I have a question regarding the uptake of Drupal in Ireland. It seems (IMHO) that there is no significant awareness of Drupal as a platform in Ireland. Obviously the members of this group are aware of the benefits of the platform but in honesty is the business community / IT community at large aware of the Drupal name and the many benefits that can be leveraged from using it.
I was considering setting up http://www.drupal.ie as a place to promote Drupal in Ireland, as a showcase for drupals uses and potentially a marketplace for drupal developers / vendors to sell thier services to customers, but in honesty the feedback I have recieved from a handfull of the drupal community has been somewhere between lukewarm and negative.
My thinking is that there could and should be a much more significant market for Drupal in Ireland (if there was more awareness).
I would greatly appreciate any feedback / opinions that you have.
Kind regards
Finbarr
Comments
Not a bad idea
I was originally one of those lukewarm people I have to admit :) However when I thought about it I couldn't figure out why cos I'm definitely in favour of promoting Drupal in Ireland and have organised local meetups, etc. And as I make my living of building websites for others using Drupal, why wouldn't I be in favour of such a group? In the end I realised why I was being hesitant.
My biggest, and only, concern regarding setting up a more business focused Drupal community in Ireland, is that we may end up with two communities - one developer and open-source focused, and one commercially focused. I'd really hate for us to have a split community. I think I would be a lot happier with the idea if we could somehow integrate the two communities and build a close relationship between them. I would even go as far as saying perhaps at the next Drupal camp, in addition to the developer newbie / intermediate / advanced tracks, that we have some more commercially focused sessions - or even it's own track if there's enough uptake.
more drupal in ireland? yes!
Hello Fin,
Welcome to the Drupal Ireland Group :) Yeah, we're really interested in raising the profile of Drupal in Ireland, so it's why, as Stella mentioned, we have set up local Drupal user groups, and have had larger Drupal events.
Hmmm... not sure who you're talking to in the Drupal community that is negative towards promoting Drupal in Ireland? I agree Drupal doesn't have the profile that Joomla or Wordpress does in Ireland. Nothing wrong with Joomla or Wordpress, but web developers should have more than just those tools in their kit.
I really recommend coming to DrupalCon in Paris. There is going to be a stronger commercial and design focus this time. It's such a great buzz.
http://paris2009.drupalcon.org/
Last year, 5 of us from Ireland attended, made great connections with Drupal developers abroad, and also cooked up plans for promoting Drupal in Ireland. In fact, at that time, I registered http://drupalireland.com/ with ideas to develop a site to do pretty much what you're proposing. At that time, others in this group felt we should keep the groups.drupal.org/ireland space instead of fragmenting the still very young group. In that time we've grown quite a bit. You're the 143rd member :)
I didn't agree with just keeping it here at first, but I see it's good to keep the membership-based group in the context of groups.drupal.org, as it also embeds us in the wider Drupal community. So as part of our plan, we focused on local groups and bigger events. The next one is planned to be in Belfast, as far as I know.
That's just a bit of the background of what we've done so far.
I'm really glad you want to help out, it's certainly time to raise the bar a little higher. I know web designers and developers are looking for ways to stand out in this current economy. As well, Drupal can widen your client base (lots of international opportunities).
Again, I highly recommend investing in the trip to DrupalCon. I think it's a good initiation into the Drupal community. You'll see how alot of the larger well-respected Drupal shops/freelance developers operate within the community, and while they offer commercial services and have a business focus they give back quite alot to Drupal as an open-source project (not just money, but patches, user support, etc).
In the best case examples of Drupal shops/design companies, there really isn't a rift/divide between commercial involvement versus open-source involvement. In the worst case examples, commercial developers sponge off the Drupal community, never give back to the community, never take part in any support/documentation/donation, etc.
So I think that maybe what Stella is talking about? I think we want to promote a good Drupally community and culture in Ireland.
Does that make sense? I'm just trying to explain where any concerns may be coming from and give you a little history and context.
Looking forward to seeing what you'll come up with!
go for it. such a site could
go for it. such a site could do no harm, but I think the main issue will be to find people/resource to maintain it up to date. We tried to have similar pages on gdo (see the Irish developer list) but such pages can get out dated quickly. There is already the domain drupalireland.com which redirects to this group, you might want to get in touch with the owner of this domain.
Most importantly, I think what is needed is actual people participating in BarCamp or other conferences and advocate Drupal (rent a booth). Organizing DrupalCamps is great, but reaching out into the Designers or techies crowd is the key.
In Drupal, the Community Builds You
If you get you chance to come to Paris (you should), don't miss that session: In Drupal, the Community Builds You! It's a panel so we could also participate and give some feedback from the previous camps we're run in Ireand (they are still looking for panelists).
Agreed, but we maybe need a varity of approaches.
I agree we need to raise the profile of Drupal, but it will take a variety of approaches. Besides a Drupal Ireland website (of whatever form) another small way of promoting Drupal is to remember to suggest to your customers that you send out a joint press release when a site goes live. If you send it to news sites that focus on Irish IT issues I'm pretty sure most of them would pick it up (they are hungry for Irish related content after all). The same could be done for BarCamps and maybe one listing Irish contributors to upcoming DrupalCon events - although that may have to be coordinated via a Drupal Ireland newsfeed to avoid duplication.
Here is an example of someone doing such a promotion for a Joomla site:
http://irishdev.com/Home/News/467-Galway-Guys-Set-Up-Talent-Tank.html
Pretty simple really - it promotes the site, includes a picture, a quote and name checks the CMS (and also the development company I would suggest). It won't change the world overnight, but it will raise the name recognition of Drupal with our potential customers over time, and that benefits the Drupal community as a whole.
Jim.
Good Question.
These are really good questions. I guess there is some awarenes of druapl in Third-Level Universities, FAS, Printed-media (newspapers or business magazines) and technical/web community. I just found drupal through reading web reviews (had experience of commerical CMS) and wanted something similar - choose joomla over drupal for no particular reason but the web reviews tend to be a bit technical for newcomers who are not web wizards.
A website reaches a certain audience naturally but to grow awareness/traffic may need extra effort?
1/ Thru newspapers, business magazines is obvious way.
2/ Or maybe better is to use the power of "umbrella" organisations like Disability Fed. Ireland, SIPTU, IBEC, IMSE who combined have hundreds of smaller members around Ireland. These umbrella groups would probably be delighted to publish a article on drupal (how it can work for our members, bla, bla) if real-life case studies are provided. Their newsletters combined have a very wide distribution across Ireland often to the smaller members who are likely candidates to use drupal rather than big corporate ireland.
Not sure if Enterprise Ireland, Lottery would provide a little grant for something like this?
Good Idea
I do think this is a good idea.
The only issue with this (I think this came up at DrupalCamp a few months back too) was the risk of splitting the community. Basically at the moment drupal groups is the place to go to get information on Drupal, and if there is another site there is a risk that the talent is split between the two sites.
My suggestion for this would be to make drupal.ie a site dedicated to something that is either Ireland & Drupal specific, or to some aspect that Drupal Groups does not cover (while still being Ireland specific). I'm not sure what that would be. As said by the OP a marketplace for drupal developers might be exactly that.