Marketplace

From my inbox to yours...

Subject:    drupal consultant?
Date:   August 9, 2006 6:21:29 PM EDT
From:     mark@labornotes.org

Hi Noel,

I got your email from Linda Setchell at Eggplant Active Media. I work for a small non-profit in NYC called Labor Notes. We publish a monthly magazine for grassroots labor activists and have been working on redesigning our very old website to run on Drupal. We are almost done, but need to find someone who can help us take our site (which as far as I can tell is almost completely finished) and migrate it off the Eggplant test site and onto Site5 where we are going to host it. (The need kinda goes hand-in-hand with by Arthur Foelsche leaving Eggplant.)

I'm collaborating with Yvette on her Cultural Fusion project , with her permission I'm posting the following request to the group. I like to use this project as an example of "managed project services" that this marketplace can offer (as what I'm doing now), as well as a "Collaborative Drupal Project" that the to-be-developed BMOC model can be applied.

If you read thru the business and development plan that Ron and Yvette put together on the CF site, it seems as a mission impossible for any one single Drupal consulting firm today. To understand this project, first scan thru the main page http://comfusion.pbwiki.com/CulturalFusion, it is most important to grasp the mathematical concept of infinity that is being told thru the story of Hotel Infinity. I quote the version from Dave Stacy at the end of his article " The point of all this is that infinity is NOT a number, and--though there is a subject called "transfinite arithmetic"--you can't think in terms of doing ordinary arithmetic with infinity. The best way to think about it, is that infinity is a property that some sets possess. Richard Dedekind defined an infinite set to be one which could be put in one-to-one correspondence with a proper subset of itself. This is the very thing that we see drupal as a community plumbing can enable for many self-organizing network of networks that can grow into infinity.

Okay everybody,

Neil McEvoy, you have tempeted me to announce the "Drupal Open Co-operative Business Model", the first of its kind, this too will be a Business Center of the marketplace. This will also cut down on the issue of pricings, Asian's cutting your profit grips and all that stuff! So here it goes:

Copyright Notice 2005, Fouad Riaz Bajwa, All rights Reserved till further notification:
Remember this business model titled "Drupal Open Co-operative Business Model BMOC" is neither patented nor it is available for patenting under US Federal Laws or international WTO-TRIPS and only falls into Copyright of creative expression, it is the Official Copyright of Mr. Fouad Riaz Bajwa, General Secretary and Co-Founder of FOSSFP: Free and Open Source Software Foundation of Pakistan resident of Lahore, Pakistan and is announced as of June 20th of 2006 on http://groups.drupal.org/marketplace as part of ongoing discussions to formulate a Drupal Services Consulting Marketplace. On my behalf, I officially authorize, Jenny Hsueh of On Demand Network, NJ and Neil McEvoy Bootstrap Ventures (I hope you two don't mind!) to defend this model and its Copyright legalities in New Jersey, USA, or, anywhere they deem there is a violation or misuse of the business model titled "Drupal Open Co-operative Business Model BMOC".

Yeup thats right, as you all may see that the model we are formulating here has Social Responsibility as the number one agenda, how, first, a certain percentage of income goes directly to the Drupal Project, it will be there issue what they do with the money, secondly, as the Drupal Marketplace is completely established, we will clone it to Drupal Non-Profits Marketplace for supporting Non-Profits throughout the world for empowerment through Drupal. We will have to keep this idea in mind, 100%!

Secondly, where ever possible, the marketplace will even contribute to non-profits and capacity development activities around its sphere of service provision activities. Yes, if any new products turn into ventures, the marketplace will also provide seeding services thus it will be a hub for social enterprising!

Great idea, I think it needs some rounding out.

First off, there are going to be providers with different levels of competency. It would be in everyone's interests, right off the bat, to establish particular services they provide and have some method of feedback allowing individual providers to be rated. I would hate to see a couple of poor client experiences lead to an entire marketplace getting a bad reputation.

Secondly, economics. There are going to be individual consultants who can work for much less than consultant shops which can provide more services. Something that would be interesting, as a way of leveling the playing field between each, is the establishment of a sub-consultancy group as well, where groups can collaborate to provide services. My company, for example, sells a bulk mailing program that intergrates nicely with Drupal through Web services. While I may not be interested in every client out there, people certainly should be able to take advantage of the mailer I have directly rather than sending clients over.