Vendors
Atttendees: Steven Peck, Kaliya Hamlin, Djun Kim, John Sechrest, others please advise.
This is currently being edited down.
CHALLENGES LOOKING FORWARD
* our present communication structure won't scale -
* info overload / noise
- need something like freshmeat of Drupal?
* one of the problems is that at the moment everyone talks to
everyone else (n^2)
* how do we grow and tap the community intelligence
* what are the standards for interaction
* mailing list too noisy to allow involvement
* need communication mechanism that serves people who don't have time/
investment to read all the mail, follow the forums, etc.
* how to communicate 'how to find what is needed'
* many cultures involved
Does it make sense to have some folks who are working to play clearing house role and coordinate efforts?
Is there a role to ad * forums (need something like Jon's Civilities tagging)
It would be great to get the Drupal vocab down about what different roles in the ecology and perhaps look forward to having clusters of them on the site?
Core development - these are the stewards/maintainers of the core of Durpal.
Board Members - those who server on the Drupal.org soon to be formed board (should hopefully have people from a range of the below roles)
Vendors - (in the proprietary world - third party resellers) firms that specialize in building Drupal/CS sites generally or for specific niches (these firms have developers and designers in house or hire out on a contract bases development and design work). They do the work of articulating the use cases that clients present them and deliver the sites that help meet those needs.
Developers - coders who work on 1) writing new modules, 2)do coding to customize the platform.
Designers :UI./UX - User Interface Design / User Experience - these people are particularly skilled at shaping the overall look and feel of a drupal site
Deisngers:Graphic Design - these people focus on the graphic elements of design.
Service Providers - companies that provide hosting of Drupal/CS sites.
Clients - companies/organizations/people who hire vendors to build CS calls
Administrators - those among clients and users who have administrative prividlidges on their Drupal/CS site.
Users - people who download Drupal/CS and install it. Clients are also users of drupal
End Users - those people who use Drupal/CS sites as community members
* Need 'about' section more prominent
Drupal and CS sites are looked at by potential clients to vet the platform choice. These potential clients need to be able to easily access information relevant to them. There are two kinds of evaluation that happen one is by techies who's understanding needs are different then 'decision makers' who typically do not understand technology are board members or leaders of an organization - often times in the nonprofit world they are women.
If a decision maker has heard of Drupal/CS they will come to the site to check it out they need to easily do three things look at sites that have been built for communities simliar to the one they are considering... ARTS, UNION, CLASSROOM (K-12, undergrad, graduate/academic collaboration), RELIGIOUS, COMMUNITY BASED.... They need to search for Vendors by geography.
It seems there are firms and individuals - lone designer/developers who may list themselves differently so that orgs who may have 1/2 the kind of people then need in house can hire just that part as well as create a market for vendors (firms) who need to find contractors of the design/devleoper kind should able to find those "people" too. So there are multiple levels here (If you have questions call). Having references for both are a good thing to encourage? or perhaps as part ofa best practices for hiring a firm is the encouragement of those looking to get something built to ask for references. Actually this piece of walking organizations through what a normal community software and I guess particularly a drupal/CS site development process would be good. I know that my clients are very very naive about how to do this and I am going to have to write this up anyways and it could be of use to others.
There is also a need to have some part of the site focused on webservices firms who might be potential vendors. It is essential to give these technical newbies a clear path to entry to learn about Drupal - reduce the learning curve (which I understand is quite steep) and to know the community is a good one. Perhaps some case studies of firms like Open Flows that have been 'converted' would be helpful. Growing the ecology of vendor/developers who are serving this market is essential with the rapid scaling that is occurring.
There would some great value in writing some white papers about drupal and particularly the performance capability (scalability), clearly articulating the uniqueness of the CMS and some of the features we it offers. Also getting a clear set of articulated side by side comparison to other competing platforms like momobo, plone etc. This sort of thing is needed to help sell services.
Need technical comparisons (e.g. Drupal vs. Mambo)
* need tech case studies
- for core, modules
- performance
- need examples (donate your logs)
- site analysis / profiling
* Can we present a view of support/communication organized by
project/module? (Organic groups, Civice CRM)
Can we have a template for case studies? Good examples? what kinds of studies would be good to do? If I am going to do a case study what should I be documenting as a go along.
What is the templates for documentation in general!
There has been a clear need expressed to have a list of webhosts that can handle drupal/CS and to have a rating system that we as vendor/developers use to collectively share information about them.
MODULES
Babysitters for modules who are they? how do you find out can this be more formalized and clear?
Need: Understand where a module is in the development life cycle and to find others working on similar modules before they are finished. This was seen as VERY important and needs some use case and work flow development. Vendors trying to solve similar problems want to work together with the resources they have from clients.
Range of stages identnified.
Glen in the Eye
Wishlist
Working on it
done not tested
in testing
stable ready
adopted in x sites
rotting (needs revision)
There were several potential ways to address this one was to adopt some structured blogging format to do this? http://www.microcontnet.org . Is there also a way to rate modules?
Open to other ideas. Should be highly searchable and sortable to allow easy discernment about module overlap and be 'the place' where everyone goes to find out about stuff BEFORE they do module builds. DrupalMods.com???
* re-vamp project module - need attn
* community members need to provide status overviews
- who/how? (key people) community leaders to aggregate info
- guidelines for the everyman
Maybe as a start we can have a developer blog section.
Knowing the Drupal/CS landscape seems essential. To do the above listing of Vendors it seems clear that some time devoted to asking known vendor/developers who they know who is doing Drupal/CS development would be key. This seems inportant given the rapid scaling/growth of the number of installs. It also seems valuable to get existing modules and modifications folded back for consideration for the core and 'established' modules. Creating a strong community hub for Vendor/Developers so that everyone is stronger and the platform is very healthy in the long run. It seems important to understand from those vendor/developers who have not participated actively in the community why they have not and how to improve the vendor/developer experience so that they will get more more involved in the future. It may also be helpful to establish some norms for how to weave new folks into the community so that it is not super challenging for those involved.
It may be that the vendor community - those who's lively hoods depend on the platform form a 501(c)(6) trade association to meet their own needs. This would obviously be in deep relationship with Drupal.org and the foundation but may have some benefits from not 'mushing' everything together.
On a bigger longer term discussion does it make sense to have CivicSpace doing everything. Should it not specialize in supporting the political/campaign/organizing uses of the platform and be a catalyst to support other unique sub communities and equivalents form? ArtSpaceLabs | EducationSpaceLabs | SpiritualSpaceLabs. Does it makes sense to foster particular communities of practice (of vendor/developer/designers) with leaders who have REAL expertise in these domains to lead the development of modules and a core release profile to meet these needs.