update: republishing with some notes from  Peter Wolanin , who has been working directly on the issues that caused me dive in here in the first place. Many thanks Peter for the clarifications and corrections!

The number of critical issues holding up the release of Drupal 8 is now in the 50s. When will it be released? When it's ready. In the meantime there are some great opportunities around to start to get up to speed on what Drupal 8 is all about. Not least of which are 7 sessions at DrupalSouth in Melbourne next month.

Check them out:

First up, our keynote by Angela "webchick" Byron: Drupal 8: What you need to know

Accessibility matters. For everyone. For those of us who build the web, and for those who use it too. All of us.

Here's some great resources that caught my attention in recent days.

DrupalSouth is the biggest Drupal gathering in the Antipodes.

We'll be at the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre over three days in early March 2015. March 5-7 to be exact.

Find out more at the website
https://melbourne2015.drupal.org.au/

A couple of days ago I found myself describing how to estimate the size of a story. It was coming out in my own words, without references. It felt... right.

One agile approach for "sizing" up a task is to use a relative scale to describe a mixture of effort, complexity and uncertainty.

Hey @drupal Beware the ides of March. Over 5-7 March 2015 @DrupalSouth is coming. See http://t.co/YP1LJMSD30 & sign up for announcements

— kattekrab (@kattekrab) June 29, 2014

The Drupal community working group exists to uphold our code of conduct, and work on the supporting policies and procedures we need to do that. Read more about it in the Governance group on Groups.drupal.org

[Photo Community Summit at DrupalCon Prague by Amazee Labs]

Here's the slides from the Panopoly talk I gave at DrupalSouth.

Well it happened! DrupalSouth was pretty damn magnificent. Learning was done, fun was had, and the community gathered and did what it does best.

There's been a couple of nice write ups by people who attended.