Introduction

  • Portfolio is the first product based on Drupal that is transparently designed and developed in the open, within the community.
  • Portfolio's long-term goal is to serve as a concrete alternative to download instead of Drupal core, in order to provide a solution for a specific use-case. (#1260214: Choose your Drupal)

(see Background below for further reading)

Problem

  • Portfolio is moving very slowly, despite lots of interest everywhere.
  • The lack of a usable product blocks the underlying processes and Drupal community shift towards a new understanding of the Drupal core product.

Goal

  • Introduce a project manager to push the project forward.
  • Publish the first Portfolio product release in Q3 2012.

Details

  • Portfolio requires the very same management, organization, structure, and skill that is required for building any other Drupal site.
  • The only difference is that Portfolio is not a one-time project that results in one site, but a permanent product that results in thousands of sites.
  • The project has designers, usability experts, and developers, who love to contribute.
  • There is also a primary project maintainer (currently @sun), who's able to provide vision and direction, and act as product manager, but has many other voluntary duties within the Drupal project.
  • Progress on the effort is hindered, because there is no one who checks for the state of current tasks, coordinates contributor work, asks for deliverables, ensures a basic roadmap, and generally tries to push the project forward.

Proposed resolution

  1. Seek a project manager who would like to volunteer a few hours per week to
    • check current state and progress of current tasks, and try to unblock them
    • coordinate current and next steps with @sun and other contributors
    • delegate work among contributors
    • pull and loop in new contributors where necessary
    • ensure that common project management tasks and best practices for Drupal-based projects are taken into account
    • help to plan and coordinate sprints and meetings (if necessary)
    • push forward public awareness and marketing

    and who ideally

    • is and works as a project manager in $dayjob
    • has some vision and direction coming from a project management perspective on her/his own
    • loves and knows how to work in an open community process (or would like to learn it)
    • fluently speaks and writes English
    • is able to work with drupal.org issues, IRC, and Skype
    • wants to participate in one of the most important evolution milestones since Drupal's existence. :)

Background

Comments

sun’s picture

Issue summary: View changes

Updated issue summary.

sun’s picture

Issue summary: View changes

Updated issue summary.

sun’s picture

Leave a comment to introduce yourself if you are interested! (We've no way to figure out that you are otherwise ;)

rlnorthcutt’s picture

Heya guys,

My name is Ron and I have been building websites with Drupal since 4.6... Been to several camps (even presented at one) and as involved in the community as my work and family allow. I've been looking for a good way to contribute, and this seems like a good fit!

Much of what I do with my work as a freelance developer involves project managment - working with clients in discovery, developing feature lists and solutions, crafting release plans, estimating time and resources, parcelling out tasks to myself and other coders (sometimes the client!), updating the plan and generally working to get across the finish line.

I've actually been sort of tinkering with building an installation profile for something like this for a bit... I have been using features to package some common configs working towards this goal:
- single user blog (content type with commenting and tags instead of the core blog module)
- gallery (for website portfolio pages, image galleries, simple product/service catalog, etc.)
- slideshow integration for front page splash
- layered promotion system
- some default views to provide different layouts
- social media integration

I've been inspired to a certain degree by one of my favorite D6 projects from last year - the Annise Parker site (mayor of Houston). The site has a front page slideshow for promoted content, blog list, news content list, and a "featured" grid on the front page. A post can end up in multiple areas depending ont he options chosen by the author, and this presents several great opportunities to promote content in different ways. I also build a simple slider block module to display FB and Twitter widgets in the sidebar.

I would really love to help out, and I am willing to devote regular weekly time to helping manage the project. I can commit to at least 1 or 2 solid chunks of time per week for general coding, testing, research, organizing, etc... and within reason can keep an eye on the issue queue on a mostly daily basis.

I currently don't have any projects on Drupal.org that I am assigned to, so I would feel comfortable committing to this. I've got alot of experience with managing projects and building many different types of Drupal sites... and I am completely on board with the idea of using core and popular contrib modules to do everything we need.

Personally, I'd like to see this become a solid out-of-the-box solution for people to quickly setup a portfolio/personal website... and I think this could also serve as a starting point for developers to create their own variations for more specific use cases.

I went ahead and subscribed to this issue queue, so feel free to comment back. You can also reach me thru my profile here or on Skype (relatidings). Let me know how I can best help!

regards,
Ron Northcutt

caelon’s picture

Issue summary: View changes

Updated issue summary.

caelon’s picture

Hello everyone. I saw chx' twitter post and figured I'd jump in here to see what he was posting about.

I would be interested in helping as the project manager on this. My day job is as a Senior Project Manager at Mediacurrent and before my time at Mediacurrent, I was a project manager at IBM for 13 years. In both places, I worked remote, including other countries, so working with the various individuals on this project would be no different. I've done one or two small contributions to this point but would like to jump in here and help as needed. At Mediacurrent, I manage many different projects of varying sizes and thus have experience switching between projects and people on those projects. I can contribute regular monitoring and prodding to keep the project moving.

In reading the issue queue to this point, there's a lot of deep thought here and it would be exciting to be a part of it. This is a daunting undertaking, aiming to do no less than provide a significant alternative to tumblr or whatever the hottest thing is next.

The use cases appear to be wrapped up and there are a few people involved. I'd like to get started and help define the quick next steps that are needed to maintain momentum, which is the most valuable resource an open source project can have. (Negative) Inertia is tough to fight against. Let me know if you want more information.

EDIT: Added Negative before Inertia as objects in motion have inertia that resists stopping the momentum. It's a minor physics nit but it bugged me the whole seven-hour drive I just completed that I misspoke as such. That said, I couldn't come up with a better word for "tendency of something at rest to stay at rest" than negative inertia, which I'm sure is the wrong term. So much for applying physics to an abstract concept like team dynamics :)

sun’s picture

Thanks for your interest and introducing yourself! :)

I'll leave this open for some more days to give others a chance to peek in as well, but will definitely come back to you shortly.

Meanwhile, I've created #1564866: [meta] Roadmap as a first attempt to ensure we're all focusing on the right things. ;)

dww’s picture

I assume there's no news on this with all the work going into D8 core these days. However, I'm keenly interested in portfolio, and strongly considering taking on this role (especially if there are interested parties willing to fund my time). This would be a wonderful thing for Drupal, and given how much has already gone into D8 (e.g. #501428: Date and time field type in core and Views, etc) I think it's reasonable to consider starting to build this in D8 (although D7 would also be fine for now). Feel free to contact me if you want to talk privately, or reply here.

Thanks!
-Derek

dww’s picture

Issue summary: View changes

Updated issue summary.