Posted by Bevan on March 12, 2009 at 8:54pm
I would love to be contributing a lot more to the Drupal Usability community, especially in the implementation of prototypes, and solutions to usability issues. However I'm pretty limited by the need to make a living.
Several people here in the community work heavily on Drupal Usability, and appear to do so under company time. How did you convince your employers to invest in Drupal Usability?
Comments
Don't ask don't tell
Don't ask don't tell sometimes works.
:-D
"We are all worms. But I believe that I am a glow-worm." - Winston Churchill
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Ha!
Ha!
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present a cost-benefit
Your company is going to need to see some benefit to investing their time in it. With modules, you can often justify usability work as improving it for the client, and therefore billable. Usability for core is hard to justify for your clients, however, since the changes will take a while to ever reach the client. So there's no immediate monetary benefit to the company to allocate your time for it. Like you, the business has to earn a living to pay you yours.
However, there are softer, medium to long-term arguments that can be made. If usability and design are things that your company wants to be publicly recognized for, donating resources to Drupal core is a good way to do it. Following the point above, usability skills have to be maintained, and work on Drupal is cheap training. It's not enough to hire a usability person; usability work is a skill that rusts with disuse. One way to maintain a skill is through formal training, another is by doing. Having you spend a few hours a month working on Drupal usability is much cheaper than sending you to one formal training event per year.
Another option might be to see if Dries or Webchick would make an appeal to the companies that employee people in this group asking for them to donate time to the project.
End Client Sponsorship
The most likely source of funding would be fund driven organizations trying to promote activities (not just awareness of social issues) online.
An example would be how the Knight Foundation promotes journalism.
They key is to get grants for functional code (modules) AND funding for research and development of more user friendly interfaces for the modules specific to those activities.
I assume most fund driven organizations would rather have a custom built CMS if they weren't fully aware of the benefits of using Drupal to achieve their goals or the benefits they receive by contributing to Drupal development to create and donate modules and install profiles that suit their needs. If there are such organizations in your area, it could work out to approach them as a representative of your company with your company's consent?
I work for myself and set my
I work for myself and set my own schedule.
Thanks everyone for your
Thanks everyone for your input. It's much appreciated
Bevan/
Bevan/
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It seems to me that Drupal represents a new paradigm in how companies are going to grow. Whether they like it or not, we are interconnected, and will continue to move in this direction. The problem with companies that don't share their knowledge is that it's so much slower and doesn't benefit from the pool of knowledge that many people can bring to the table. The car companies are a perfect example of what the old paradigm has wrought. I believe that the open source model is the way that we can get beyond the economic crisis that we appear to be in.
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