So I'm like, hey guys, this will be good. So I'm going to talk a little bit about the state of documentation for Drupal, Drupal.org, the code and or the documentation that is part of Drupal core, kind of everything documentation related, some of the things that the community is working on in order to attempt to improve the documentation. And then I'm going to solicit your guys's feedback and help on some of that stuff. My name is, whoa, hold on. There we go. My name is Joe, or EOJTheBrave on Drupal.org, Twitter, IRC, pretty much everything since forever. I am a member of the Documentation Working Group. The Documentation Working Group is a handful of people from the community that were chosen to help oversee sort of policies and such around Drupal documentation, policies and guidelines to help resolve any disputes that come up and that kind of thing. So I'm a member of that group and as such I know a lot about the things that we talk about in that group. I mentioned this too because I'm going to talk about a lot of those things, but I also need to point out that in some cases, this is my impression of how things are going and how they should work and is not necessarily reflective of the entire group. And this presentation has a whole bunch of links in it.  So I kind of mentioned this already but what I'm going to talk about is the current state of documentation. So what is the documentation that we have? What's good about it? What's not so good about it? Then I'm going to talk about some of the work that we're doing on Drupal.org and in other places to improve that documentation and a little bit about why we're making those changes. And then finally I'm going to talk a bit about this new project, the Drupal 8 user guide, which is something that started around the time of DrupalCon in Los Angeles where I actually gave a presentation similar to this one, which I said here's the state of documentation, one of the things we could do to improve it is write a user guide and now we've started writing it and I'm going to talk a little bit about how that's going and how far we've come and so forth. I think one of the first things to think about with this is like when we talk about documentation for Drupal, what is it that we're talking about? And the thing is, it's like our documentation exists in a lot of different places. And so these are just some of them. The ones that people generally go to first or when you think about documentation for Drupal are either the handbook. So if you go to Drupal.org and you click on documentation tab up at the top, you end up in the community handbook which is basically this giant wiki, I think it's something like 12,000 pages at this point of community contributed documentation. And then there's api.drupal.org which is the documentation that documents Drupal Core's code and all of the internal API. So as a developer, you probably make use of that documentation a lot when it comes to doing something like looking up how the format date function works. That documentation also has comments. So similar to, for example, php.net's documentation, you'll get information about a function and what it does and how it's supposed to be used. And then you'll also have some comments where people will sometimes provide helpful information like examples of how you can use it and sometimes provide unhelpful information like examples of how you can use it. There are also change records on Drupal.org which in a sense I think are a form of documentation. And what they serve to document is whenever there's a significant change made between the way that something in, for example, Drupal 7 works and how it now works in Drupal 8, not always, but for the most part, change records get filed for those things. So for example, if there was a function in Drupal 7 that was removed and there's now a new version of that or a new way of performing that thing in Drupal 8, there'll be a change record that documents that. And there's usually code samples. So one of them will say like, this is how you implemented this hook in Drupal 7. This is how you do the equivalent in Drupal 8. So those are change records. And then there's also this Drupal 8 user guide which is a new project that the Drupal community is working on to create a bit more of a curated guide for beginners, people that are new to Drupal and kind of want to get an understanding of what the site building experience is like. And then there's all this documentation that exists in our community that isn't really part of the Drupal communities purview, if you will. It's things that exist on external sites. I worked for a company, Drupalize Me, that creates training videos. And in a sense, those are documentation about how Drupal works. There's tons of books and blog posts and videos and that all over, typically found by searching in Google. But that's documentation as well. That element of documentation isn't something that the documentation working group really has any control over. I don't get to say, hey, sorry, can you not write that blog post? But that exists as well. And a lot of it is really awesome. So I'll start out by talking about some of the things that are really great about our documentation. And I do this because I think that when we talk about what's not awesome about our documentation and the changes that we would like to make, I think it's important to remember what's going really well for us. So that we don't lose those things as we make changes. I think that api.drupal.org and the documentation that we've got there is really good. It could certainly be improved, but for the most part, the documentation is good. It's generally easy to follow and it's generally pretty complete. And I like that. And there's a few reasons that I think that api.drupal.org documentation really stands out when we look at all of our documentation sources. The biggest one for me is that documentation tends to be somewhat curated and it's definitely required. Anytime you write code for Drupal Core, which is where all of the api.drupal.org documentation comes from, if you implement a new function or a new system in Drupal, you're also required to write the documentation for it as part of the coding standards review. So that patch that you wrote won't even get in unless the documentation is written, which is kind of cool because it means the documentation gets written. I also think the change records are really great, especially as we're making this transition from one version of Drupal to another, I think for those of us that have been working with Drupal 7 for a while, these change records are gonna be super helpful because I know how to do a lot of things in Drupal 7 and I know that I can still do those things in Drupal 8, but I don't necessarily know how and I think the change records will help with that. I think our community does a pretty good job of this concept of drive-by editing. The handbook on Drupal.org is all wiki pages and so if you have an account on Drupal.org, you can click the edit button and make changes and so we get a lot of people that come by and fix typos in the documentation and that's super useful. It helps improve the documentation and that's something that I think that we should continue to support in some way or another is the ability for people to contribute to documentation without having to jump through a lot of hoops to do so. And I also think that we're, as a community, we're getting better and better all the time at celebrating the people that work on documentation and recognizing them for that hard work and there's a lot of people that contribute to documentation. These are statistics from basically since the beginning of the year, since January 1st. We've had just over 6,000 total edits to handbook pages on Drupal.org, which is awesome. So 6,000 times someone has come by and said, you know what, we can improve this documentation and done so. And these are the people that have helped contribute to that. So 6,000 edits, roughly 1,000 people have contributed but what's interesting about this is that when you start to look at the numbers, while there's 1,000 people that have contributed, there's really like 20 people that have contributed the vast majority of the changes. If you've ever seen graphs of like what Drupal core contribution looks like, you've seen this graph, right? It's like five people wrote Drupal core and then a whole bunch of people helped with it. The documentation kind of tends to be the same. There's, so on the left, the really tall part is number, it starts with, from the left, you've got number of people, so we'll say one, or sorry, 300 some people have made one edit. And if you come across this way, it's how many edits they've made. So you can see there's a lot of people that have made like one or two or three changes, but then never come back and make any more. This is only since the beginning of the year, so this isn't all time statistics, but I think it's probably reflective of the, like what, you would see a similar long tail like this if you looked at statistics since forever. And that's awesome that we've got this many people contributing, but I think one of the things that we could look at is what would happen if we got everyone that was making only one change to make two instead? So now instead of 6,000, we'd have 12,000 changes. And that's huge in terms of improving the documentation and getting people to contribute. So I'll talk a little bit more about that later in the presentation. The other thing I wanted to point out, now that kind of switching into like, okay, so those are the things that are awesome about documentation. Now let's talk about why we have documentation and what we can do to make the things that aren't so awesome a little bit better. This pyramid of skills is part of a project that developed personas for Drupal.org. The idea was to identify groups of people, the types of things that they might be using Drupal.org to do, and the ways that they participate in the community. And then over time, we'd like to use Drupal.org and all of the tools that we create to help transition people from the bottom of this pyramid up to the top of it. So basically someone that's new and has never used Drupal or heard of it before, how do we funnel them into becoming masters of Drupal over time? And the documentation that we write and all of the tools that we create to allow people to write that documentation are part of that process of moving people along this trajectory from being a newcomer all the way up to a master. One of the things that's fascinating about this is, I think it's probably safe to say that with these personas, every single person that's attending DrupalCon this week is in like halfway of, I would say, about where the word skilled is and up. Like just being in the skilled category is like, oh, you're like just by virtue of the fact that you know what Drupal is when you're attending a community event, you're already in that like top 30%. So this is a huge group of people that we can help get moved into those higher groups, but also like there's a lot of potential there for us to tap into those resources and help get them editing the documentation as well. So as we talk about making changes to our tools, we often do so by taking a look at these personas and saying, if we make this change, let's say we make it so that change the tool that someone uses to edit documentation, which of these personas does it affect and how does it affect them? And if it does, are we using it as a way to help transition them from say skilled to expert? All right, so that's all the stuff that was awesome. This is some of the things that the documentation working group and the community over time have identified as pain points in our documentation and things that we'd like to see improved. This is primarily relates to the documentation that is part of the handbook. So the big wiki section on Drupal.org, though I think it applies to most things. So in no particular order, lack of curation and review is something that comes up a lot as being a pain point for the documentation that we write. Anybody can go to a page on Drupal.org and edit it and make changes and fix a typo or add a code example or whatever the case is. And there's no formal process for those changes to be reviewed. The way that they do get reviewed is somebody else happens to notice that there was a change made and come along and look at it or update it or fix it. But there aren't great tools for, so for example, Boris does a lot of work on the theming documentation. And there's no good way for him to know if I've come and made a change to something that he wrote, so that he can go, oh yeah, that is correct. Thanks for making the change versus, that's not a good way to do it. Maybe we should consider improving the documentation. The organization and the hierarchy of documentation is insane at this point. You go to the handbook on Drupal.org and it becomes this nested tree that just kind of goes down into the right forever. You're like, holy cow, that's a lot of pages. It's not necessarily a bad thing that there's all of that content, but we definitely struggle to keep it organized. I think a lot of this stems from the fact that in the Wiki system, anyone can come along and they can create a new page and they can create that new page anywhere in the Wiki. So there's not a lot of, we end up with a lot of pages that are kind of like, well, is this really the right spot for it? Or did you know that you've duplicated a page that exists in another section of the documentation? Which you probably didn't, because you went down this tree, but it was actually in that other tree. So thinking about and working on ways to deal with that, I think, are important. For me, that partially comes back to this idea of review and oversight and somebody that's more familiar with the documentation might say, hey, did you know that that existed already? Maybe you could help us improve that project or that page rather than writing a completely new one. The discoverability of documentation is a bit challenging. It gets better and better all of the time as we improve these tools, but it's definitely something where, I've talked to a lot of people who, when you ask them like, where did you learn that information? They're like, oh, it's on duple.org slash node slash one, two, seven, nine, five. And you're like, you mean you remembered the node ID of the page that documented the thing? So it's either that or people finding it through Google, it's often brought up as a pain point for people that we talk to about how they use the documentation is that it can be challenging to find the things that they're wanting to read about. Probably stems partially from this fact that there's just a hard to keep organized hierarchy. Versioning is another problem. You go to all these pages on duple.org and it's awesome. It's like, this is the page for how to do this one thing in duple six, seven and eight. And you're like, okay. And then they're all kind of different. So I'm not positive that this is gonna cover all of them. And you start reading through it and it's like half the paragraphs are like, this applies to duple seven, but not duple eight. And you get through and then you're like, this applies to duple six, but not duple seven. That can be really tough as someone that's learning how to do something new. Because why should I need to differentiate between versions of duple? I'm like, I'm building a duple eight website. I don't really care how duple six or seven did this same thing. But the way that our documentation is set up currently, there isn't really a great way to version resources in the documentation and say, here's the duple seven version of this page. Here's the duple eight version of this page. You know, the equivalent of that would be, if your documentation was all in a version control system, you could write all the documentation for duple seven. And then when duple eight development started, you could just create a new branch and say, here's the duple eight documentation. A lot of projects do this or similar. And you often see this in that, you'll go and view their documentation and they'll have like a little toggle at the top that's kind of like switch between versions of our software's documentation. API.duple.org does this really well because it's parsing the code and getting the documentation from there. That code's obviously versioned. And then translation is tough. Translation of documentation is tough because there are 12,000 some pages figuring out which one should be translated. It would be difficult. There's also an issue of if I created a page and then you translated it and then I changed the page. Now your translation's out of date but you have no way of knowing that I changed the page and you need to update the translation. What we see mostly with translation now is that people, different language communities will create their own Drupal websites and translate a select number of pages from Drupal.org. They'll just kind of pick the ones that they think are important and start translating those. They very quickly become out of date but it is a useful resource. So with that in mind, these are some of the things that the documentation working group has identified as sort of priorities for things that we can improve in order to help solve some of those pain points. About a year and a half ago or so, we, the group, when we was first formed, we went through a process of basically reading like all of the issues in the documentation issue queue and identifying themes within those issues and trying to group them together to say, what we hear the community saying over and over is for example, they would like the ability to follow or subscribe to a page in documentation. The idea being that if you've made a change to a page or it's a page that you're particularly interested say you're the maintainer of the flag module, you could follow the page that documents the flag module so when somebody makes a change to it, you would be notified and then you could go and review those changes. Another idea was introducing the concept of maintainers for documentation, whether it's for a section or a page. We have this concept of maintainers for Drupal projects so themes and modules and as a maintainer of a project you gain a little bit more authority over that project. You get to, well with projects for example, only maintainers can commit code to it but you also gain some additional karma I suppose as being the maintainer of a project and so if we could allow people to identify themselves as maintainers of say the theming guide on Drupal.org we could do things like give them additional tools and permissions to do their job well, like for example, get updates for all of the pages in that section but we can also then recognize those people better. We could do things like on your Drupal.org profile we could list the sections of documentation that you've said I'm maintaining in the same way that we do with projects and when people come and view your profile that's a nice way for them to get a sense of like, hey, this person is doing some good work in the community. And then creating a better link between projects and the documentation for those projects. So for example, the flag module and the pages on Drupal.org that document the flag module so that as a maintainer of the flag module I know what pages are out there that exist that document it but also as someone is trying to learn more about it, how that module works it's easy to find the documentation for it. And then the Drupal.at user guide is our kind of another priority right now which is this project of which I mentioned earlier to create a sort of comprehensive introduction to site building with Drupal. So with that in mind some of the things that we're doing in order to resolve some of those pain points. The first one is changes that are being made to Drupal.org and all the tools and the infrastructure there in order to support documentation. There's actually some really cool and exciting stuff coming up in the not too distant future. For this work, in this case a lot of the work and the way that things get changed on Drupal.org is the Drupal Association employs people that work on Drupal.org and make those changes. And the community and the documentation working group are asked to play an advisory role. So we get to come and say hey, these are things that we've identified as being important and we'd like to get solved and then let's work together to get that worked on. This also ties in with a lot of the content strategy work that's been happening on Drupal.org recently and just overall plans and changes for Drupal.org. But hopefully what this is gonna look like is Drupal.org is going to switch to a new format in which sections of documentation are created as essentially organic groups. So you could have an organic group or we'll just say we'll have a section or a group that is the theming documentation. Pages that are part of theming would then be inserted into that group. This creates a little bit more hierarchy and structure to the documentation but it also allows us to deal with a lot of the things that we just pointed out that are pain points. Like for example, you could say that someone could be a maintainer of the theming guide by virtue of the fact that they're an owner of a group and you could have multiple maintainers. This would modules, the organic group suite of modules and already has a lot of tools in place for helping deal with things like notifications, for example. So getting notification when somebody posts a new page into your group, you could take that to getting notification when somebody creates a new page in the theming documentation so that you can then later come back and review that page. So that's a big one, just that idea of maintainership and the idea that tools like organic groups allow us to provide a little bit more structure like an information architecture behind the Wiki that allows for us to group things together in a way that you can realistically subscribe to a page or a set of pages in the documentation and get notice. I'm hopeful that even just the getting notice part will help us make that transition from people that come and only ever make one edit to people making two edits because what happens now is like you go and you edit a page because you happen to discover it via Google search and then you probably never come back to that page ever in your life. If we could let you edit the page and then say I'd also like to be notified when somebody makes changes to this page. Next time somebody else comes along and makes a change you could get a notice and then you could say I'm gonna go review that change and make sure that the page still makes sense. Another thing that we've been talking about a lot is the comments on Wiki pages on Drupal.org are varying degrees of useful. They range all the way from actually useful to not useful at all. And how do we make that better and what do we do with them? What ends up happening a lot of times is people leave so you go to a page in the Wiki and you leave a comment on that page and usually most of the time those comments are either questions where you're asking for clarification in the documentation or they are the clarification themselves. So they're improvements to that documentation which I really wish you would actually just edit the page and put the improvement in there but it doesn't always happen, unfortunately. Sometimes it does happen and now you've got a comment that says it would be really great if the documentation was updated to say this and it does say that and now as the person that read the comment I'm like what is going on here? I don't get this. And then when somebody asks the question in a comment on the documentation that says this part isn't clear it would be way better if rather than leaving a comment that says oh well what you really need to do is X as if the documentation got updated so that the next person that read it that was clear as well. So we talk about using comments as more akin to how Wikipedia uses comments where there's like the talk or discussion tab on a page and rather than treating the comments as part of the documentation itself which we kind of do now, we would use the comments as a way to discuss the documentation and suggest improvements. So it's a combination of comments but also if you could imagine every page in the documentation having its own thread in the issue queue where people could discuss that piece of documentation and the status and whether it needs updates and so forth if we could use comments like that I think that would be amazing. There's a lot more information on Drupal.org about the changes that are happening to Drupal.org meta. As well as Tatiana did a session earlier this week on the content strategy and the work that's being done there which is definitely worth checking out. Okay, so that's the changes on Drupal.org and kind of where we're hoping to go with that. At DrupalConLA I gave a presentation similar to this one in which I talked about what things that are pain points in documentation and we had a long discussion afterwards and one of the things that we talked about was I had done a bunch of research into how other open source projects write their documentation and how that compares to what we're doing. Specifically I did some looking at WordPress and the Mozilla Developer Network. And I like these examples because in both cases they have over time transitioned from a community wiki much like Drupal.org to a more structured version controlled system for documenting. WordPress is actually still in the process of that. So like half of their documentation is actually version controlled and edited and reviewed and all of that and half of it is still the community wiki. MDN on the other hand is completely in version control and they end up with really high quality documentation. The downside is it's actually really hard to contribute to the MDN documentation. There's like an entire book that you have to read just to be able to like fix a typo. Which is kind of annoying. Then we talked about it a lot. The session went long and we talked about it like basically through the entire lunch period and then at the end we decided we should pursue this idea of writing a curated manual or guide for Drupal 8. This is something that the documentation working group had been talking about for a while and this was our opportunity to kind of get feedback from the community and at that point a lot of people expressed like yeah this seems like a really great idea. So the idea was to write curated documentation that would replace some key portions but not all of the documentation on Drupal.org. We identified that one good place to start would be with sort of a site building user guide. People's first, a lot of people's first introduction to Drupal is through the documentation on Drupal.org. So if we were able to provide this really awesome experience with the first set of documentation that people read, hopefully we can get more people loving Drupal and involved in our community. And we decided to do this by creating a new project, much like you would a module and writing the documentation as a book of sorts. But instead of just an individual writing the book we're trying to write it with the whole community. We initially were going to we put together a whole proposal for what this book might look like and how it would get written and we thought about ways that we could seek grant funding in order to employ someone to like basically pay someone to write the book. But then we got so much interest from the community in helping out that we decided well we'll give this a try and see if we can write this together as a community which in the end probably ends up being a better thing because ideally something like this becomes maintained by the community and not by an individual. So if we create processes that allow us to write it as a community, hopefully better. The guide is currently it's being written in a format, a text format called ASCII doc. It's kind of, it's like Markdown or Textile or any of those text formats that are ultimately parsed into HTML or some other format. It's divided up into a whole bunch of different sections and then tasks and concepts within that. One of the things that we did was we had a core group of people sit down and identify what would an awesome outline for a user guide for Drupal look like. This helped deal with some of that organizational hierarchy problem where instead of having like anyone can add a page anywhere we actually sat down and wrote an outline and said this is exactly what this book is gonna contain and this is the order that it's going to contain those things and hopefully it makes it easier to read through and for people to follow. It's all being written in text, text files that are version controlled with Git and this has a lot of benefits because it means much like code that's submitted to core or any project we have the ability to have content that people write for the guide be reviewed before it gets added to the guide. And all of the reviews and updates happen in an issue queue which means we've got a great place to discuss the work that's being done. And it's going okay, we're making progress. We've divided this up into three phases. We decided let's have an initial writing phase where we try to just like get something on the page and write each of these sections and then we're gonna come back and do two passes at editing it. One of them will be a pass where we basically confirm that the instructions that were written actually work. So like read the guide and follow the steps that were outlined in the guide and then there'll be a phase where someone goes through and probably just one or two people go through and edit the entire manual for voice so that it sounds and reads as if it's all written by an individual rather than what we end up with right now is there's quite a bit of disparity between the way that different people write and it can be really jarring when you go from one page to the next and it just sounds like it's a completely different person that's written, well it is a completely different person and it sounds like it, it makes it hard to follow. We've been tracking progress, we've got this spreadsheet that we use as a way to, we've identified what each of the things are in that in the outline we've written a few notes about what this section should cover and then we've been working with people who are interested in writing sections to say, what are you interested in, what do you wanna write about? Once you've found a section, we'll assign that to you and then we've got various different statuses and but I pulled this up because I was just looking at it the other day and at this point we're looking at roughly about 40% of the outline that we identified at DrupalCon LA has been, has had someone take an initial pass at writing the content for it. There are more of them that have someone has claimed that they're going to but in a lot of cases what happens is someone says, yeah I'm gonna write it and then we never hear from them again. We have some policies like for example, we say we'll give you two weeks and if we haven't heard from you in two weeks we're gonna unassign it and we'll let somebody else choose that task and that's been working pretty well. We've got a lot of really good guidelines and templates in place so we have a whole section on if you're writing about such and such in the Drupal user interface and you wanna identify a string in the interface this is the formatting that we use for identifying strings. If you're gonna take a screenshot this is how we take screenshots and this is how we annotate our screenshots so that if we need to update them in the future it's easy to do so. Having this content be in version control and having those types of templates and guidelines will hopefully make it easier for the content to ultimately be translated as well. Once the text is all written and we've edited it for voice just like with Drupal Core and the user interface strings for example once we say this is what the copy's gonna be we have the ability to allow people that are interested to translate it and be pretty assured that it's not going to just change out from under them at any moment. That's also part of why we have these guidelines for how to deal with images and such is that we'll need to be able to take screenshots of the Drupal interface in different languages when we translate the guide to different languages. But it's coming along well. This is an example of a page from the guide right now. Kind of things that are neat about it and I think are gonna be really helpful. We've got templates for what each page should look like and the information that it should contain. We've identified that generally there are two types of things that we're documenting we're either documenting a concept which is like what is a region or what is a theme or what is an entity or we're documenting a task that's like how do I add a region to my theme or how do I create a new node type. So we've got templates for if you're writing documentation about a concept what that should look like and if you're writing documentation about a task what that should look like. We've also created a hypothetical story that the documentation will tell so that the whole guide will be written as if it's you're building you're all working towards the same end result rather than what you end up with right now as you've got all these different pages on Drupal.org then there's really no cohesive thread through the documentation which can make it hard to follow. So our story is these sort of guiding principles that's really rough it's basically we're building a website for a farmer's market and we're using that as a way to identify sort of certain components within it like when we talk about creating content types there are content types that we can relate back to this idea that we're building a farmer's market website when we talk about creating roles and who the users of our site are gonna be we can relate those back as well and it helps create a mental model for anybody that's reading it that they can reference. And there's been a lot of people that have helped out with it which is super, super exciting and mostly I just wanted to say thanks for everyone that's been helping with the documentation in creating this user guide and that's been great. One of the things that this is kind of a side effect of this user guide and the process that we had to go through in order to write this text and have it be on Drupal.org it has to comply with Drupal's licensing and in order to do that it has to be Creative Commons license and in order to be Creative Commons license you have to write attributions for everybody that contributed anything to the documentation which is both a pain in the butt and really awesome because we can do things like this where we say so and so John McDonald contributed to writing the concepts and regions in the theme section as did Michelle, I'm gonna butcher this and she works at Erd Fish similar to the way that we've worked on tools that allow code contributions to Drupal to be attributed to users so individuals and or organizations we can start to do that with documentation as well which I hope will compel people to be more active and contribute. We got a lot of work to do though to finish this up. We're making progress. The nice thing about the guide in compared to the other changes that we talked about but the changes to Drupal.org are primarily going to be the work of the Drupal Association. There are times where there is an opportunity for people in the community to help out but usually the actual bulk of the work the heavy lifting is done by people that work at the Drupal Association because they have the ability to make those changes. Yeah, but you can totally come to the sprints. We're gonna talk about that in a second, see? But things like the guide are a little bit especially if you are new to Drupal are a little bit easier to help get started with so anyone can help. As a process of writing this one of the things that we've discovered is that and this is kind of true of documentation in general though writing documentation is a task that seems to be really conducive to sprints or user group meetings or that kind of stuff. When we've worked on the guide we'll get these like surges of activity where we'll have a sprint and a whole bunch of people will help participate and a whole bunch of people will assign themselves a task and work on it for a while and then it tapers off afterwards and then if it's been a month or two since we've had a more focused sprint there's not a lot of activity. I suppose probably similar for Drupal core projects the same thing happens when there's a sprint there's a lot of additional activity. One of the things that I've noticed though is that because we're using the issue queue to write this documentation as somebody comes to a sprint and they start contributing to a topic and we assign that topic to them and now next week I can just go leave a comment on that topic that's like, hey, how's this coming along? And the person's like, oh, that's right I was helping out with the documentation and they actually come back and help finish it rather than like what happens with documentation sprints now a lot of times as people show up and we work on editing wiki pages on Drupal.org and it's great and they maybe make some progress and then they just disappear but there's no easy way for me to just kind of give them a friendly push in a week or two and be like, hey, remember that thing you said you were gonna help with? It'd be great if you finished it and if you don't, that's okay. So that's a benefit of this and I think that I think we'll also see as a benefit of, for example, the transition of using things like comments to discuss the documentation rather than as part of the documentation is that if you could follow a page in the documentation and be notified when someone left a new comment it's a similar effect. Like, hey, it looks like you did a lot of work on this. Did you know that this system changed? It would be great if the documentation was updated or whatever the case is. So one of the big challenges that we have left with this is obviously writing it all but then there's also the aspect of once it's written how does that content become part of the Drupal.org system? How does somebody, it's again, it's basically the discoverability. Once the guide is written how does somebody get to it and find it? There's some ideas about how to do that and we've been working on it but I think that'll be one of the trickier bits of it to solve. If you wanna help out with any of these projects and are gonna be at the sprints on Friday there's a couple of ways that you can contribute. We'll have a table where we'll be working on just documentation in general and the user guide. I will be there along with a couple other members of the documentation working group. We've got tons of different issues that we could work on kind of depending on what anyone is interested in. There is like Neil mentioned if you wanna help out with changes to the infrastructure and sort of makeup of Drupal.org related to what was talked about at the beginning of the presentation with switching to groups and using comments in different ways and all of that type of work. Seek out this handsome man. And then as part of that process as well this whole idea of like we'd like to provide more information architecture and structure to our existing documentation means that we're actually gonna have to identify what all of those sections are and then move all of the existing documentation into those sections which is kind of a daunting task. We're looking at probably about 12,000 pages on just a handbook on Drupal.org that in some form or another will need to be audited and determine should this be part of the theming documentation or part of the flag module documentation. So Tatiana will be working on that at the sprint and she promises it'll be fun for some definition of fun. Otherwise working on any of these things beyond the sprint on Friday, if you there's a the documentation issue queue or the groups.drupal.org slash documentation group are great ways to get a hold of myself or anyone else that's actively working on these things. That's what I got. So that's the end of the session. If you wanna leave feedback you can do so by going to the node on the events.drupal.org site and that's it. And I'm happy to answer questions if anybody has questions or wants to talk more about what's going on with these things. Ta-da. Surprise question. Joe, great job as always. Thank you. Awesome work on structuring everything. I love the basic concept behind the user guide and how it's working. I had a question though as I've been kind of piecing through the code. And for those of you who don't know me I'm Josh Mitchell and the CTO at the Drupal Association so we get to implement the code. Whenever I say there are challenging things that someone has to figure out. He's one of the guys that has to figure out how to be great to ask a question in this forum. AsciiDoc, how is that working in terms of is that helping, hindering? How do you feel about that particular format? Sure. So the question is we're using AsciiDoc as the format to write all of the text for the user guide and how's that process going and do we like it and such. I would say that we use a very limited subset of the things that AsciiDoc can do currently. From that perspective it's been, it works great for me. Like I have no problem figuring out the syntax. It's not all that, it's different than Markdown but it's not anymore or less challenging from my perspective. I do find that like, I've been using Markdown for years and so I have all the basics that I use regularly, memorized with the AsciiDoc. I definitely need to look things up from time to time. I specifically end up looking up the syntax for how do you link one document to another. It has some features that we definitely make use of. Like that for example, the ability to link from one document to another. So AsciiDoc would let me say using a special syntax, link to this other file. That file based on its syntax has an obvious title at the top. So it's generally like the first line and it has a hash symbol in front of it. I'm like this is the title of this document and the document has an ID which is usually the name of the document as well. So I can create a link in one document to another by identifying it by name and what it'll do is it'll actually grab the title out of the linked document and pull it into where I've inserted it into some other documentation. That for example has been really great because I don't have to change the title in one place which is a feature that, I suppose lots of other, so there's AsciiDoc and there's restructured text and there's Markdown and there's a bunch of formats for writing documentation. Yeah, it seems like it works as well as any of the others. I don't know that we're necessarily tied to it. It was the decision to use it stems largely from the fact that Jennifer Hodgson who has been doing a lot of work with this had the most familiarity with that of all the other things that we had looked at. O'Reilly uses AsciiDoc for people who are writing books for O'Reilly and so that was an easy one for us to get started with. It has some benefits like for example once the guide is written you can compile it as HTML but you could also compile it as EPUB or a PDF so we could distribute the documentation in other formats which is kind of one of those like well that's appealing. I guess we'll see if we ever actually use that but does that answer your question? Totally answers the question and then the last thing I would ask are what do you see as the key features for actually implementing that that we're missing right now on Drupal.org? I think the, so the question is what's the key thing that's missing for getting this integrated into Drupal.org? I think the biggest thing is gonna be there's two parts of it, there's the discoverability so how do we get it on Drupal.org in some form that people can locate it so it doesn't just end up as its own separate site that no one ever knows exists and can't get to. So I think there's that and then I think there's the how do we essentially deprecate pages in the Wiki that are now made irrelevant because of the fact that they've been rewritten and incorporated into the guide so getting those two to live well together I think is gonna be quite challenging. Ta-da. Hey great session and I apologize if this was already covered because I came in a little bit after you started. Is there a certain discussion around voice or tone or a persona of how the whole thing will come together because it seems like in other communities that have documentation sometimes there's been a community friction around pronouns or the audience. So have we covered that as a community already? Yes and no. Some parts of that I would say we have and some we haven't. For example, the use of specific pronouns and such isn't something that we have discussed well at this point. Audience on the other hand is something that we have talked about quite a bit at least with regards to the user guide. It's audience for Drupal.org documentation gets a lot tougher. And there is documentation in the documentation. From the audience perspective there's the personas that were developed for informing development of Drupal.org and what we've done is identified, I think we identified the, I can't even remember off the top of my head, but we identified one set of that persona as being this is our target audience. We'd like to write in a way that they will understand and be able to read and have make sense to them. And we use that as guidelines for being able to say, for example, this definition is too technical or it assumes too much knowledge about the inner workings of Drupal. Can you change that? Or conversely like we can assume at this point that you don't need to explain what Drupal is because they already know what that is or they already know what a node is. There is, yeah, does that help? Yeah, so there's, and then in the user guide project there's some written documentation about the audience and the sort of guiding scenario of essentially the story that the guide tells so that we're all kind of referencing that whenever we're trying to create, figure out what content type we're creating or what roles we're creating and why. In terms of the voice, we haven't really figured that part out yet. And that's a discussion that definitely needs to happen. Like ultimately when we go through and edit this whole thing for a consistent voice, what do we want that voice to be? So far we've been aiming for like short, concise, say it in as few words as possible, get the point across and we'll come back and edit it later and probably do it in a friendly way, but yeah. Thank you. You're welcome. Nice work, Joe. Thank you, sir. So forgive my rambling, I'm trying to work my way through this, but you mentioned earlier Mozilla Developer Network and WordPress moving to, you didn't explicitly say more of a model like this, but that was the implication I was kind of getting that it's in version control and the process of contributing is managed in some way. You also mentioned that for Mozilla Developer Network, it's very onerous to do things like fix a typo. This doesn't sound too dissimilar to me from some of the concerns we have on the contrib side of being able to fix typos, for instance, in documentation within modules. And there's a lot of talk about building and improving the tools on Drupal.org to help with that process and make it easier. If that can be done, can you imagine a future where, or do you think that, assuming we can solve those process and technical problems where this is a better way to manage all of the documentation and those 12,000 wiki pages that are the Wild West, sort of, I know this is a long term vision, but that it would be better for them to live in this type of model? Yeah, so kind of two answers to that. Do I have any idea how to do that? No. Do I think it would be awesome if we did that? Yes. I think that part of what this user guide specifically becomes is an experiment. It's our way of testing this theory out that by writing documentation as a project in version control or similar, we help resolve a lot of those things that we've identified as being pain points, like, for example, editorial oversight and review, the ability for someone to suggest changes and ensure that they're changed and kind of all of that. As well as using it as a way for us to have better tools for identifying contributors and such. But it's also, we kind of consciously made the decision to pick just one subsection of the documentation and start with that as a test, rather than commit to saying like, we're gonna rewrite all 12,000 pages on Drupal.org. I'm hopeful that the things that we learn from doing this experiment, whether it's this exact set of tools or not, will help us make informed decisions about how to improve the tools that we're using. And not just be going and making changes to Drupal.org and the tools, assuming that this is a good change, but we actually will have a way of saying, we tried this and it worked or we tried this and it didn't work. I don't know that we would ever get to a place where like, for example, all of our documentation is in Git or that all of it is in a wiki. And I don't know that that's, I don't even know that having it all be in version control is necessarily a good thing because having a more wiki, the free form style allows for a bit more drive by editing, documentation for things that aren't necessarily super important to the entire community, but are nice, helpful notes for me and you for the thing that we were working on together. And I'd like us to continue to have a place for that kind of documentation to live. But I also think that taking the pieces of our documentation that are critical to Drupal's success and putting those into a more rigorous system is an important step for us to make. I think it's interesting that and obviously there are good reasons for this, but we have a model for how we contribute and edit code and we have such a very different model for how we contribute and edit documentation. And it's almost as if, and there might be great merit in this, just think that like, well, any documentation is better than no documentation. But it does present problems where you've got completely eight different pages about similar topics and some are correct and some used to be correct and et cetera, et cetera. So very interesting stuff. I would, as a comparison to and you kind of, I had mentioned that I've previously looked into how other projects are doing this and WordPress specifically, WordPress has their codecs, which is the equivalent of Drupal.org's handbook and the codecs is essentially like a community wiki. They're now switching to, I don't remember offhand what they call it, but basically the WordPress book, which is also community edited and created, but it's kind of like, this is the section that is the like, if you're new to WordPress and you just want the like, I can read this in an hour and be like, know what terms I need to know and make a decision about whether or not WordPress is the right tool, start with the book and it's really well written and it's a great introduction. And then there's the codecs or the wiki, which allows for documentation of all of the sort of more disparate things that are good to document, but aren't necessarily relevant to 95% of people. So that's the model that they've gone to and I think for similar reasons that we're talking about too, in order to basically ensure that people's first experience of the documentation and that the information they get in that first experience is good and correct. Responding to your question about style guides, we do have a Drupal.org content style guide. It's probably a bit stale and probably, well definitely under advertised. And actually like we don't have, because of the fact that like you have no idea when somebody edited a page, we don't have a great way of enforcing the style guide either. So even though we have it and we can say, you're supposed to conform to writing in this way, the only way that that ever happens is if somebody else who came across the page randomly had also read the style guide and said, oh yeah, this doesn't conform. Yeah, so yeah, it covers things like be concise instead of rambling and use American English instead of British English. A British person wrote that style guide. I like you, just clarifying, wasn't me? I didn't, in my two seconds of looking at it, I didn't see anything on pronouns. We probably would defer to something in Drupal Core's help text guidelines if that exists. We right now have content strategist slash manager at Drupal Station and one of his two items is to update the style guide. So he started working on draft and he's really serious about pronouns. So there will be suggestions about that. That's awesome. Cool. Thanks for coming. That's all I got. It's lunchtime now. Thank you.


Good morning, everyone out there. Nick Lund here, outreach and network manager from Maine Audubon. Welcome to morning two, two of two for the second annual 2020 rangerly birding festival. That's a lot of twos today. It's the second morning of two for the 2020 rangerly birding festival, the second ever. We're so glad to have you back or to have you join us for the first sign if this is the first morning. I want to thank again yesterday's excellent presentations from Bill Kitchcock's and Pete McKinley and from Kevin Sinnet and the Loon Cruise crew who put together thanks to Maine Mountain Media an incredible virtual Loon Cruise that was really great. So thanks to those and for those who didn't hear me just a minute ago we are working on posting those online as well as the content today so folks can watch it again and again if they want to or if they weren't able to join watch it for the first time. So thank you. So again this is the rangerly birding festival. We had hoped to do the second annual festival in person obviously but the world conspired against us. So thank you for joining with us as we pivot to this virtual festival which I think has been a lot of fun but of course I have to say it's no substitute for the real thing. So I hope everyone out there who is inspired by these talks and who wants to visit the ranger area and see all these birds in person please stay tuned for information about the actual third annual rangerly birding festival this time sometime next year because we love to see all your faces and actually go bird together in person. So so stay tuned there. Let's just cover and quick recap of the morning the agenda for Thursday the fourth is out the window we did that already. Today this morning on the Friday the fifth in a few minutes I'm going to get started on a presentation called State of the Birds which talks about the reasons why various bird populations in Maine have fluctuated over the years. At 10 a.m. photographer Nick Ledley from touchthewildphotos.com and who has a storefront there and rangerly expert wildlife photographer is going to come on and give a presentation about wildlife photography 101 which is great. And then following that at 11 a.m. is our keynote speech from professor Brian Olson of the University of Maine. He's a very entertaining smart fun guy and he's going to be doing a presentation about lumps and splits species and field guides. It's going to be really fun. So stay tuned all morning you can come in and out as you need to and this is like I said being recorded so there'll be opportunities to catch up later. So that's a schedule and I'm going to turn it over to David Miller from Ranger Lakes Heritage Trust to thank some folks. Thanks so much Nick. First of all what a great day yesterday inspirational and it was amazing to begin to understand more deeply the incredible biodiversity and birds we have in Maine's western mountains. So I want to join Nick with inviting all of you to come come up in person and experience rangerly in the region for yourself. I'd like to just take a minute to thank first my colleagues in Maine Audubon. This would not be the way it is without them so thank you so much to Nick, Doug, Laura and the whole organization. We have support from the Maine Office of Tourism for this year and probably next year's festival as well as a Betterment Fund. I want to thank them and all of our partners that we work with through the year to make rangerly a birding destination. And let me just take a few seconds to kind of back up now and set some context set the stage for today. So both Ranger Lakes Heritage Trust, my organization and Maine Audubon are conservation organizations and we would not have the bird life, the wildlife we have without the many years of efforts by the part of hundreds of thousands, millions of people to conserve the beautiful nation and world country we have. And I want to encourage all of us to continue supporting both your local land trust who conserves land right near you and your local Maine Audubon chapter. Without this kind of work going on in perpetuity we risk losing what we love more than anything. I spent just a couple minutes this morning looking into the derivation of the word conserve which I often do. And it is interesting. Usually it comes down to from Latin originally to save to preserve together to work together to preserve something. But if you go deeper into the roots the the serve that from sir which is the Indo-European the original if there's a coming straight from some of the original human languages it means to keep watch. And it is interesting to think about bird watching. Certainly we're out there birding bird watching looking at birds. We're actually also keeping watch over something that we love so much. And the reason we love it is we're part of it. And in reality we share the same cellulose the same cells that all these living creatures we see around us have. So it's not something separate from us. We're protecting ourselves when we protect the natural world and we are we share the same fate. So thank you again for all of your work. I know many of you probably all of you work hard to take care of the wonderful world we have the natural world. Thank you for that. And yes please look to support your local conservation groups land trust your local main at Ottoman chapter and looking forward to a great morning. So thank you very much and Nick back to you. Okay thank you David. Let's get going shall we nine oh man nine I gotta go. So hopefully I'm going to go through this presentation quickly. We'll leave some time for questions and then and then we'll rock and roll. State of the birds decades of change. This is a presentation originally developed by my much smarter and handsomer colleague Doug Hitchcox. I sort of adapted it to my own ends. So I want to thank him for putting together a lot of the ideas at the beginning and a lot of the photos probably too. So what are we talking about today? Well I got to do this quickly first. This is a I'm contractually obligated to say tell you that main Audubon is the largest and oldest wildlife conservation in the state of Maine. We've been around since 1843 if you can believe that. We've got 10,000 members around the state 2000 volunteers. We got seven chapters. The closest to range Lee is the western western Maine chapter based out of Farmington. Eight wildlife sanctuaries including Boarstone Mountain up in the range Lee area. We connect people to wildlife is what we do in Maine. So we have robust education programs. We teach thousands of kids about nature and wildlife. We have conservation programs. We have scientists out on the ground monitoring populations of animals and then advocacy program to bring what we found from our scientists to Augusta to try to tell those people the right way to protect me. So if you're not part of our world already please join us. Decades of change. Okay so this presentation we're talking about bird populations in Maine and why they fluctuated for various reasons over the years. There are quite a few reasons. Some are mysterious. Some are natural variations in populations and many of them are have changed because of human one way or another. So we're going to talk about some of the varieties and some of the reasons that some bird populations are changing today. But we should start with by talking about what's a range right? Why do birds have different ranges? Will birds have different ranges because they like different things. They have different habitats. They eat different things and so over the years birds have developed different areas to live based on those needs. We'll use here two similar species. These are two warblers. On the left is the yellow warbler and the yellow romped warbler on the right. They're both you know pretty closely related in the scheme of things but they've because of you know slight divergences in their habitat preferences and their food they've developed very different ranges as you can see from the maps up above. So just so we are clear the red is their summer habitat for these birds. The yellow is sort of migratory transition habitat. The blue is where they spend their winters and as you can see for example the yellow romped warbler they their blue area is much higher far further north than the yellow warbler. The yellow warbler can spend has learned to be able to tolerate colder temperatures, learn to eat some fruit and so consequently has been able to spend some some time of their winter in areas where there aren't a lot of insects to eat. The yellow warbler on the other hand just eats insects and so it can't spend any time in a place where there aren't insects and so in the winter it needs to get somewhere warm where there's bugs to eat. In the summer they can come north and so ranges change based on the species. It's not just these warblers but here's a range of another lovely bird common loon. Common loon they have evolved to nest on freshwater lakes. The trouble with a freshwater lake and I should say this map is sort of the inverse of the last one. The blue is the summer habitat and the red is the winter habitat. I didn't make these maps but that is kind of confusing. So in the winter they are out on the ocean and in the summer they're inland. You know the trouble lakes are a great place to nest they're calm there's lots of fish there but the trouble is you can't spend the winter on the lake if you're a bird because it's frozen solid right so loons have evolved to find open water in the winter and that means the ocean for them. So that's what ranges mean. Let's talk about a couple ranges that have that change flexually or bird populations that have changed naturally sorry. So first of all we should say that lots of birds ranges have changed in the past 18,000 years because 18,000 years ago Maine was covered entirely by ice. I don't know what was there before maybe some some penguins I don't know but there certainly wasn't much and so as the ice has receded from the previous ice age in the past 18,000 years almost all bird species have moved up and changed their range to to become into Maine in that time. So here's one of them. This is a beautiful bird one that you could possibly see it range the sort of an elusive denizen of the northern forest this is an eastern northern sorry evening gross speak I've had one cup of coffee which is not enough an evening gross speak very beautiful finch bird with a big bill that can crush seeds and just beautiful colors. This is a bird that as you'll see sort of disappeared recently so this is a sightings map for evening gross speak in Maine starting on the left at 1960 and you can see that sightings sort of burst up in the 70s and 80s people were seeing these birds much more frequently and then early 90s their populations crashed absolutely crashed and it was a real mystery what was going on people didn't know what the reason was for the sudden decline in this beautiful bird and there were sort of some some of the similar species facing a similar declines that up on the top left is a female evening gross speak on the top right is a bay breasted warbler down here is a Cape May warbler on the left and then a Tennessee warbler in the flowers each of these birds was experiencing declines and people didn't really know why. So here until they discovered a link between this insect and those birds so like I said sort of with the yellow warbler birds eat insects a lot of these birds especially migratory birds eat insects and need insects to feed their babies insects are a major part of this the summer diet of almost all birds because their caterpillars especially are so filled with protein that they're great for raising baby birds and so insects are really important to lots of birds and scientists were beginning to understand that this insect called the spruce budworm was a major diet major important source of food for evening gross speaks and some of those migratory warblers Easter spruce budworm is considered a pest like certain other insects they have these cyclical patterns where they sort of have big outbreaks in the forest every 30 or so years and they can be fairly devastating to a spruce forest they they devour leaves and they can kill a lot of timber but they are extremely important to spruce budworms as we're learning and outbreaks of these insects track very closely with the population heights of these native birds so right here we can see a population map over just the past between 14 and 18 of Bay breasted warbler one of those warblers I showed you before and so what we are seeing now is sort of an emerging outbreak over the past couple years of spruce budworms and so the question is to sort of prove the link between the two will the populations of the birds rise along with the populations of the budworms and the answer is a resounding yes so you can see here the purple line is the most recent you can see it gets higher and higher and higher over recent years as they are recovering as more insects run the landscape this is a similar chart for Tennessee warbler you can see it similarly peaks high and for Kate May warbler again the purple is at the top so that was sort of a natural mystery going on and what we determined is that certain populations of these birds even grow speaks and some of these migratory warblers naturally fluctuate along with populations of their favorite food source these spruce budworms and so this is important discoveries for for management like I said spruce budworms are considered a large pest of the timber industry this is a airplane in the 60s spraying DDT down to try to kill spruce budworms so the more we know about the benefits of spruce budworm the more we can plan for them and work improve our management of the insects and our management of the northern northern forest to also protect birds so that's sort of a natural fluctuation that we've discovered another natural fluctuation this is sort of cheating is this very cool bird the cattle egret you can see down in the in the lower left that funky breeding plumage they had with this cool little colored mohawk cattle egret is a primarily a old world bird they live between europe and africa and for the longest time they didn't live in the united states at all then live in in north or south america but in the early 30s as birds are want to do occasionally a group of cattle egrets made it over the atlantic and landed in south america they just showed up one day this happens from time to time but in previous years whenever this would happen these cattle egrets didn't fare well or we don't know what happens then they they follow large herds of animals so in africa they'll they'll follow you know buffalo and and elephants and things like that when they showed up in the 30s in south america they suddenly found some big animals around they found cattle and so these cattle egret which naturally made the jump across the ocean suddenly had some suddenly felt sort of at home and since then cattle egrets have spread all over north and south america it's pretty incredible so you can see here the sort of jumps that they've made over time from 1937 they spread down into chile in south america by the 70s and then up into north america in the 60s and 70s and even there's recently the 2000s they're still very rare in main it's rare to get cattle egrets but down south they're much more common and this is sort of part of their natural range expansion facilitated by humans but still still natural so good for them so that's sort of it for the natural changes birds range is naturally we're we're honed over thousands of years and so don't change very much on their own but humans have come along and and thrown many wrenches in the system and because of our influence lots of birds ranges have changed so we're going to talk for the rest of the presentation about things that we have done to facilitate range expansion or contraction from different birds the first way that we've put our influence our thumb on the scale is by changing land use or removing habitat for certain birds like this guy one of the most beautiful birds out there this is an american kestrel beautiful little falcon not very big you know just a but a terror if you're a dragonfly or a grasshopper you do not want to see this bad boy coming at you a beautiful bird another species this is a tree swallow a beautiful aerial insectivore sort of spend their whole life on the wing not their whole life on the wing but they fly around and in patterns like that picking off aerial insects really beautiful birds and this one too this very cool blackbird called a bobble link the beautiful little yellow cat back there and a crazy song and display what all these birds have in common they are grasslands specialists right so these birds all are right at home on the grasslands and the thing about grasslands is they're not doing great in the state of Maine here are some population maps in Maine of the american kestrel you can see that they've been declining since the 70s pretty strongly that routes chart at the bottom is just to show you that the data is steady here there where it's just a sort of a control for the data that population is is steadily declining the way that a lot of bird conservationists keep track of bird populations is through these breeding bird atlases which is a comprehensive survey of breeding birds in any state Maine's breeding bird atlas is underway right now kudos to my friend Doug Hitchcox who is leading the charge from main autobahn's end for the main breeding bird atlas in conjunction with the state of Maine and other organizations ours is almost done and so we can't sort of share the data we don't have the data done yet but massachusetts recently finished theirs and so we can infer from massachusetts it's how main birds may be doing so this is the the american kestrel change map for from the massachusetts breeding bird survey the red triangle means that there was a decrease in population and you can see it's nothing but red triangles down here so this is just to show you that in a state sort of similar to Maine kestrels are also not doing very well at all similarly those other species the tree swallow and the bobble link are facing shark declines why is that because we sort of changed their habitat right there aren't nearly as many grasslands or open meadows as there used to be this is a map of farmland in the state of Maine since 1850 and you can see here that the percentage of the state in farmland used to be much much higher than it was now so farmland and grassland were great habitats for some of these birds in the 1880s about 30 percent of the entire state of Maine was farmland which is which is think about what that would mean for the landscape that's a lot of land now it's down just over five percent and so all of those all of that could have been habitat but there's good news through the efforts of main Audubon and many others we have worked to protect piping clover nests on beaches throughout the state and we're we're doing a great job kicking some butt this here is a map of piping clover nests in in blue and fledgling birds and young baby birds in red that oops over the years and you can see that from a low in the early 80s we are up over you know as of 2015 60 nests with more than 120 birds fledged this chart is way out of date we're up nearing 100 nests now on Maine's beaches after a couple record years that article blows from last year where we have record numbers of nesting piping clover nests and you know the early word is that it's another fantastic year in Maine for these birds another beach nesting bird is the least turn a very adorable little turn turns of these agile little seabirds likewise they're doing much better in the state of Maine thanks for our efforts so the lesson here is that we if we want to change our land use habits and be more aware of what we're doing the bird will bounce back another bird you may be surprised that has changed because of land use is this gorgeous little guy here this is of course a northern cardinal northern cardinals used to be very rare in Maine did you know that in the 60s and earlier there are almost no cardinals it was a big deal when you saw a card but as you can see from this chart their their numbers have exploded in Maine of course you see them everywhere now why is that it's largely due to our changing land use as humans have come up and put houses up and then planted a lot of things that are that cardinals love especially like bushes and low berry producing bushes cardinals have moved into that habitat so that's why they're so common around people and in our backyards because they love sort of the low bushes and the shrubs that we've planted for them that otherwise weren't here eastern bluebirds are another one even more recently than cardinals you can see here just even in the early 2000s bluebirds in the winter this is in the Christmas bird count were very rare but their numbers have gone up this is due again to bluebirds being able to eat berries in the winter and as humans are planting more plants that have food sources for them throughout the year they aren't they are migrating less frequently you know migrating is dangerous and it takes time and it's you know if they're like me it's pretty lazy so that if there's food then they'll just stick around so bluebirds are a recipient of that what you what you can do to help land use change as well there's a lot of things there's movements to let your lawns grow up if you can to keep some better habitat really the best thing you can do is plant native plants so I touched on it a little bit earlier but native insects are critical to the survival of birds birds eat insects and they need caterpillars to survive and a lot of caterpillars don't survive on trees that haven't been here for a very long time a lot of insects have very close relationships with specific species of plants trees and so you need those trees if you want to have the caterpillars to feed the baby birds and so what you get to do is plant native plants main autobahn just launched our awesome native plant finder at mainnativeplants.org and we have a plant sale native plant sale coming up in a few weeks all going to be online this year you'll pick them up in person but all your ordering is online stay tuned for that it's a fantastic way to make your garden look beautiful and to support native insects and native plants so check it out all right the second way that we have changed bird populations over the years is through direct interaction here's a culprit of that this what a handsome devil this is of course a wild turkey you all know that wild turkeys were extinct in Maine extirpated from Maine in the early you know 100 years ago this is through direct interaction of hunting so there was some you know loss of their habitat but a lot of just unregulated hunting led the wild turkey to be not found in Maine at all 100 years ago here is a map on the left I mentioned earlier before we were so rudely interrupted about bird atlases this is on the left the image from the previous bird atlas from the early 80s you can see that the the black dots there are the presence of wild turkeys you can see there are only a few of them and these were reintroduced birds mostly from the Adirondacks in midcoast and southern Maine but they were not widespread this was just 30 40 years ago the other the map on the right is the blue dots are wild turkey sightings recently you can see look everywhere they are coming back in large numbers they are supposed to be here they are native here and we changed our direct interaction changed our hunting practices and they have returned to where they should be actually you can see here from the Massachusetts atlas wild turkey is the number one species that has changed the most in a positive way they have grown the most more than any other species in Massachusetts and we suspect that the map will look similar to me here's another one cheers for this guy drink your coffee for this one bald eagle of course you know that bald eagles were in a terrible state in the 50s and 60s the the insecticide pesticide DDT caused their eggs to become very fragile and riddle and when the birds would actually sit on the eggs they would crack and break and babies would die so there were very few eagles in the state of Maine and around the country in the middle part of the century but they have bounced back we had banned DDT of course and the birds responded here's a map of eagles in Maine starting 1945 and then ending 2013 and you can see a market increase there there are almost no eagles in Maine you know in the 40s and 50s and now they're much more common to see if you make the effort another one is loons common loons the direct interaction there is fishing right so loons don't have teeth they swallow their food whole they need to chew it up and so what they do is they have a thing called a gizzard they swallow stones and put them in their gizzard and then when their food comes in they crush up the food with their stones in their stomach and that's how they sort of chew and so that's how a lot of you know birds do it a lot of diving birds the trouble is that when humans drop their fishing tackle off their off their lures it mixes with the stones at the bottom of the seabed so here's a picture of a typical seabed filled with stones this is where a loon might go to get some stones for its gizzard and you can see here huh looks pretty normal to me the yellow is a lead tackle at a sum to the bottom that has that is blended in with the ground so you can see here it's almost impossible to tell in this clear you know picture without any water and sediment in the way where the lead tackle is if you're a loon there's no way you don't even know what lead is and so this is how loons ingest lead from our fishing lines into their bodies and lead kills them just like a human ingesting lead so I'll show you again how hard that is this is why lead tackle is such a problem loons are have lots of problems climate change water quality people getting too close to boats in their boats frankly but it's another success story when we work to educate ourselves about the issues facing loons and to past laws banning bare lead tackle the population of loon bounces back so this is a slide from our loon count program that shows that the population of loons in southern Maine has about doubled since the early ages so um direction interaction when you can recognize it and stop it it it helps here's a fun one these are house finches you guys probably all seen these maybe at your backyard bird feeders here in Maine they're not native to Maine did you know that they are they are a sort of a recent development the story with with house finches is they were a popular cage bird captured from their native ranges out in the southwest and sold out east as hollywood finches this they gave them a sexy new name hollywood finches um when there was a crackdown on um on captured birds it's illegal in the us to capture native birds and sell them um pet stores just sort of release them into the air um especially in new york city there's big release and because of that in the 40s or so um house finches took off they sort of established themselves all across the east and so you can see here now the current range map for house finches has this interesting east west split where there are you know this made this introduced population out east and is the native population out west and they're sort of merging in the middle a similar story for this bird you're raising collared dove um they were released the story is from a pet store in the in southern florida from a hurricane and a bunch of them escaped and they sort of populated the country so this was in the early 80s and i want to cycle through some slides here to show you how they've expanded just since the early 80s so you can see here the the purple squares are the presence of these birds look in southern florida and watch how they have changed um so this is 93 96 99 2002 they're spreading 2005 2008 2011 and then present day they've conquered the country um you notice that they're not really in main though for whatever reason they spread up through alaska but not really come come east but they're coming um this is the state's first record of raising collared up in main this is in falmouth in 2013 right doug um this is my friend doug's picture obviously he was there to see the first dove i was not but they're coming to main um as are these birds and vultures um we have there's two species of vultures common in the us on the left is our familiar turkey vulture um with the the silver behind the wings there uh the lower burn in this picture is another species the black vulture you can say they have thicker wings and they have silver on the tips of the on the sort of their hands rather than the trailing edge black vultures are not common in main but they're coming um here's a range of black vultures um you can see that they're sort of creeping up through the i-95 corridor following you know a dead roadkill on the road and we know they're coming because even the turkey vulture is a is a recent addition to the state of man um it was just 1982 where mainers found the first ever turkey vulture nest in the state near camp and so uh following roadkill on the roads likely turkey vultures came up and now are very commonly seen floating around we expect black vultures to follow what you can do direct interaction there's tons of things to do it depends on the bird don't hunt illegally don't use lead tackle please main autobahn is launching a lead tackle buyback program at certain stores check our website to see how you can get a voucher to buy non-lead tackle it works just as well and protects birds so there's lots of things you can do to help birds in different ways and i'm just cruising for time here so i'm keeping an eye on the clock man made climate change of course how have humans affected bird climate change um uh here's a bird that me is much more common out than used to be this is a red belly woodpecker it's not a well named bird um you can see here underneath the bird's leg that's the red belly of the red belly woodpecker um the red-headed woodpecker is already taken by different species so whatever um but this is a bird that is expanding its range in domain um and we know it's because of climate change no climate change to play in a role um this is what's typically thought of as a real southeastern bird a real sort of uh economized the southeast but it's now it's changing um here's you can see that so um in in red is a number of red belly woodpeckers seen in the winter in main you can see there really weren't any at all starting in 2004 they started jumped up the blue line is new Hampshire they've had a much more steadier increase we're not really sure why there's been this sort of jagged up and down in main but the trend is upward very clearly um and we know it's climate change playing a role because something called Bergman's rule and which says that when there's a population of animal that that goes from north to south from the equator to the poles say um that the larger individuals of that population are always toward the poles and the smaller ones are towards the equator that's a rule that applies to many different species around the world and we're seeing that same thing happen with um with uh red belly woodpeckers so um there never used to be red belly woodpeckers in main in the 50s the ones that were closest were the biggest red belly woodpeckers um now as there are red belly woodpeckers in main those are the largest and the ones that are further further south are smaller so we're seeing that that's a very clear temperature climate radiation there and there's been lots of other species that we know that have moved in uh into main as the climate and the waters have warmed um these are just some headlines that I picked from a quick google search uh the smooth mud crab is here the black sea bass is in our waters carolina wren is another one that we know is moved up so um we are very clearly seeing species that are more at home in warmer temperatures uh warmer waters coming into main um with the changing climate some of the best information recently is from a national autobahn report um called survival by degrees this came out just a few months ago and it really modeled out into the future um how habitats change and so a lot of the modeling a lot of what people are um assuming is going to happen to certain bird populations in main is based on habitat so we know that habitats are tied to certain climates and temperatures um you know where it's very hot and dry there's desert where it's very cold and dry there's tundra uh where it's wet there's rainforest so um the the climate dictates the habitat and the habitat dictates the species so if you can model out different climates um you can model out where the habitat will be in the future and we can see that some some pretty dire predictions for main based on different climate scenarios this is the common loon here there are three scenarios on the left it's the current uh current state you can see that the orange is where loons live now the middle side is with a 1.5 degrees difference of change on the right it's a three degree difference of change red means the birds aren't there anymore so you can see that if we allow the climate to warm within three degrees then the habitat in main just simply isn't habitable for common loons anymore and i'm going i have five minutes left so i'm going to go quickly a similar story for bobble links um uh if we continue things go um uh you know but this has uh there are different factors and sort of angles to this um for example wood thrush is a bird that whose range may increase in the state of main uh with a warming climate you can see that parts of its southern range it'll be pushed out of and it'll move into main as main becomes more southerly and habitable to net and so climate change means lots of different things to different birds um here i encourage you all to go to the national autobahn uh website and check it out um this is their slide overall for main showing which types of birds will increase or decrease um the biggest hit in main is likely to be to be our boreal forest birds which is what a lot of people go to the range the birding festival to see birds like canada j boreal tickety spruce grouse they depend on this deep forest boreal habitat which is sort of most southern in main as our climate warrants that habitat will be pushed out potentially of the state and the birds with it and so um there uh we're we're watching that and working to take action so take some action um thankfully main uh is doing uh really great work on climate change right now governor mills has set up the main climate council um to work with um all kinds of voices in main to develop a climate action plan um to figure out how we can respond to climate change and we're very proud to have uh two uh members of main autobahn on the climate council sally stop along the lives of donahue um and they are uh working hard but we encourage you to help out we really need your voices here because the state needs to know that people are want climate change um to be stopped and want to protect the birds from from uh from the effects we encourage you to come to our website go to main autobahn.org slash advocacy you can sign our petition to the main climate council to advocate for a strong plan um and we encourage you to do so we have lots of other actions on our website um and if you sign up at main autobahn.org slash advocacy for our action alerts so we can keep you posted on all that so sorry for the rush on the second half of the presentation thanks for bearing with me through the craziness of the morning i've got two minutes left um so i'd be happy to take questions if there are already in the chat um and um thank you to dug and everyone moderating um and helping me get through the second half without interruption um so great are there any questions out there um i'm happy to look and Doug asks i can't see the chat room for whatever reason sorry so um we're just slowly getting people entered into the room here with okay hesitation um so in the chat i can see the chat too yeah yeah there was a good question uh richard asking yesterday i saw hundreds of mating horseshoe crabs in middle bay does that suggest more red knots good question um so horseshoe crabs have been here for long as long as anything has been here they've been on the planet for millions of years um and are very common in Maine you traditionally the the most famous breeding areas of them are on the coast of Delaware for example and i uh and are a critical stopping over point for lots of shorebirds including red knots um horseshoe crabs will will come and mate during the full moon lay their eggs in the millions and um in this in the sand uh right there in the on the beach in shallow water and that's just delicious caviar for these um migrating birds as they move northward um that's a good question i don't know if that's if there's going to be an if there's an increase in horseshoe crabs because of warming waters in Maine uh and the and the shorebirds are able to adapt and understand where the new breeding populations of horseshoe crabs are then i would imagine to be increased in certain birds as they stop over north um um i don't know if there's been a sort of scientific following of that so far but that is possible um i know that we do have um our own horseshoe crabs here already um but whether that population is increasing i'm not sure why aren't new chicks increasing at the same rate as adult loons that's a great question one we didn't get to yesterday um uh a lot of that has to do with um ranges and so one thing that's not increasing is the amount of territories going on uh and so um as you know there are only so many birds loons can actually breed on any lake at any given time and so although there's many adults back some of them aren't breeding as much because of the habitat restrictions and so um uh we see uh one thing we're hoping is that as the loon population of Maine um increases some of those birds will expand elsewhere maybe out of Maine to um to uh populate populate different lakes in different places so in a lot especially in southern Maine we're sort of um almost full on the habitats in the lakes we have and so um the underlining messages that loons are doing great and there are more um adults in Maine maybe just not on our lakes thank you for to uh uh Reverend Mary Zachary Lang for protecting the bobbling so it's a they're a fun bird to have so all right we got through it thank you all for joining and getting through the crazy zoom bobbing of the morning that was insane but we are undeterred we are the range of the birding festival and we're not going to let some some uh silly kids ruin our fun


Assalamu alaikum dear learners and welcome in this video which is about Social Entrepreneurs and Social Entrepreneurship, one of my favourite topics. First of all, let's see who Social Entrepreneurs are. A Social Entrepreneur is a person who pursues a novel cause that has the potential to solve community-based problems. These individuals are willing to take on the risk and effort to create positive change in society through their initiative. So, Social Entrepreneurs are basically those entrepreneurs who don't want to do their business for profit. You have a lot of issues. For example, people are not getting a job. There is a problem, i.e. unemployment. Poverty is an issue. The issue of unemployment also relates to poverty. After that, Islam said that you are not getting a job because of a minority. You either want to do your business or God forbid, you have a disability. These are all your issues. They have to be solved. So, why not create a venture that can solve these socio-economic problems? And the one who is solving these problems is a Social Entrepreneur. The primary purpose of the venture is to solve the socio-economic problem. In crux, doing the business is for a social cause. Basically, Social Entrepreneurship caught their roots in a way that they were basically doing NGOs, i.e. non-governmental organizations. You must have seen that NGOs are dealing with issues like education, poverty, women's rights. Basically, these are the issues that NGOs are dealing with. But the business model of NGOs and its sustainability are all over donations and funds. I.e. as long as NGOs are receiving donations or funds from the local community or international funding, as long as they are receiving funds, they sustain them. As soon as funds stop coming, NGOs also stop coming. In order to break this model and to give financial stability to any good and noble boss, basically NGO and business model is mixed to give financial stability to the institution. And this mixture is called Social Entrepreneurship. In other words, we can say that Social Entrepreneurship brings commerce and social causes together. According to a web source, which is ManagementStudyGuide.com, Social Entrepreneurship is all about recognizing the social problems and achieving a social change by employing entrepreneurial principles, processes and operations. Or, major portion of the profit of this business usually is donated for the special cause. You must have got an idea that basically this is a business model itself, but this business model is created, this venture is created, this institution is created, so that any socio-economic problem can be solved. The profit of this is basically not going to any stake or stockholder, it is re-investing. This is why the significance of Social Entrepreneurship is much more important, this is why Social Entrepreneurs are working together with the government and NGOs and are solving a lot of the problems of the people. Let me give you some examples. For example, when you go to the internet and start looking for Social Entrepreneurship, the first example you will get is of the Grameen Bank. The bank has its own procedures, obviously the bank is an institution that is doing business. But the Grameen Bank was basically created for ultra-poor people. Because this is the community, this is the unbanked community that didn't have collaterals to offer. They didn't even give them a loan. So the Grameen Bank would make a loan that would give this kind of community a loan. The community would start their own business and then the loan that was taken, the loan would return them. And the Grameen Bank is a success story. That is, this ultra-poor community that we think that they might not have money to eat, out of these 99% people have returned all the loans, that is, the recovery rate as compared to the commercial bank, the recovery rate was 99%. So this is why the Grameen Bank is a very good example of Social Entrepreneurship. If you want to see it in Pakistan, then there is a model of Akhubat, which we say that it is very close to Social Entrepreneurship. Akhubat is also a kind of foundation, an institution that has no collaterals to offer to this community, they are given a loan to do their own business. But what is the speciality of Akhubat? It gives loans, it doesn't charge interest. So all over the world, this is a very surprising thing for everyone that there is an institution, it gives loans, it doesn't charge interest, and despite that, that institution exists. Its financial, its operational sustainability is there. So, again, Akhubat is a very good example of Social Entrepreneurship, and we can see Dr. Amjit Sakeb as a Social Entrepreneur. Another example, in 2010, this model was very famous that a restaurant was started, in which when people used to come to eat, there was total darkness. The waiters who served the food, they were blind. The purpose was that there was a restaurant where people came to eat good food, but the cause was that people realized that the blind people are so beautiful, and the blind community was also given a job. So, you will get many more examples like this, in which you can see a business model, but at the same time, you will see that the purpose of doing that business is not profit earning, it is to solve some socio-economic problem. There are three major issues of any Social Enterprise, the biggest issue is its financial and operational sustainability, self-sufficiency. What is this? The profit you have, you are using that profit again for a Nobel Prize. What profit is being generated from your business, i.e. in other words, if the government doesn't charge interest, then does the government have so much profit generated that the government can run its operations and its business financial matters itself, because business operations are also running. So, this is why the government relies on its income for its self-sufficiency and operations, along with that, they have also opened up the option of donations and fundraising. And the biggest issue is business sustainability. Can these institutions sustain? Is this model better than NGO? This is a very important discussion. There is a lot more to say about Social Entrepreneurship. The purpose of this video was to tell you that you can also become a Social Entrepreneur and your enterprise can be a social enterprise. You can create a social value which can solve the socio-economic problems of your community. You become a job creator as an entrepreneur and you are creating value. You are giving jobs to people. You are creating a social success, but again, an enterprise whose purpose is to make life a better and solve the problems of the community is nothing more than beautiful. Nothing can be more beautiful than this. See you in the next video.