ve been creating a custom moderation workflow with several user roles and edge cases that will need to be deployed on a dozen or so sites, so you’ll see that reflected below, but this process should work for just about any project with lots of interrelated configuration.

Once I have completed a set of changes, I export the site’s configuration again making sure to avoid uuids and hashes that will cause trouble on import:  drupal config:export --remove-uuid --remove-config-hash

Now git can easily show which configuration files were changed, added, or removed:

Next I use git, xargs, and cp to copy those files into your module (hat tip on this detail to Andy Gregorowicz):
git ls-files -om --exclude-standard --exclude=core.extensions.yml |  xargs -I{} cp "{}" pub/modules/custom/fancy_workflow/config/install/

Notice that I skip the core.extensions.yml file. If your module had dependencies you’ll still need to update your module’s info.yml file to list them.

Now a quick commit and push of the changes to the module’s repo, and I’m ready to pull the module into other projects. I also commit the builder repo to ensure it’s easy to track any future changes.

This isn’t a replacement for tools like Configuration Installer, which are designed to handle an entire site, this is intended just for module development.

If you think you have a better solution, or that I’m missing something important please let me know.

Preparing for your next crisis

Can your plan handle the bizarre?

Last winter Dries, the Drupal Association, and the whole Drupal community, stumbled when concerns about a leading contributor’s potentially exploitive relationship got caught up in discussions of Gorean subculture and related sexual behaviors (warning researching this topic will quickly lead you to NSFW information). The intriguing details drew in an ever-expanding audience but were actually irrelevant the main concerns and the secondary ones that followed. The DA lost control of the message and the story and the entire community suffered as a consequence. Last spring and summer I was asked to step in to help them regain control of the message and start to resolve the crisis. It wasn’t the first time I was part of a crisis response with unusual details, and likely won’t be the last.

The first time I saw an organization respond to a threat to their reputation was my senior year at Hamilton College when I was intern in the Communications and Development Department. The morning of February 5th, 2001 the administrative assistant who spent every Monday morning scanning major publications for references to the college and its professors (this is before you could use Google Alerts and other tools for a similar purpose) suddenly jumped up from her desk and ran into her boss’s office. A few moments later they both sprinted down the hall to the Vice President’s office. She had found an article in the New York Times Magazine titled The Cloning Mission; A Desire to Duplicate featuring then-chemistry professor Brigitte Boisselier who – unbeknownst to the college – was moonlighting as the research director for Clonaid trying to develop human cloning technology as part of her leadership of Raëlianism.

Yup, the first time I had a front row seat to an organization’s crisis was a college learning from the New York Times that they had a professor doing secret human cloning research for a group that believes aliens created humanity.

Within a hour they had a preliminary message prepared for any alumni who called – and they were calling – and got it to all alumni class presidents to share with any concerned classmates. By noon they had held meetings with all the needed decision makers including the college president, the chemistry department chair, the deans, and the VP of Communications to form a plan of action. By early afternoon that turned into a more formal statement that was recirculated to the class presidents and anyone else expressing concern to the school. Over the course of the semester, and the two years that followed (she continued to make world news after she left the college), they responded to repeated media inquires – I was one of several interns in a mock audience for b-roll footage of a CBC piece on the topic – and even got her to engage in a public debate with an ethicist from the Philosophy department (which went poorly for her). In the end the concerned alumni were pleased with the college’s handling of the matter and the school’s reputation remained intact.

Eventually every organization will face a crisis that requires a public response. Depending on the nature of your organization you may already have a plan that handles the obvious situations: like schools preparing for threats to their students or political campaigns preparing for sexual harassment claims (at least they all should be prepared regardless of what their candidate tells them). But in my experience most of the time the crisis that actually emerges isn’t what you expected and includes strange details that easily distract everyone from the main issue.

Hamilton did not have a plan titled: “What happens if one of our professors is caught leading human cloning research for an alien cult.”  What they had was a general plan for “What happens when it appears someone is going to make us look bad” that was quickly escalated to “what happens when it really is bad.” They knew who they needed to get into a meeting, and that allowed timely decision making. The communications team then had a basis to work quickly so they could get back in control of the story. The plan they had allowed them to brush aside the unimportant details – the involvement of Raëlianism was fun to talk about but didn’t change anything about the response – so they could focus on important details.

Often when faced with these kinds of strange details surrounding a crisis the people who should be leading the response get distracted and start talking about those details. When it gets really weird they really want to say “is this not my fault and not my problem” and ignore it. It doesn’t matter why just that it is your problem. Everyone will want to focus on the salacious details, but you have to focus on the important details and lead your audience to supporting your response.

These are my tips for how to plan for a crisis and building a response that allows you to stay focused:

  1. Know when to initiate your response. Develop a list of people and metrics to use to initiate a crisis response. It should include both some clear markers – e.g. a threat of violence against staff or constituents – and some fuzzier signs – e.g. anytime the ED/CEO or board chair says there is a crisis.
  2. Know who needs to be involved and how to find them. Part of what allowed Hamilton to move quickly was they knew exactly who needed to be involved in the process. Likewise you should determine which staff, board members, volunteers, consultants, etc, need to be in the loop and how you reach them quickly. And know who gets cut out when – if your board chair is on a cruise and can’t be reached until next Tuesday who do you call instead? If your director of communications is the problem you’re probably better off not having them planning the response.
  3. Prepare different types of response. You may want to monitor the situation while saying nothing; you may want to target different messages to specific audiences (your board may get a different message than your donors); you may want to try to use press contacts or avoid them. You should think about how and when to use all your communications channels as part of your response.
  4. Have metrics for testing your plan before following it. In a time of stress it can be easy to overlook important details in your response. While planning write up a checklist to run through to make sure you remembered everything that’s important. It should at least include a reminder to think about everyone’s physical safety and your legal risk (in that order). It should also probably include contacts with important constituent groups (like Hamilton’s alumni class presidents) and any internal audiences so staff and volunteers aren’t surprised by public statements.
  5. Be prepared to share aggressively. Often organizations appear to be hiding information when they share it slowly, or when they say “this is all we can release” and then are pressured into releasing more. With any given statement release everything you can – sometimes with supporting materials if you need to – and then stop.
  6. Be prepared to shut up. This correlates with the previous tip. Sometimes part of a good response will be to be quiet. Usually this will be right before and after a major statement. It gives people a chance to process your response and avoids the sense that you are leaking information in dribs and drabs.
  7. Don’t over plan. Your next crisis will not look like what you planned for, so be prepared to change course from your very first move. If you lock in to many details you will likely make your situation worse by sounding tone-def.

When you have created your draft plan you should practice using it. Some of that practice should be very practical: what do you do when a man in leadership is accused of sexual harassment or abuse? Some of it should be like the CDC and FEMA zombie drills; even if you don’t use zombies use a crisis that you think couldn’t possibly happen – if you hear someone in the office say “good thing that can’t happen here” use it as your scenario. The first makes sure you are prepared for the kinds of things that are most likely to actually happen. The second makes sure you are prepared to think outside the box and handle a messy situation to which you thought you were immune. Your organization might not do any medical research at all, but what would happen if you discovered a board member was marrying the next director of Clonaid (including aliens is almost as fun as including zombies)? What would you tell your major donors?

A good crisis response comes from being prepared for the unexpected. If your plan is flexible enough to handle the utterly expected and adapt to a staff member cloning alien zombies, you can probably handle whatever actually comes your way.