My background and history with Drupal:
I started working with Drupal in 2016 and since that time have been focused on helping individuals, government, and enterprise make the most of Drupal, especially for mission-critical sites. In 2018 I co-created the Tokaido local development environment manager, which helps Drupal users of all skill levels get local Drupal environments up and running quickly and easily.
I've presented at DrupalSouth 2017, 2018, and 2019, and I am excited to be presenting at DrupalCon Prague in September. I have also presented at several Drupal meetups around the country, and now help co-organise the DrupalACT meetup group.
Why I'm running as a candidate:
Over the past 5 years, while building an enterprise Drupal PaaS provider (Ironstar), I've enjoyed the rewards of the hard work of everyone involved with DrupalSouth as well as local community meetups and the community itself, especially everyone in the #australia-nz channel.
I'm finally in a position where I feel I can contribute back and help the Drupal community in NZ and Australia to help increase awareness and understanding of Drupal's capabilities across the region.
I intend to continue the tradition of responsible governance and community building that the DrupalSouth committee has developed.
Why you should vote for me:
My goal is to foster greater awareness and adoption of Drupal within the education, government, and enterprise sectors. I plan to achieve this by helping to organise new community events aimed at decision makers (both technical and non-technical) in these sectors.
With over 20 years of experience in web hosting I've worked with a laundry list of content management systems and web frameworks and believe that Drupal has tremendous opportunity to grow in enterprise and government, and I would like to help make that happen within our region.
I believe this could happen by focusing on sector-specific events and outreach. This has already taken place in the past with DrupalGov, but I believe this could be expanded with other mini-conferences or side-tracks at the main DrupalSouth conference.
For example, DrupalCon Portland did this recently with ""Summits"" - small slices of conference time set aside for presentations and discussions specifically around education, non-profit, and government. I think this is a great idea which would help build direct connections within specific sectors.
I would also like to explore small showcase events aimed at CTOs and CEOs, this would give agencies and developers across Australia and NZ an opportunity to demonstrate their work and capabilities to decision makers who traditionally might only see this sort of content from AEM, Sitecore, and other CMS platforms which compete with Drupal.
You should vote for me if you would like to see additional effort placed on growing the Drupal user base and community within NZ and Australia, while also seeing a continued focus on the excellent work that DrupalSouth has already done around inclusiveness, tolerance, respect, and the fostering our existing community.
Gender: Male
