At DrupalCon Rotterdam, the DA announced the Drupal Advocacy program to incentivize folks to be louder about Drupal in an effort to "win back" folks who moved away from / dismissed Drupal in the past, showing off all the cool modernization we've done. And that's a great and worthy goal!

However, there are WAY more humans on this earth who have _never_ heard of / tried Drupal. And they're not necessarily in our networks to hear what we have to say, they will not understand words like "Drush" or "render array." ;) But, they also don't necessarily have a preconceived notion of Drupal at all, and therein lies an opportunity.

So, here's a challenge to the Drupal community: during the month of October (the spoooookiest month), go to a local meetup / hackathon / community event where Drupal *isn't* (AI, JavaScript, WordPress...) and report back what you heard and learned about the developers there, what they're building, and where they're struggling.

We can then use this information to brainstorm the best way to "show and tell" Drupal for these developers, in _their_ words, around _their_ use cases and pain points. Then we do DevRel at global scale. 😎

Will this work to drum up new interest in Drupal? Who knows. But hey, worst-case, it's an opportunity to meet fellow nerds and talk tech over free pizza. :)

What do you think?

(Really hoping this doesn't break self-promotion rules; someone joined today who only heard about this initiative through a Reddit comment, so I figured it was good to post it here to a wider audience.)

At DrupalCon Chicago, the "vibes" I caught around Drupal + AI were that folks were roughly divided into three camps:

1. There's a vocal minority of folks who are absolutely ecstatic about AI, and are adopting it wholesale for absolutely everything, up to and including orchestrating fleets of agents to write and review code while they sleep.
2. There's a vocal minority folks who absolutely despise AI, refuse to engage with it from foundational moral / ethical principles, and are trying desperately to halt these tools' proliferation.
3. And then, there's the vast majority who are somewhere in the middle. Maybe they've played around with these tools some, but seen them make bone-headed errors when pointed at Drupal and so dismissed them as hype. Maybe they were too busy shipping for the past ~year and only recently popped their heads up to look at the developer landscape around them and are now feeling fearful that they're being left hopelessly behind. Maybe they're "AI curious," but have absolutely no idea how/where to get started.

We created the Drupal AI Learners Club for group #3. We hold ~weekly informal sessions where we get together as a group and just... talk about AI. This includes "show and tell" demos on what's working (and also what's not ;-)), sharing links to interesting AI-related tools and bits of news, and answering questions so that we collectively help each other level up on AI. Think Drupal Dojo (if you were around back then), but for Drupal + AI.

Our Club Ground Rules are very simple:

1. We follow the Drupal Code of Conduct
2. There are no “stupid questions” — we are all here to learn 💙
3. Pragmatic advice, not hype / pitches
4. Please speak slowly and clearly to help non-native English speakers
5. Your participation is key!

We've done two of these sessions so far (see Session Recordings and Session Recaps):

• Kickoff Meeting: Show Your Setup! with demos from Jürgen Haas, Mike Herchel, and Scott Falconer on how they're each using AI tools to assist with Drupal contribution.
• From Autocomplete to Autopilot where Scott Falconer did a presentation that covers the evolution of AI coding tools and demonstrated using agents to research and fix an open Drupal.org issue.

Our third session is coming up April 27 https://luma.com/552bhxpx where Jim Birch and Eduardo Telaya will be demoing their Skills (as in Agent Skills) setups. These are extra bits of context that can teach "vanilla" AI coding tools how to be much smarter about Drupal.

If this sounds like your jam, join us in #ai-learners on Drupal Slack! There are folks sharing links to things they're playing with and finding useful to them, there are questions from folks who are hitting weird AI problems, and there's a tab there where you can suggest + vote on future topics. This is also the place to offer to be on a session to talk about one of these topics (just please bear in mind our presenter guidelines — this is a learning community, not a marketing channel ;-))

Whew! If you made it this far, thanks so much for reading, and hope to catch you on a future one of these, either in the audience or on the mic. :)