Drupalcon in Vancouver was really quite a good time for me. In addition to the coolness of Vancouver, the human goodness of the community at large and the little thrill of putting a face to many of the names I've seen in IRC and on drupal.org, I was particularly jazzed at just how many paying jobs there are out there that revolve around Drupal.
I was very excited by the discussion in both Gregory Heller's "Grupal Guild" session on Saturday and in Zack Rosen's "How to make money and help Drupal too" session on Sunday, and in thinking about what's next I figured rather than try to explore some of the topics in a mailinglist or other backchannel, why not come out and start a forum thread to capture some of the momentum of the conference?
With that in mind, here are some of the major tasks that seemed to be out there:
Marketing
All the shops and individuals who base their solutions on Drupal have a vested interest in increasing the name-recognition and credibility of the platform, as well as promoting its strengths and answering common objections. This could have all sorts of manifestations.
For instance, In some spare time at the conference, Zack Rosen, Dan Moger and I started putting together a site called What You Pay For which is meant to educate decision-makers about where their money goes when they pay a for a proprietary web application as opposed to one which builds on an open platform. That's a small example, but it's the sort of thing that can help get more people interested in spending money on Drupal.
Services Directory
At the rate the market for Drupal is growing, this list on drupal.org isn't up to the task of connecting potential customers and Drupal Professionals. After some discussion, it seems that what's needed is a directory that allows for somewhat more granular sorting users and somewhat more extended profiles for professionals and professional services shops.
While such a directory could eventually add more features as the community and platform evolve, it seems in the short term that getting something simple, open and user-friendly would help out and is easy to get done.
Drupal Professionals Group
There are a lot of questions for people trying to turn drupal into a profession. How does one support the community and their business? How does one find new talent? How do we prevent the duplication of effort in development? How do we increase the talent pool?
While in the long run these are questions that the community as a whole will need to answer, in the short term there's a pressing need for Drupal Pros to start thinking and experimenting with answers.
Some Notes On Method
There are a lot of ways to go forward from here. My intuition is that it's best to pick low-hanging fruit, try to set things up quickly, see what works, and keep the dialogue going.
Dries has expressed a willingness to open up drupal.org subdomains for some of these purposes, which is probably the best long-run solution. Once we have some solutions that have been vetted by the community and are well-enough accepted to be "official," this will be the way to go as it will keep these services nice and neutral and strengthen the Drupal trademark. However, in the meantime, it might be smart to push some of these efforts forward under another domain (e.g. drupalpros.com) while we work out what exactly we're looking for.
Ok folks, that's about all I've got for now. Hopefully this post can set some conversation rolling towards getting some of this off the ground!
Comments
Sounds really great -
Sounds really great - particularly the subdomains.
If we are going to user a domain like drupalpros.com I think it would be wise to register it as quickly as possible (or avoid having it publicly known) to avoid any 'drupal.com' situations. Any discussion of the drupal.com situation?
Not here, please
Please, no discussion of drupal.com here. There's at least two other threads already immersed in it.
Sounds great
Even though it was much closer by merit of at least being on the same continent, DrupalCon was still too far away in Vancouver. Alas....
Some sort of evangelizing site for Drupal makes sense. (The more buzz, the better, imho.)
A professionals group sounds great, too. Sign me up!
Laura
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pingVision, LLC • BlogHer • rare pattern • scattered sunshine
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Laura Scott :: design » blog » tweet
Evangelizm
Indeed... this is a big thing. We should try to get some kind of consensus on what are the three short things we want potential clients to know about drupal. In politix they this "message discipline," and it really helps.
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Personal: Outlandish Josh
Professional: Trellon
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Personal: Outlandish Josh
Professional: Pantheon
I'd be interested in
seeing where this leads, and helping move the process along.
Aside from this thread, are there any other next steps planned?
Cheers,
Bill
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http://www.funnymonkey.com
Tools for Teachers
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http://www.funnymonkey.com
Next Steps
As Gregory notes below, there are people who are serious about working on a service provider's directory, that's a solid next-step that we should be able to deliver results on within a pretty quick timeframe. The follow-on to that should be for everyone to add their info to it, and begin the discussion of "what's next" for that particular service.
Beyond that, we are still very much in an exploratory phase here. I think the thing to do is to try and set some stuff up. In the words of a well-honed marketing phrase, just do it!
Some ideas:
There are a lot of ways to contribute. Think about what you think the community needs for evangelism, for training, for marketing, and take a stab at it. Then make sure you post back to let people know what's going on.
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Personal: Outlandish Josh
Professional: Pantheon
and how best for them to get
Done!
The first few things I do on most installations and how I learned to use Drupal. I created it for a friend to help guide her and because I thought it might be generally useful.
--
Knaddison Family Blog
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Morris Animal Foundation
Any chance of you putting
Any chance of you putting that in the handbook?
-Steven Peck
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Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide -|- Black Mountain
-Steven Peck
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Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide
my pleasure
That would be my pleasure. Is there a particular place you think it should go?
Greg
--
Knaddison Family Blog
--
Morris Animal Foundation
Thanks for getting this started
Coming out of the session led by Zack, Rich Orris (CivicActions) and I volunteered our time to get the Drupal Service Providers directory started based upon the proto-spec we outlined during the session.
The directory will allow individual contractors and contracting firms to be listed and connected, along with other relevant information (availability, project thresholds, both time and money), geographic or issue area focus (international development, politics, publishing, commercial).
There was talk of creating a resource for potential drupal customers to help them create RFPs and guid them through making the decision about what kind of firm to work with, or how to evaluate firms. The consensus seemed to be that this would come after getting the directory up and running.
In terms of domains, a number of people commented through out the conference that drupal.org is intimidating and scary unless you are already a drupal person. For this reason, I think it is important that the site lives on it's own domain, or is accessible from its own domain (like drupalpros.com, which is already owned by someone in the community).
I would also like to start a monthly conference call for Drupal Shops to talk. Conferences are a great opportunity for us to all get aligned and share intentions about module development, but they are too few and far between. A monthly conference can help us all get synched up and perhaps collaborate rather than duplicate. I'll be posting more information on this soon. I imagine that the first call will be sometime in late February.
Gregory Heller
http://www.CivicActions.com
http://www.GregoryHeller.com
AIM/SKYPE: GregoryHeller
Word!
There was talk of creating a resource for potential drupal customers to help them create RFPs and guid them through making the decision about what kind of firm to work with, or how to evaluate firms. The consensus seemed to be that this would come after getting the directory up and running.
This is similar to what Techsoldaten said below, and it seems like a natural follow-on to the basic directory function.
It just seems to me that the directory is such low-hanging fruit that we should just do it, get a lot of profiles in there, and have some kind of discussion there which will be a little easier to track than just this forum.
I'm game to help out if anyone needs it.
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Personal: Outlandish Josh
Professional: Pantheon
sounds good
Unless someone can provide a low cost bridge - google talk/skype with an IRC back-channel seems like a good system for this. Also, I have appreciated the CivicSpace podcasts of their past conference calls. Perhaps we can do that as well.
--
Knaddison Family Blog
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Morris Animal Foundation
Freeconference.com and freeconferencecall.com
Works for folks stateside. and is totally free.
as for skype, doesn't it max out after a certain number of callers?
Anything that gets the the full time professional drupal developer/implementers on a regular call is what I am willing to use.
If you would be the kind of person who would want to be on one of these calls, send me an email http://drupal.org/user/32696/contact
Gregory Heller
http://www.CivicActions.com
http://www.GregoryHeller.com
AIM/SKYPE: GregoryHeller
Just what we need
This is exactly what the Drupal consulting community needs - better infrastructure, and better networking! The consulting mailing list was a good start, but that (and the drupal.org directory) is hardly enough for what is a fast-growing professional community, and an even faster-growing customer community.
Personally, I'd like to see a focus on getting more potential developers into Drupal, and thus in "planting the seeds" for more Drupal consultants. I know I'm not alone when I say that there are too few of us 'pros' to handle all the work that's out there. Once we have a 'drupalpros' web site, I think we need to start a marketing and PR campaign that is directed at non-Drupal PHP developers, web developers, and web designers. Google got more people involved with its Summer of Code program - now it's our turn to continue the work.
There are a lot of developers out there who have never heard of Drupal. Let's educate them about what a great platform it is, and about how they can make a living out of it by consulting. I'm not advocating a "want to make money now?" approach, but still, we need to reach out.
Jeremy Epstein - GreenAsh
Jeremy Epstein - GreenAsh
A couple of things
A couple of attempts at answers to the questions posed above:
1) With training new talent - one of my first jobs out of college was with a place that needed me to learn ASP and java. They paid me to earn certifications in both.
While there are many drupal shops out there that could easily train people, there is not much in terms of a visible, external support infrastructre for learning drupal. You can go to the Web site, sure, but it is important for companies to step up and start offering training around the platform. For that matter, people need to start publishing books that can be purchased off the shelf for learning drupal. The reasoning here is simple, when people can sign up for a course or buy a book on how to do something, they learn that way. People still are not used to learning by searching out information on a Web site.
2) With the duplication of effort in development - drupal.org is a great place to find out what is going on in terms of development if you understand how the environment is structured and how to find out information. If you know how to look through forums and CVS directories, if you know how to understand what you read, and if you are reading a good description of the project itself, you can understand current development efforts.
A lot of people who are just getting started into developing for drupal are not able or do not know to look at these things. Information is organized in a non-linear manner owing to the open-source nature of development teams. There are a couple of simple things the community could do to make development efforts more transparent:
- A project directory classified by project type. Event modules should go in an event directory, blog modules should go in a blog directory, etc. This should include projects that are in contrib and explain what versions of drupal each project works with. Projects could be listed in multiple directories.
- Directory editors for each section listed above. There are only so many projects that could belong to each directory, and there could be multiple editors for each section.
- A roadmap for development. Something that says what is going on with module development, when new releases are expected, and what long term plans exist for specific capabilities. This would not be as hard to develop as what it sounds, groups could be organized around specific categories of projects to decide what should be 'officially' included in the roadmap and what might make it in as footnotes.
3) Services directory - The idea of a services directory makes sense if you look at it as an improvement from what is there now, but might not really be able to meet the goal of connecting clients to developers. People don't always know what they want until they see it, and technology purchasers don't always know what to ask for when looking for a shop.
What might be more useful is a services-example directory, where providers can put up case studies of sites they have built and customers can look at the sites. Service-examples could be sorted by industry, capabilities, and other dimensions in order to help people find out what it is they are looking for and who can do it.
M
Book
I'm intrigued by this idea of a book. As much as we may know better, there are a lot of companies out there that seem to think that if they can't find it at Barnes and Noble or Amazon then it must not be a legitimate thing.
I could also easily see a drupal book being one of the best marketting tools ever. In terms of building the community awareness by snagging all the people just starting out who have no clue about drupal but know they need to purchase 'the next web development book on the shelf' to continue their self-education (my situation not too long ago). But also something we could point clients to, to lend legitimacy.
Furthurmore, if someone was kind hearted enough, the proceeds could be turned back into the community as a small income stream. I know I have often wished for a drupal handbook pdf as I have been learning anyway. Don't know, just rambling here, but the website can be intimidating for the uninitiated and a book can be less so.
As far as the whole idea of drupalpros.org, I'm all for it. I know for a fact a lot of my clients had difficulty locating a drupal consultant before they found me, and if the talk at BarCampNYC was anything then it sounds as if a lot of the shops are having trouble locating and training talent.
I think it would also serve as a filter on the noise and clarify the difference between people setting up small sites for personal use asking for a volunteer to help answer a few questions (which I'm happy to do most of the time) and people looking for a serious professional consultant to aid in a major site.
Other than that I need to think on this more. Who is doing this and how can I help?
There is a drupal book by
There is a drupal book by Robert Douglass and it is a fine reference, although Drupal shares space with phpBB and Wordpress in it.
Of course, more books would be welcome. I think someone is working on a book for drupal developers, I forget who though.
Book
That'd be me.
Good Points
Some follow ups:
Training
It seems to me that we're a ways away from having any sort of body that can credibly "certify" drupal developers. However, a similar solution that can work in the near-term might be short on-the-job intensives. For instance, imagine if you were a new developer, and you took a two-week apprenticeship with a shop who would help you get some real-world skills in Drupal deployment and development.
You'd get a resume item ("I worked on site X"), and if you were any good, you could get a letter of recommendation, or at least a reference. If you were great, maybe you'd get a full-time job. ;)
This seems to be something that can work right now, and which should scale at least a little bit until there's enough organization and infrastructure around drupal to offer some sort of certification.
Development
I didn't mention this, but I was talked about that someone from CivicSpace (Nedjo?) was going to take on some much-needed improvements to project.module which should help both identify the more thoroughly tested and reliable modules, and help prevent developers from duplicating effort.
Services Directory
What might be more useful is a services-example directory, where providers can put up case studies of sites they have built and customers can look at the sites. Service-examples could be sorted by industry, capabilities, and other dimensions in order to help people find out what it is they are looking for and who can do it.
This sounds similar to Gregory's idea about how to help clients put together good RFPs. It seems like a very natural next-step beyond basic directory functions.
However, when you consider that all we have now is this and this, and that getting something that's an order of magnitude better should be possible inside a week, I don't see any argument for going forward with something that's less than perfect but still a marked improvement.
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Personal: Outlandish Josh
Professional: Pantheon
1) Training New Talent:
1) Training New Talent:
I would love to set up a "job board" of sorts where people who want an apprenticeship experience can apply, or connect with a shop. I think that the professional services directory is a step in this direction. When the shops are listed, potential apprentices can find them.
2) Development Duplication:
There was talk that the modules/projects section of drupal.org will allow for classification soon. So that is on its way to being done.
Drupal developers still need to get in the habit of listing their project/module early so others can see their intention and perhaps help contribute (use cases, documentation, code). I could see a "code of conduct" for drupal pros which includes things like "make project intentions clear early to avoid duplication of work" or "contact similar module developers before building your own that is slightly different.
Conference calls will be a way for some folks, bigger shops perhaps, to talk about this sort of thing.
Better project/mosule descriptions and roadmaps etc.. all good ideas.
3) In so far as the current lists of drupal programmers and shops do actually connect some potential clients with contractors, I feel strongly (and there seems to be a fair amount of consensus) that creating a better directory that is more searchable and is not living inside scary drupal.org land but is linked from it will help potential clients find pros for their project. As I said above, and JoshK has echoed, the next step would be a tool that allows potential clients to submit rfps and evaluate drupal pros in the directory. One of the features outlined in the proto-spec is links to exisitng sites produced by pros, and as Mike Gifford suggests, using flickr for screen shots and delicious for tags is also a no brainer, everyone should be tagging their sites on delicious with "drupal"
Gregory Heller
http://www.CivicActions.com
http://www.GregoryHeller.com
AIM/SKYPE: GregoryHeller
Sorry.
I didn't mean to post this and can't seem to delete it.
Getting what you pay for
http://www.whatyoupayfor.com/
"Page not found"
Okay, I get it...
Work in progress
We haven't posted the content yet. Still a work in progress.
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Personal: Outlandish Josh
Professional: Pantheon
Drupal.biz looks like it is
Drupal.biz looks like it is owned by a Drupal professional, but not currently being used (it's just landing on Drupal.it). Does anyone know the owner of that domain, or if s/he might be interested in donating it?
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"Please drupal responsibly: answer as many questions as you ask."
Let's find out!
I think this is a perfectly appropriate use of WHOIS data...
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Personal: Outlandish Josh
Professional: Pantheon
Drupal Pros
Hi Folks,
Also keen on this idea. Sorry I missed the DrupalCon - bad timing.
I've been trying to collect lists of drupal consulting groups in Delicious:
http://del.icio.us/tag/drupal+consulting
Please add to it. I also think that there could be a great deal more done to get more folks to adopt Drupal. CivicSpace Labs has done a lot in making it more accessible & adding help.. But having more stuff to draw on would be good..
Even just a collection of screenshots to include in proposals. Looks like lots of drupalcon photos here:
http://flickr.com/photos/tags/drupal/
I've been adding some here, but perhaps a group would be useful:
http://flickr.com/photos/mgifford/sets/1178930/
Mike
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Mike Gifford, OpenConcept Consulting
Free Software for Social Change -> http://www.openconcept.ca
A feeble attempt
This page: http://drupal.org/services
and its children is only a poor excuse for what you guys are proposing.
Can we get an outline of what is needed.
I volunteered to maintain above pages a couple of months ago. Nothing real has happened. It would be very cool to get this going.
Sorry I did not make it to Vancouver this time.
Gunnar Langemark
http://www.langemark.com
Features list for the new Drupal Pros Director
This is what Gregory, Kaliya, Rich came up with on 02/09/2006 and shared with a larger group later
Moderated space where people who provide professional service related to Drupal services can list themselves and their firms.
Firm Profiles
Name
Contact Info
Website
Brief Description
Areas of Expertise
Market Focus
Geographic focus
Project Thresholds (money, timeline)
Related links/Portfolio
Size of firm
References
Developer Profiles would be linked to firms, if developers are associated
Location
Bio
Available for contract
References
Link back to Drupal (profile with contribs and commits)
Approved Links between Firms? (showing the dates of the engagement with the firm, linkage must be approved by the firm)
Contact forms
Relationships in CiviCRM?
Store profile datab in CiviCRM?
the last 2 would probably be for v2
RFP Wizard
this is really more of a v1.5. If folks have rfp templates that they like, or have received great RFPs that they want to share, or use to create an RFP template, by all means, do not wait for the facility to be set up, start gathering that information.
How to write an RFP
Pointers about how to write a good rfp for an open source web project.
Market education for the client
WhatYouPayFor is doing that in a broad sense, but we probably need better plain language resources/material to market/educate clients about Drupal Specifically
Professional services directory v2
* Rating: based upon diverse set of factors (community contribution: modules, documentation, etc; bug fixes; fundraising for drupal, number of live sites, number of users, number of page views etc...)
* Relationships: more complex system of mapping and tracking relationships between developers and firms.
We are planning on building V1 with out of the box components:
CCK and Relativitiy for starters with taxonomies and related links.
You'll see somethign in the coming days.
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Gregory Heller
http://www.CivicActions.com
http://www.GregoryHeller.com
AIM/SKYPE: GregoryHeller
Excellent
What can I do to help?
I think this is very
I think this is very important and timely. I'd also like to help out. Thanks for all the efforts made so far!
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"Please drupal responsibly: give as much help as you get."
Might I make a suggestion?
Might I make a suggestion? I think that in building this pros directory, it would be helpful to allow or create some way for individuals or companies that are stronger in one area to work with others who are stronger in another area. For example, an individual who is good with CSS and themeing, might link up with someone else who is good with PHP programming for a project (or two, or three...). Having some facility for helping this happen, even if it's only back-end-ish, would be a good thing, IMO.
Sure.
Sure.
The site doesn't allow or prevent this from happening.
There will be an "areas of expertise field" and individuals/firms can indicate their areas of expertise, and can contact each other to find out if they want to work together.
Once the list exists, it will create opportunities for communications and collaboration.
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Gregory Heller
http://www.CivicActions.com
http://www.GregoryHeller.com
AIM/SKYPE: GregoryHeller
update?
What is the status, if any, of work on this. I just noticed that whatyoupayfor.com is still very pretty, but lacking content. Has anyone made progress on a Drupal Pros site? I vaguely remember one idea that it might be possible to merge this in with groups.drupal which is available if that actually makes sense.
There seems to be a problem with http://home.civicactions.net/drupal/drupalpros/ but maybe that's just the 4.7 upgrade or something exciting like that.
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Growing Venture Solutions
Drupal Implementation and Support in Denver, CO
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Morris Animal Foundation
Drupalancers.com
Hi All
We have this site: www.drupalancers.com where people can post Drupal-related jobs currently.
Advantages: It has a feedback aspect that is lacking from a simple list of providers.
Disadvantages: It doesn't have nearly the info about each provider that you are suggesting.
Why did we build it? Because we're a website firm that needed help from a professional Drupal developer and couldn't find one through the forums here.
If we can help or support this new project, just let us know.
www.Drupalancers.com. Hire Drupal Experts in a Business-Friendly Environment.