[version en français ici : http://groups.drupal.org/node/15683 ]
Hello and thanks to everybody for participating in drupalngo,
First, last week-end was great. Check
http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23drupalngo
http://video.google.fr/videosearch?q=drupalngo
to get an idea.
One of the crazy goals of drupalngo was to make a data driven, community oriented website just over a week-end.
We were close, but not close enough. The reason? We started way too slow on saturday, loosing nearly 8 hours.
We worked on a steady pace on sunday, with a webteam of nearly 40 people at peek time. But sorrily that was not fast enough to have a finished website online at the end of week-end.
The website is live, but not ready yet for the general public.
Some of what we have done collectively on the Aurore project:
- found a name : soleos.info
- decided on the user experience
- written texts, help, policies
- designed a logo and a template
- defined a data model
- coded a multi-rating module tailored to needs of the site
- ported a couple of modules to Drupal 6
- installed and tested a multi-point localisation visualization solution
- installed a faceted search engine based on Solr
- set up a blog with super-easy embedding of videos
- found a solution to allow official and community corrected content to coexist
- defined fine-grained permissions, precise to the form field
And I'm sure I'm forgetting a lot of things that went into the mix, so please feel free to complete!
Now, what's next ? Obviously, we need to finish the project. We need to finish it in order to be proud of it, and we need to finish it because that's why we started it.
The good news is, we estimate that it can be done in one (big) day with a little bit of work in anticipation. Not so far from our initial goal...
I'm sure we can regroup again, and get this thing done! Please be prepared :-)
Remember that if you were there this week-end, you still can access the Trac and Wiki here :
http://aurore.drupalngo.org/trac
Please don't hesitate to read and add more documentation.
What we learned : how to do a drupalngo
On a more general basis, we have gathered a lot of input. And the result is that now, we have a better picture of how to actually do a drupalngo :-)
What didn't worked :
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The scope of the project was a little bit of moving target, with some editorial part added late.
-
The actual data content was not ready enough. It impeded data model definition and testing.
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We should have never tried to work in 15 or 25 people meetings the first day. It's just plain crazy.
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Tools like Svn and Trac should have been set up for everybody in advance. Some people have lose hours in installations and settings.
What worked :
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We applied the open source online way of collaboration to a real life event. No artificial hierarchy, just competencies, dialogs, and consensus.
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Very small team of 1 to 3 persons were very effective. In fact I noticed that 4 people teams naturally split in 2 people sub-teams.
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Project facilitation was done by 15 minutes stand-up meeting, à la Scrum. After each 1h45 work session on sunday, each team told everybody what have been done, what were the problems, and what was their next tasks.
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We crossed the competencies boundaries, fostering communications between each disciplines. And that included Aurore, the project initiator NGO.
I personally think that we are better armed than ever to do even crazier events, with even more people.
That's the paradox of this first drupalngo: we had to do it to learn how to do it...
Julien