How can China be of services to Drupal -- practically?

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john.zhu - Wed, 2008-04-16 18:50

We have been pondering about how to best evangelize China into the Drupal community -- and in droves.

After operating in China for two years, and despite of our best trying such as holding the Drupal BootCamp event in Beijing http://www.drupalchina.org/node/3638, our biggest challenge is the practicality of getting Chinese acquainted with Drupal -- BEFORE -- we can even talk about having them participate into the DROP program, let alone directly contribute into module or theme writing.

Meanwhile, after our Boston DrupalCon session http://boston2008.drupalcon.org/session/drupal-china-how-who-and-why, we were in London for CFUnited Europe http://europe.cfunited.com/, during which we shared our thinking to run a two months long, 50-100 college-students, China Open-Source Summer-Camp (ChinaOpen), in Beijing this summer with excitement built around the sites and sound of the 2008 Olympics.

Within the first two hours, we received 7 Open-Source projects to work on.

That was 1-month ago. And we have been contemplating about how this ChinaOpen can be of direct service to the Drupal community ever since.

Our latest epiphany/idea is to solicit ideas/projects to build web-sites for the non-profit community -- this summer -- in order to “graduate” the ChinaOpen participants into the DROP/SoC program, (say) next summer and give back to a few deserving organizations that need to get the word out but don't have the budget or resources. We imagine some participants may even be able to directly contribute to writing Drupal modules after this.

We could obviously open to For-Profit (kind of like the old “dotcom”) style web-sites/ideas, but we figure this would open the flood-gate too much.

What do you think?

Ideas, suggestions, critics, helping out?

Finally, we are trying to decide, whether this ChinaOpen should be pursued forward this summer, since logistically speaking, we are rapidly approaching the absolute deadline time to get the words out, and arrange all the logistic issues as May will be here in 2-weeks -- which is our other way to ask, for those of you who have participated either DROP or SoC before:
-- What kind of general rule-of-thumb in terms of operational-support that we should estimate?
-- For example, for each student, how much "mentoring" and backoffice support that we would need to factor?

Thanks!

Cross-posting

add1sun's picture
add1sun - Wed, 2008-04-16 19:09

I'm sorry that I do not have time nor brain power to really respond to this right now, but I did cross-post this to some other groups that may give you more eyeballs with good feedback on this: SoC, DROP and Dojo groups.

Lullabot loves you


thx!

john.zhu - Wed, 2008-04-16 20:01

thx!