Who are you? (biography/background)
My name is Vladimir Roudakov. I have called land Down Under (Brisbane, Australia) home for more than 2 decades. I'm an open source contributor, IT college teacher and organiser of various events (local meetups, conferences, training sessions and code sprints). I’m an active member of other open source communities such as Gitlab and WordPress. My Drupal username is VladimirAus. See the list of my contributions on my profile: https://www.drupal.org/u/vladimiraus
Why are you running for a board seat at the Drupal Association? (mission/motivation)
I’m passionate about the following initiatives:
- Building or adopting better tools for Drupal events. Currently the drupal.org events section allows consolidating and promoting code sprints, meetups and camps to the Drupal community. Inspired by GovHack (Australia and New Zealand government code sprint) and WordCamp (WordPress conferences) experiences, I would like to build a prototype that enables the Drupal communities to have tools to run local conferences as well as tools to promote the events on social media.
- Promoting Drupal as technology of choice in academia. I have invested interest in bringing Drupal as a technology of choice to Colleges and Universities in Australia (and hopefully around the globe). Improving Drupal help and learning material will play a crucial part for Drupal to stay relative as a technology.
- Expanding contributors recognition program. As a Gitlab Hero, I have witnessed Gitlab attempts to recognise contributors including special events, announcements of MVPs (Most Valuable Person) of the month and other incentives for active contributors. I would like to use acquired knowledge to propose a few trial recognition campaigns.
Please, consider voting for me if any of the above initiatives resonate with you and you think that they will result in an even better, wider and stronger Drupal community.
Why should members vote for you? (qualifications)
I feel strongly about the initiatives listed before. Below is the list of my qualifications related to each topic.
- Building or adopting better tools for Drupal events. I’ve been a Drupal events co-organiser for more than 7 years. Currently, I’m curating monthly training sessions, local meetups and seasonal code sprints. I'm volunteering for various events to get inspiration and experience. Joined by a few of my colleagues we built a conference prototype for DrupalSouth conference which can work as a base building block to create a better event organising platform.
- Promoting Drupal as technology of choice in academia. As an active IT teacher, I receive feedback from teachers and students about advantages and disadvantages of using Drupal (and other content management systems). Fun fact, the first thing that new students get confused about is the lack of Drupal 10 and Drupal 9 help and tutorials as they only can find Drupal 8 help!
- Expanding contributors recognition program. I granted various contributions on Drupal.org over the years. At the same time I've been an active member of the Gitlab heroes program and witnessed different approaches to contribution.