Barnraising Best Practices?!

Posted by ianrhett on April 27, 2010 at 7:21am

I'm organizing a "barnraising" for a Nashville non-profit in July and I'm soliciting best practices and experience from anyone who's participated in or helped organize a 24 or 48 hour sprint to build a website with a group of volunteers? I've found two Drupalcamps where this happened, so far. Anyone else?

DrupalCamp Paris:
http://civicactions.com/blog/drupaln039go_drupalcamp_paris_a_community_b...

DrupalCamp Florida's case study:
http://drupal.org/node/755498

Comments

I've helped run/attended a

Posted by kaerast on April 27, 2010 at 8:21am

I've helped run/attended a couple of events like this now. The first a weekend in the countryside with around 20 people building a Drupal site for a mountain rescue team, the second a day building a site for the local soup kitchen (in Wordpress, but hush don't tell anybody here).

The main problem I saw on both events was that we didn't complete the job. The first one was a major problem because the number of people on the weekend meant we could make it really complicated and feature-full, and then nobody really wanted to do the finishing off afterwards. The second was much simpler, and so it didn't take a lot of finishing off.

A key thing to consider is infrastructure to make this happen. I was responsible for infrastructure and support on the weekend in the countryside, and could only arrive at the same time as everybody else. The internet connection in the building was almost non-existent, and flooding meant the entire village had no mains gas for cooking lunch. The second event, being both smaller and with time to setup, meant we could build a server the evening before. Keeping things simple really helped, don't bother with any fancy technology unless it's proven in the field and you are sure that everybody involved knows how to use it - spending the entire first morning teaching people to use git is not good.

Think about food and drink. On the weekend event we planned that really well, and it really helped having time to sit down away from the computers and chat about what needs doing next. We had one person come along purely to manage the cooking, and she took volunteers from the pool of geeks to help - particularly those who were stuck with nothing to do, or keen to learn how to improve their cooking. Definitely provide food and drink for free, especially free caffeine and cake.

Have a good way of logging what needs doing. We used Atrium on the first weekend, and a wiki on the second. Atrium got a little complicated, but seemed good for the people used to using it. The wiki got a little messy, but was a good way of keeping track of things for a simple job. Again - don't use technology people are unfamiliar with, they'll either not use it or spend ages trying to learn it.

Have standup meetings every so often. Get everybody to step away from their computers and stand up, they'll all be keen to get back to coding and won't have distractions so they'll keep the meeting short. In these meetings groups/individuals should all announce "what we've done, what we're about to do, what would help us do that".

The people joining a weekend like this get lots of experience seeing how other Drupal people work, and enjoy the networking. The non-profit wanting the website will get something really good for much less than the going rate (provided you can guarantee it gets completed). And you'll all enjoy a weekend together, ideally somewhere nice.

Finally, ensure you spend time with the client. It's really important to know exactly what they want and be able to get quick and good answers, especially since time is so limited. If they offer you a guided tour then take it - you'll really learn a lot in that time, mostly things you haven't thought to ask or they haven't thought to offer. The guided tour will sound like it's a waste of time, especially when you are keen to get on with coding, but is definitely a must.

Oh and check out the interviews and other videos with the people involved in the mountain rescue weekend we did.

I haven't done this with

Posted by sheldon rampton on April 27, 2010 at 12:52pm

I haven't done this with Drupal, but I've organized some online "barnraisings" for a nonprofit organization to help build content for wikis. Rather than get everyone to meet in the same physical space, I organized lists of articles that either needed writing or neded to be fact-checked, improved, etc. I also wrote up instructions on how to edit wiki pages, and I set up a live online chat room (using Campfire) where we had a couple of volunteers available so people could ask questions and get them answered in real time. Then we announced that the barnraising would occur at a specified date and time through the nonprofit's network of supporters, bloggers, etc.

It worked pretty well as a means of getting a group of people to work together on a common project, introduce them to one another and teach them how to edit wiki pages. A fair amount of work got done. It didn't get "completed" in the sense of having a perfect work product at the end, but that never happens with wikis anyway.

Sheldon Rampton
Senior web developer, New York State Senate
http://www.nysenate.gov
http://drupal.org/user/13085

I see that you already linked

Posted by liberatr on April 29, 2010 at 4:25pm

I see that you already linked to the Florida DrupalCamp write-up. Honestly, we could write a whole post about just the Coding for a Cause event we held.

Our goals were as follows:
1. Since we just had a DrupalCamp, have people apply knowledge.
2. Pair up new / inexperienced people with advanced / expert people.
3. Do some good work for a non-profit.
4. Provide a portfolio-building experience for everyone involved.
5. Inspire further involvement in the community. (Probably shared by all community service projects.)

Our biggest problem was lack of preparation on the project. We didn't dedicate enough time before the event to meet with the client, get a clear picture of their goals and business processes, have them all agree on functionality and design, and prioritize "must-have", "should-have" and "nice-to-have" features properly.

Finally, if doing this in the future, I would have a finished graphic design ready.

We know that next year, we want to get every single participant set up with a bunch of stuff the day or week before the event:
1. A local development environment.
2. An SVN / Git / FTP account
3. A copy of a base install - we started with Acquia, since it saved time downloading modules.
4. A copy of the base theme - including the sub-theme that would be customized throughout the day.
5. A copy of any necessary contrib modules that don't come with Acquia - Backup and Migrate comes to mind as a must-have for me, and when trying to do massive collaboration. Probably Features and Deploy would be good ones to have in the toolkit as well.

The facilities, food, and space will change with every group and project, but I have a few suggestions:
* If there is a Publix in Tennessee, write a letter to a local store and ask them for free stuff. They will often do it if it is for a non-profit.
* Get the NGO you are working with to put their Tax ID # on anything you buy - save some money, and possibly even get discounts. For our DrupalCamp, we partnered with the Central Florida Computer Society, which was the smartest move we made in our second year. They gave us use of their bank accounts, bookkeeper, tax number, volunteers, and countless other benefits.

I know Heather James did this in Ireland at a DrupalCamp:
http://civicactions.com/blog/2009/apr/09/drupal_camp_ireland
http://groups.drupal.org/node/18452

Apparently Stella built one of the sites completely by herself.

Ryan Price
DrupalEasy Podcast