Discuss the role of the Drupal Association of Ireland

Posted by edward_or on April 3, 2011 at 4:05pm

Continue the discussion regarding the role of the Drupal Association of Ireland after the Galway DrupalCamp.

Comments

6 Month review of Drupal Ireland

Posted by alanburke on April 3, 2011 at 7:07pm

Drupal Ireland has been in existence for about 6 months.
Its main role is to promote the use of Drupal in Ireland, in particular through the organisation of regular Drupal events.
At the founding 6 months ago in Dublin, we set ourself 3 main goals.
Get a bank account in place.
Get a website promoting Drupal in place.
Orgainse Drupalcamp

1 Bank Account.
This has been a slow process, hit by a couple of roadblocks. We hope to finalise this in the next few weeks, allowing easier administration of future Drupal events.

2 Website
We hoped to have sponsored hosting in place much earlier, but this is finally in place. We plan to move our various existing websites to this hosting package [as they are dispersed on various accounts at the moment] and develop a new website at Drupal.ie.
We have secured the domain name Drupal.ie in the meantime.

3 Drupalcamp
We had hope initially to have the Spring 2011 event in Sligo, but that proved unfeasible, so at short notice, and with the help out people outside the committee primarily, this event went ahead in Galway

4 Drupal Quiz
This cropped up as an idea during the year. We orgainsed a Drupal Quiz at Drupalcon Chicago to promote Drupal Ireland to the international audience. This was a big success, and should help when inviting international users to Drupalcamp Ireland.

What Drupal Ireland does next is not up to the committee but is up to the community. Let's hear what you have to say, and what you plan to do.

Alan Burke - Chair, Drupal Ireland

Some Ideas for Drupal Ireland

Posted by alanburke on April 3, 2011 at 5:48pm

In the discussion at Drupalcamp Galway, some idea were presented at to what Drupal Ireland could be doing.
The 4 main ideas summarised.

Peer Review.
Many developers work alone or in small companies. The pace of Drupal best practice moves too quick to follow. Drupal Ireland could facilitate a process where peer review of work and work practices would raise the standard of Drupal developers.

Joint Ventures.
Following on the from the above point, as many developers or Drupal companies in Ireland are too small to take on larger projects, a means could be provided for these companies to come together to submit joint proposals.

Finding developers.
Companies and Organisations are looking for Drupal developers and Drupal companies. Drupal Ireland could find a way to make that easier.

Lobby group.
Drupal needs a strong coherent voice promoting its advantages and advocating its use in Ireland. Drupal Ireland could be that voice.

Getting Involved

Posted by alanburke on April 3, 2011 at 6:12pm

Getting involved is easy.
We have an Open atrium installation where people can plan working groups, events etc.
Anyone can have an account, and we'll setup groups as needed.

So, for example, you want to spearhead the peer review idea, just let me know,
I'll give you an account, setup a group and help you out as much as I can.

We already have a group setup for Drupalcamp Autumn 2011.
http://atrium.drupalcampireland.org/autumn2011
So if you have an idea, and want to help, jump right in.

Of course, most everything can discussed here on groups.drupal.org/ireland, and its often the right platform for general discussion, so feel free to post here too.

I am putting this post up

Posted by Jimmel on April 3, 2011 at 7:52pm

I am putting this post up while its still in my head.

Taking the four points that came up at the Drupal Ireland Meeting
1: Peer Review.
2: Joint Ventures.
3: Finding developers.
4: Lobby group.

All of these can and should be achieved through the focal point of the Drupal Ireland website.
Therefore I am putting these very rough proposals for the website to start off some interaction and to act as a starting point. Agree or disagree as you like.

1: The Drupal Ireland website should be for the promotion of Drupal as a robust and agile website management system. It should be used to push Drupal as the system of choice ahead of other systems and that Drupal can do anything other systems can do and much more.

It should not be for the promotion of individuals and companies as that defeats the purpose of open source.

Therefore the site should not show any list of developers/drupal experts on the site itself. Listing people up front has the liability of sites being prominent and promoted which don't exist anymore. This looks very amateurish unless the Drupal Ireland site is routinely administered.

It should have examples of sites that were built with Drupal and maybe these sites could be pulled from sites promoted on the main Drupal site until a way is found of showcasing Irish sites in a fair manner so that companies/individuals will not be promoted more than any others.

Another way of doing this is to showcase sites in categories eg ecommerce, government, community, or by things like carousels forums etc, and not give the site builder any coverage for these site. It will be up to the site builder to agree to this or not. Ultimately people will probably be able to trace the builder of these site from the site itself but that is another issue to be addressed.

I do think that not listing experts on the site itself should be the way to go as it will portray Drupal Ireland as open and welcome and not some sort of closed professional organisation only open to established Drupal experts. BUT THERE SHOULD BE AN USER FRIENDLY WAY TO GET IN TOUCH WITH DRUPAL EXPERTS OR USERS.

2: For users of the site to find Drupal experts, the suggestion that a form is used is probably the fairest proposal. This form should be sent to Drupal experts in the specific region that the user is from. Therefore the user finds a Drupal expert nearest to them.

It also means that one region is not hovering up all the clients (this does happen, believe it or not). If the expert in the region chosen does not have the expertise to complete the job asked for then they will put a proposal out to all the signed up Drupal experts by email in all regions and it can be taken from there. This again can be done through the website.

This systems allows a drupal expert to push for work in their local area in the knowledge that if is becomes too large for them that there is backup expertise outside of their area. Therfore work will not be lost to other systems and if it is not lost to other systems then that work will trickle through to everybody in a fair manner. It also allows the user to interact with the replies of those who are interested and be able to meet those Drupal experts face to face locally.

The regions should probably be done by county, where if no expert is in a county then counties could be joined together as one region. But no matter how many regions there should always be a Drupal expert within all the regions of the site.

3: Having the resources to build anything for anyone through Drupal Ireland's website should make it easier for the lobbying of Drupal as the product of choice for companies and the public sector. It will show them that there is plenty of backup for the system they will be relying on. Also the Drupal site itself would showcase the power of the system over other systems.

4: I have not really thought about peer reviewing. But it could be similar to Drupal.org forum which everybody is fairly familiar with. I for one have not come across open atrium so maybe a lack of familiarity with open atrium might go against it. I don't know maybe everybody has used open atrium.

Anyway this is just a quick overview of some ideas and needs to be discussed in a lot more detail.

Peer Reviews, Naming Camps, etc.

Posted by mccrodp on April 4, 2011 at 9:29am

For Peer Reviews, I'm not sure where best to have it, but some kind of thread possibly per review. The initial post could be from someone just sharing or looking for feedback on the workflow of a project they are working on or have completed. This post could be somewhat like the case studies on drupal.org where the person lists, workflow, modules used, base theme, design process, etc etc. Then people could learn from this while also posting anything they believe would improve the workflow and anything else relating to the project.

I had a quick read of Jimmel's post above and agreed with the vast majority of it. I too believe that no experts should be on Drupal.ie itself and that Mick's idea of a form open to the public that would submit RFTs and general contact to opt-in Drupal Ireland members. I take the point above regarding sending this form on a per region basis so that the same company(s) don't hover up clients but I also think that in order to show the strength of the community and range of choice for the customer in terms of business sizes, cost etc. it would be better initially to send this to all opted in Drupal Ireland members. It won't help the community if a client gets one Tender in response to an RFT, quite the opposite I would think!?

As a side note, here's a nerdy idea for naming Drupal Camp Ireland seeing as we will have two camps/year with a different focus: Drupalcamp Ireland IO.
Drupal Camp I - The more community centric Camp
Drupal Camp O - The Camp focusing on expansion of the community
May be too developer oriented, but thought I'd throw it out there.

Open source, open mind

peer review this month in wicklow town

Posted by frost on April 4, 2011 at 11:35am

great weekend, really got a lot out of it, espeically seeing the drupal community begin to self-organise!

met another wicklow-based drupaler at the tail end of the drupal camp, so that is 4 of us in wicklow town that i'm aware of, and likely there are a few more in the woodwork.

so we're going to try something like a peer review/ meitheal / surgery in wickklow town, where anyone who can come (from wicklow or elsewhere) just shows up with a problem or two they're working on, and we go through one or more of them, looking at your approach, brainstorming, maybe a bit of config/coding, and hopefully all learn and also solve the issue or help you improve what you already did.

open to anyone, will post date/time/venue shortly...

mike

Galway Camp

Posted by Ortaga on April 4, 2011 at 11:48am

Really enjoyed the meet up in Galway, well organized considering some of the speakers could not make it.
I always take loads of new learning for these camps.
The overview of my basic presentation on Ckeditor & IMCE are still up for people to reference here: http://www.indytech-dev.com/overview
Thanks to all.

Choosing regions

Posted by Jimmel on April 4, 2011 at 11:57am

A good point about only having one tender coming from a user's request. Could it be done where there are at least 4 Drupal experts per region and if none of these respond or if less than 3 respond in a certain timeframe (say 4 hours) then the request will be sent to all the regions. That way the user is always guaranteed more than one response from the Drupal site. Also we could put up how many developers-designer are in Ireland like the Drupal.org site does with the amount of themes/developers etc so that it show there are more than just those who responded to the users request.

I will leave this open as it depends whether people would rather go by regions or all ireland (which would be easier to implement).

Great to see a discussion

Posted by stella on April 4, 2011 at 12:49pm

Great to see a discussion going on this, and also pleased to see that there is a new group meetup in Wicklow - though not sure, I'll be able to travel down yet.

As for the regions thing, I think it would be nice to have it by region, but think that the community is possibly too small at present. I imagine that there would be some counties with only 1 or 2 developers, and even some with none! I reckon going with all of Ireland is a good start and we can review it some time after launch to see if/how it is being used, the number of developers signed up and how it is working generally. It also means it's easier to do, as the per-region thing would be slightly more difficult to implement as you say. Let's keep things simple for now and then review later.

Regions

Posted by igzeebihir on April 4, 2011 at 1:09pm

Why not look for a count of developers in each region...1 for Kildare here...

Wicklow

Posted by Ortaga on April 4, 2011 at 1:28pm

OK
4 developers I know of in Wicklow

I'll go with stella's suggestion on regions

Posted by Jimmel on April 4, 2011 at 1:52pm

I think Stella suggestion to start with all Ireland makes practical sense from a start-up point of view. The website could be used to collect and collate information on the dispersion of Drupal developers/designers throughout Ireland and a decision on regions could be made in a few months.

This is me while we are adding informatin
Galway based Graphic designer/theme builder/all round Drupal dogsbody.
Not sure whether that makes me a developer or not. And on that issue should we not try an encourage more Graphics experts, UI experts into the Drupal community (it's all very well having a robust working system but it needs to be tailored more towards the user experience and user interaction).