Governance Taskforce Recommendation "Create Community Training Offerings to Develop Leadership Skills"

Effective leadership is not a given. All current and emerging leaders benefit from training and professional development.

What we heard:

Our community needs to offer more support to members who may be good candidates for leadership roles, but who would benefit from professional development. This is especially important for our international community, who are often required to communicate non-natively in English.

The Drupal community does not currently offer the resources necessary for effectively developing new community leaders. This runs the risk of promoting burnout, entrenching tribal knowledge, a lack of transparency, and decreasing opportunities for new people to participate.

Community crisis has also made apparent the urgent need for clearer communication and expanded conflict resolution capabilities.

What we recommend:

To help address these concerns, we recommend the creation of training courses, beginning with the following topics:
Leadership
Conflict resolution
Communication (e.g. non-violent and crisis communication, ESL)
Event management
Creating meaningful diversity and inclusion

Training offerings are complementary to supporting initiatives to recruit, onboard, and mentor new community members. Training will also help us better prepare individuals to deal with future community issues that arise.

We recommend that all individuals in leadership roles and all members of existing groups take appropriate training courses. The initial course topics listed introduces what we heard and should be expanded over time as the need arises.

We also recommend the creation of a new certification or badge program for display on the drupal.org profiles.

External training partnerships may offer the most effective solution, and should be explored, although outside partnerships may require fundraising efforts and the DA’s involvement as the legal entity representing the community.

We recognize that there is limited funding available, and external training partnerships or paid offerings may be the most effective solution; however, any trainings required for leadership, or used to promote community growth, must be free.

Training needs can and should evolve over time. Any group should be able to outline their training needs, and the DA should help to support the finances, infrastructure, and potential partnerships.