The Liquidation of a Similar Group and the Clarification of Dojo Guidelines

I've been learning Drupal for a little over a year now and have created a new group Students of Drupal to share my sometimes incredibly hard-won triumphs scaling the drupal learning curve. However the D.G. moderators have since pointed me to the Boston Initiative and the Drupal Dojo as potential places to migrate the content of my group and to express my ideas.

I wasn't even aware of the Drupal Dojo group beforehand but the fundamental mission statement of the Drupal Dojo is on par with the goals that I've set out for the Students of Drupal group. Given that, along with its already established presence and much cooler name, I could simply post the wiki's and discussions I've created for the Students of Drupal group, but before doing so I wanted to express my disdain for these kinds of groups becoming mere subsidiaries of the Drupal support forums. It is my opinion that any post with a title that ends with a question mark may be far better off in the drupal support forums, where it is far more visible and likely to be answered by veteran Drupalers. As I have said in my Students of Drupal wiki, Getting Help When Your Stuck:

"The purpose of the Students of Drupal group is to compliment the already vast support network that the Drupal community has built by locating, discussing and amalgamating the best links and resources that have helped students to conquer the Drupal learning curve without (but all too often shortly after) spending a fortune or wasting weeks and months of time piecemealing the required body of knowledge in desperate solitude.... However, members of the Students of Drupal Group are encouraged to create and post their own tutorials and case studies to display and share their newly acquired expertise when they finally grasp something in Drupal that has been pestering them so we can continue to reciprocate and extend the resources of the group."

Looking at the type dropdown menu when creating a new discussion in the Drupal Dojo, which includes the options "Lesson, tutorial, or howto," "Workshop, sprint, or project," "Discussion, coffeetalk, or BOF," "Dojo documentation and guidelines," and "Showcase, Case study or demo" I suspect a similar policy was meant in the creation of the Drupal Dojo. Unfortunately looking over the most recent posts more than half of all content created in the Drupal Dojo are questions concerning modules, site configuration, and installation - all topics that are far more represented in issue queues and support forums.

That is not to say that questions should be discouraged or that people posting questions should be instantly flamed, but it seems to be in their own best interest to learn where to go to get the greatest exposure and expertise to answer their questions. The Students of Drupal group, much like the Drupal Dojo, was meant to be more like a student-run Open University and to that effect I have been creating wiki's on what I believe to be the best collections of tutorials for the various areas of the drupal learning curve, for navigating the drupal community so beginners can get help and not pester or waste any time, as well as case studies such as the one where I document the lessons that I learned during my first views configuration (with the help of spovlot at the drupal support forums), and a "theming strategies in context" project that I've been working on for quite some time that discusses the "when" and "why's" of using one theming technique over another throughout the site build process. All to both share my sometimes incredibly hard-won triumphs scaling the drupal learning curve over the past year, and to serve as examples of the kind of content that is appropriate for this type of group.

Lastly, posting questions about modules, site configuration, and installation creates an accessibility issue because valuable content such as tutorials, workshops, documentation, and case studies, as well as polls, events, jobs, and wiki's are inevitably buried in the onslaught of poorly targeted questions. In its current state, all else being equal, I believe the Students of Drupal group is > the Drupal Dojo. Unless we differentiate the group from the Drupal support forums and issue queues and form as a point of entry the knowledge of where to go in the larger community to get the most help, it will continue to exist primarily as a mere subsidiary of the Drupal support forums, with a smattering of advertisements for workshops...