Steering Drupal’s Potential in Academia: Janna Malikova

The Drupal Association Board Elections commence in a day and last until the beginning of September. In this installment of The DropTimes' "Meet the Candidate" campaign for the Drupal Association's 2024 Board Election, we feature an exclusive interview with Janna Malikova. This campaign aims to introduce the Drupal community to the individuals vying for this important role, allowing members to learn more about their motivations, ideas, and qualifications before casting their votes. 

Janna Malikova is a Senior Software Engineer at Tomato Elephant Studio. She has a deep passion for open-source and a strong background in community leadership. Her career spans roles as a team lead, developer, and accessibility tester, and she has made significant contributions to Drupal code, documentation, and community initiatives. As a co-organizer of various industry events, including WordPress meetups and DrupalSouth conferences, Janna has consistently advocated for the growth and adoption of open-source technologies.

In her interview, Janna discusses her dedication to improving Drupal's educational impact and documentation, highlighting her ongoing work to bring Drupal into academic curriculums. She shares her vision for making Drupal more accessible and recognized within educational settings and how she plans to leverage her role on the board to further these initiatives. Janna also reflects on her successful efforts to inspire novice speakers and her plans to foster a stronger relationship between Drupal and academia.

TDT [1]: The most generic question to a candidate at any election is why do you want to run? Similarly here, why do you want to run for a board seat at the Drupal Association?

Janna Malikova: I am running for a board seat as I am feeling passionate about Drupal's potential in academia (schools, colleges, and universities). By teaching Drupal early on par with better advertised and competing technologies, the community has a chance to foster Drupal's recognition and improve awareness among graduates, teachers, and novice users. While my colleagues and I are already organizing monthly documentation sprints and planning curriculum initiatives, the seat on the board will give me a global stage and room for discussion with passionate professionals worldwide who are asking for help in adopting Drupal in their curriculum and upskilling process.

TDT [2]: What can the Drupal Community expect from your candidacy? What are the innovative ideas Drupal should look forward to if you are to win?

Janna Malikova: Regardless of whether elected or not, I will continue to work passionately on the following initiatives:

• Sustainable and up-to-date documentation. Running a monthly documentation code sprint throughout 2024 allowed me and other community members to improve dozens of documentation pages, user guide pages, and API examples.
• Public Drupal course curriculum. I’m working closely with my colleagues who teach Drupal (in college and privately) to release a number of Drupal course curriculums to be used worldwide. This initiative is tightly integrated with the documentation initiative above to have a single repository for documentation. We are planning to release the first teaching plans before 2025.

If elected, I plan to use the Association’s channels to attract more people to contribute to both initiatives and pick up the adoption where the Starshot initiative leaves it. At the end of the day, all successful software projects come with accessible and up-to-date documentation.

TDT [3]: If you could change one thing about the current structure or operations of the Drupal Association, what would it be and why?

Janna Malikova: Access to a quarterly activity summary (perhaps in the form of a newsletter, article, or infographic) that highlights achievements and forecasts long-term and short-term goals. At the moment, the association's operation and direction are not always as transparent to a common user and even to association members as some of us would like them to be.

TDT [4]: How do you envision the Drupal community evolving over the next five years, and what role do you see yourself playing in that transformation?

Janna Malikova: If I had a magic wand, I would make each Drupal user contribute one documentation change a day. If we replace magic with hard work, in five years, we can achieve

• a smoother Drupal learning curve to make it simple for novice users to start building solutions using Drupal.
• better Drupal awareness among students, teachers, and non-Drupal users. We can do better than the “less popular and more complex WordPress alternative” as it is currently known.

TDT [5]: Can you share a specific instance where you successfully led a community or organizational initiative? What were the challenges, and how did you overcome them?

Janna Malikova: It is not a secret that meetups around the world are struggling for speakers. Recently, conferences have felt like the same people are presenting over and over again, sometimes on the same topic.

As a local meetup organizer, I created a series of inspirational talks for novice speakers. Already presented at the meetups and scheduled to present at local colleges, the talks motivate novice speakers to give their first public talk. After the presentation, the number of first-timers who approached us increased. My colleagues and I continue providing direction, feedback, and assistance to foster a more diverse and inclusive speaker space.

TDT [6]: How do you plan to leverage the resources of the Drupal Association to strengthen the relationship between Drupal and academia? Can you give us a glimpse into your ideas?

Janna Malikova: So far, my colleagues and I have achieved the following in the last 24 months:

1. Brought Drupal back to the college curriculum.
2. Spent time talking to teachers and lecturers who were trying to bring Drupal back and collected the challenges they listed.
3. Attended industry and college events to promote Open Source in general and Drupal in particular.

In the next 12 months, we are collaborating with local colleges and universities to run a number of events (DrupalCamp is one of them) to promote student attendance and participation.

The access to Drupal Association resources will help me amplify the above ideas into more structured and global initiatives. Here’s a sneak peek of a few ideas I’m currently thinking over:

1. Drupal Global Student Day
2. drupal.org web college
3. Best Drupal tutorial competition