Discussion from February 11 online meeting

what was recorded? I didn't hear any announcement of voice or audio.

I saw your post a couple of days ago, and haven't had time to respond.

I think it is an excellent summary and really gives the most important points which motivated everyone on Sunday.

The only thing I would stress would be some of Sepeck's contributions, apart from, as you say, helping us to hash out some very complicated issues. One was that, the weird "contributor links" checkbox that is half way down the page when you edit your user profile at d.o., when you check it, makes a new block appear on the right-hand side of the page when you log into d.o., chock full of fun and games and handy links for drupal geeks. And the first link (Sepeck implemented it as we spoke on Sunday) is to the advanced search facility on d.o. (there is a similar one here on g.d.o when you go into advanced search). It's facilities for narrowing down searches through node types and taxonomy and module topics is remarkable, and goes a long way to ward off one of everyone's pet peeves on d.o., namely, how to find stuff without a sequential search through all the handbooks and their single hierarchy , single entry-point structure.

So now I have seen Josh's post, which is amazing in the sense that it is as if he was there talking with us, because a lot of the stuff he is saying in his post really addresses most of our concerns from last Sunday.

Josh is all for a having DrupalDojo.com set up so people (the people!) can easily find the good stuff we are producing here on Dojo. So people can easily find a way of getting to what they need. And where everything is integrated into the handbooks, can be used to enrich the handbooks. What Josh is saying meets squarely on one of our biggest concerns, which is overcoming our relative isolation so we can reach out to many people who as we speak are pulling their hair out (if the posts on d.o. are anything to go by). And also to showcase what we are doing so everyone knows about that, too.

I would comment directly on Josh's post, but the wiki commenting isn't set up, so I will go on commenting here on what Josh is saying.

Josh fully meets head on another of our concerns, where some of us (including you, from what you were saying, add1sun, the other day, and what you have said above), namely, that we not drift away from g.d.o at all, and continue using the group as our main water cooler. That is, let's have DrupalDojo.com to meet some of our needs that can't be addressed in any other way, but let's stay centered in the community, let's make sure we remain squarely centered in what we are doing with a scenario of collaborating with the Drupal community (whose high level of activity, intelligence and good solid work over the years has made Drupal possible after all), and not forking in any way, even as an interest group.

That leaves only one of our major concerns from the other day which Josh does not address, perhaps because of what he says about it being too much work and in the end a drain of resources. He may be right there. What most of us are in dire need of (apart from having our brains tested, of course), is a scratch site, where:

1. We would have a place to put fully functioning demos from the lessons;
2. And a place to put demos of our own, and perhaps use them for mini lessons.

For example, I gave a demo at the last meeting of the Buenos Aires Drupal Users Group on how to make a CRM-light with just CCK and Views, and I would love to have a "dojo" place to have that running together with some documentation so people can re-use it. I feel doing that (maybe on DrupalDojo.org, and not the brochure site DrupalDojo.com) would be extremely useful, a place full of demos of that kind, a "demo" garden, would be incredible. Just to give another example, take a look at funnymonkey's Userlink + Taxonomy = Useful demo site: I had to tag it in delicious, because I stumbled upon it by chance in the mailing lists, and then couldn't find it even on their site! And it is just incredibly useful.

In the Cathedral and the Bazaar, in the final Acknowledgements section, Eric Steven Raymond underlines one of the startlingly clear points made in the book:

"Phil Hudson reminded me that the social organization of the hacker culture mirrors the organization of its software, and vice-versa."

That means, that the democratization of the flow of information in an open source software community is essential to keeping that software strong, clean, functioning, beholden to no-one.

MVC: more value in the community!

And that is a contribution we on this Dojo group certainly have a chance of making in the Drupal community.

Victor Kane
http://awebfactory.com.ar