To all group members, new and old:
As we talked about last night, we're trying to survey the group's skills and interests to determine the topics that interest people the most. By creating your profile on Devcard, you can see who in the group has similar skills and interests as you for networking, etc.
The information is private to the group. The only personal information you need to enter is a username/password and email address (not shown), but you're welcome to enter as much as you please. The information is not sold or used for any other purpose beyond connecting with the group.
To get your Devcard profile, please sign up here:
http://www.devcard.com/user/register
There are two parts. The first is your main account info, and then the Experience / Interests form. Yes, it's very long and a bit overwhelming, but you don't need to fill out the whole thing if you don't want to.
The site is still under active development (alpha stage), so please bear with us. Some statistics should be up soon within the next few days, shown on the site to those who have registered.
Cheers & feedback is appreciated,
- Dwight
Comments
Group Stats
We now have some aggregated group statistics available for viewing. Please visit the following link:
http://www.devcard.com/group-stats
However, this data doesn't fully represent the group yet as we still need more people filling it out, so if you're interested in the group and what we meet about, please go to the following link to quickly register:
http://www.devcard.com/user/register
The data is updated in real-time as people fill out the questions.
Thanks to those who have already filled it out!
Cheers,
- Dwight
Some thoughts on the Devcard
That is quite a number of choices, that's for sure. I'd say you were missing some (from my perspective at least) rather important content management systems:
IBM FileNet
EMC Documentum
OpenText Livelink
OpenText edocs
and others of course. All of these are mature and active with a very large user base. They do look at content management somewhat different than Drupal does, but they are all very much frameworks and with all due respect to the Drupal I love and use in my own business, in many ways years ahead of Drupal in many important ways. Given we live in London, less than 100km from the corporate headquarters of OpenText, a company that brings in over $1billion in revenue / year, I'd at least be happy to see that represented.
There are a huge number of others too of course, Nuxeo and Alfredo to name two "sort-of free" solutions that are also commercially established.
Also (and I hope you don't mind the critique but if the devcard is to be used by the group then I think it should be openly debated) I think there is a lot of demographic information that is missing. You got my age, oddly enough, but not how many years experience I've got nor my education ... surely those are more relevant then when I popped into this world.
Finally and no offense intended, it is an interesting collection but I think Drupal offers far better ways to garner the information desired without such a arduous process for users. Perhaps a good future topic for group discussion is a real-time creation of such a site using CCK, auto-completion and a probably a few other tricks (and maybe we can show you how to show the year of my birth without a comma :-))
Thanks for doing this though, I think the work has value!
President & CEO, Global Alliance of Trusted Experts
http://www.gatevillage.net -- South-Western Ontario's Drupal Community Building Site
Thanks Dave
Thanks Dave - I agree, the number of choices is huge, and then there are tons and tons missing, and perhaps some that shouldn't be there.
I wasn't sure which CMS' to include as there are probably thousands. Here's what Wikipedia has just as an example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_content_management_systems
I just tried to include a few from the different programming languages (PHP, Java, .Net, etc). The user-base of a CMS would be a good indicator for it's inclusion though, I agree. I'm not sure the easiest way to get that though, and then if we need to collect info on who knows which CMS's (I was mainly trying to determine group interest in presentation topics).
And yeah, the demographics were a bit random (whatever just came to mind :) - I wasn't sure how many people would fill those out and nothing is required. As for work history/education, yes it's lacking there too, but I didn't want to spend too much time duplicating LinkedIn and I thought the questionnaire stuff was the most important stuff.
The main goal (in my opinion) was to try and see what topics people would be interested in hearing about (relating to Drupal specifically and tech in general).
I only spent a few days (as I'm quite busy with a lot of stuff), but again I agree, there are lots of other ways to collect the data. It would be nice to have the questions branch out once you select something. Ie., if you choose PHP, then it would ask a lot of questions related to PHP, such as MySQL, Apache, frameworks, etc. What it really needs is a graph database with tons of paths between nodes to capture the relationships between programming languages, frameworks, software, etc.
I thought that was a little overkill for the purposes of this group and determining presentation topics, so I just used some simple taxonomy for the time being to see if that would get us somewhere.
Anyways, thanks Dave - I really do appreciate the feedback and hope to see you out sometime!
Cheers,
- Dwight
Hi Dwight I certainly didn't
Hi Dwight
I certainly didn't mean anything disparaging towards you or your good work, I totally understand how such side projects need to be done quick and dirty. I really did mean that discussing how it could be better would make for a really great meeting. Drupal offers a number of ways of looking at this real-world problem, some of them involve coding, some involve something that makes code (but isn't really coding either) and some, I'm sure, are little more than configuration of a particular module. If there is wifi available, I've got a great platform for playing around in real time and you can accomplish a lot in Drupal in a very short time.
I really would love to come and join the fun, I enjoyed the meetings I went to in Kitchener and I'm sure I'd enjoy these. It is just a matter of finding the time and while I can find 30 minutes here or there to write an email or two, so far at least I have not been able to find the time to get to these meetings. I'm essentially a freelance consultant with many clients in different time zones, I try not to travel but I do a lot of it just the same. Whine, whine, I know, but I've felt bad about not being able to make it to even the one I REALLY tried to get to a few months back. sigh
The truth is that Drupal is far more a hobby for me than it is a money-making tool, though I'm not against the idea at all, I already have a pretty good gig doing Enterprise Content Management projects using one of those other brands I mentioned. BTW: you are correct about the profile, there is always linkedin: http://www.linkedin.com/in/kinch and your response to my earlier message has already allowed me to say yes to a connection request should you so desire.
Anyway, I will continue to put forth an effort to attend and promise that when I do I will be an active participant.
President & CEO, Global Alliance of Trusted Experts
http://www.gatevillage.net -- South-Western Ontario's Drupal Community Building Site