DrupalDojo.com and "social network"

What are the main complaints of newcomers to the drupal community besides "Drupal's too hard." I've heard many negative and positive comments but the one that stands out in my head is "I can't find anything." Personally, I don't think that we should continue this thread of scattered information.

When I use to work in broadcast television we use to hire these outrageously expensive research groups to help us focus our brand and to target our market audience. While the dojo does not have the resources available we can take advantage of the general principles. One of the biggest things is, "Why do your viewers watch your station." In our case it was Weather. In the dojo, its the tutorials and more specifically the video tutorials. In that since I say we should really focus as what our users expect from us. Creating additional forums and community will only clutter things and its success as a community is probably limited. I expect that only more cries for support would arise from a community. Regardless, I think we should focus our attention to our content, the videos.

Actually I think the planning for Dojo 2.0 is a bit premature. We've already accomplished the most difficult task for a new organization and website, finding our niche. I think we have found our niche in video tutorials and due to the lack of general participation on the development site I think we should at least consider the entire overhaul of drupal dojo and instead devote a good while to high quality video productions, move away from the live session phenomenon and towards the delivery of content. dd.com could temporarily take the position of a video delivery splash page containing nothing more than tutorials and specifically video tutorials. This means that we no longer announce dojo lessons, instead we produce 3-4 tutorials while we are doing what we are currently doing. These 3-4 tutorials will receive the most attention from any tutorial we have ever done. THey will be of quality that makes twit.tv and other hi-quality produced shows shudder. These 3-4 tutorials will create a back log. Now we have a 4 week pad. We release one tutorial a week on Friday morning, that way our viewers will have time over the entire weekend to view these tutorials, comment and increase the information available. We should have comments for each tutorial on dd.com and hopefully include the pdf "cheat sheet" I discussed in the issue cue. Now we can focus an entire week's time to producing one tutorial and our viewers will know that they can get it on Friday night. Incase something goes wrong, we have 3-4 that we can just pull out of a hat. Any time a deficit is created we need to pull some OT and get it caught back up to the 3-4 week buffer.

Following this plan we will have reliable content. Once we have overcome the many hurdles with doing the above mentioned strategy we can resume our additional planning for Dojo 2.0, infact the planning should continue during this process so that there will be ample time for refinement of ideas. Now we meet our immediate user's needs and hopefully grow the dojo. By growing the dojo hopefully other resources and volunteers will become available. Our website can be crap if our content is good.

So your asking, "What about the live sessions." So I've heard these live sessions are really cool and I've been to a great number of them. But how many truly beneficial questions arise? Most of the time the question is, "Can you pastebin that? Pastebin? Pastebin?" What good does that do anyone? When real questions do arise most of them will be answered if people just wait until the lessons conclusion. So what happens to live sessions? We make them into special events, highly publicized events that may only happen once every 1-2 months. Then people will bring there big questions, once that truly deserve attention. It could be like what television shows like "Myth Busters" do, where once in a blue moon they do a "revisited" episode where they take user responses to flaws, inaccuracy's, etc... into account and resolve, answer, and test the purposed issues. Now the live sessions become valuable again, we gain public appeal, and we are pumping out extremely high quality material while simultaneously resolving some of our infrastructure issues by just not having to deal with them.

I know we've spent several weeks now gathering feature requests, don't worry those won't go to waste and now we can refine them. This is probably considered a radical approach but I really think that its beneficial to our users and is within our current potential.

Please let me know what yall think, comment, reply and keep me responsible.

Peace,

-mpare

Pare Technologies
Drupal Consulting, Themeing, and Module Development
806.781.8324 | 806.733.3025
www.paretech.com

Figure Something Out? Document Your Success!

I have not been active in the dd 2.0 discussion thus far but as someone who used the dojo from within the first few weeks of its creation I have to agree with Addie. g.d.o. functions very adequately as a social/discussion/networking platform and adding this to dd.com would probably not add anything of note and would likely dilute the dojo g.d.o community effectiveness. Redundancy is not always a good thing.

DD.com as a social network = community split. Or at the least, you have to leave one community for another (d.o) when you've grown your Drupal skills. So I'm definitely with Addie here. That said, it may be good to have more functionality at d.o to let new Drupal users "connect" and share their knowledge as they learn.

I definitely think the term "social network" is adding additional ruckus about all of this. As I stated in the other issue, I see the Dojo as a place to learn, teach, for people wanting to climb the Drupal ladder to know easier how to get there. While I don't like the idea of forums, user profiles, or other "social" aspects, with the fear of splitting the community in mind, I do think things like the "bookmarks" or repo for various resources is a great idea.

The dojo should be a central place to get tutorials, lessons, links to other resources, etc., for aspiring developers, themers, and contributors.