Discussing Growth: DrupalDojo.com/net/org?

UPDATE: I made a mistake and had comments turned off. Please comment on this! I want your feedback and discussion!

In just six weeks, this group has really taken off, and I have been extremely pleased and excited by the response from the community, and by people's willingness to jump in and help out.

I think we're doing a lot of valuable work. We've got an excellent core group and a process for having "lesson" events that seems to really provide value, especially given the excellent work that so many of you have done to create screencasts and written documentation after the fact. So thank you all once again for your participation.

The topic of the day is growing pains. There was much discussion of this in Sunday's CoffeeTalk discussion, which I was thrilled to see take on a life of its own without my participation.

There are several points I would like to cover, not least of which is what (if anything) to do with the domains drupaldojo.com, and .org, which Squidster took the initiative to acquire, and .net which is owned by Senpai. Read on for my thoughts on this, including a pretty graph!

Visual Aid

DrupalDojo.com is for The People

The biggest need we have at the moment is to get the excellent materials we're producing out into the world. Currently it's hard to find the screencasts and documentation if you're a newbie: you have to find out about the dojo somehow, and then once you're on the group homepage you have to hunt for the stuff you're really after.

I think the single best things that the Dojo project could to do improve its utility is to create a simple, easy, obvious repository for the products we create. This is what I propose we do with drupaldojo.com:

• Brochure-ware style site
• Attractive/simple design
• Possible aggregator: dojo planet, RSS feed from group, etc
• Maybe five pages total
  • Frontpage w/latest products
  • About the Dojo page explaining process
  • Lessons directory (screencast+documentation, sortable)
  • Archive page: IRC Transcripts, other gems from groups.drupal.org/drupal-dojo
  • How to get involved; links to handbook, group, etc

While some of those (archive, lessons) would actually be views of many nodes, you get my point: this site should be small and simple. It should make it blindingly easy to get at the tutorials and documentation we're creating -- big links and graphics for screencasts -- and also to make it easier for people to lurk.

With this site in place, I think we could increase the Dojo's "reach" considerably, help many new developers ramp up, promote Drupal in general, and also help keep our own sub-community focused, happy and moving forward.

G.D.O is for The Community

I'm a firm believer in keeping this groups.drupal.org group as the center of the dojo community. There are several reasons for this:

• Retain vital connection to Drupal community
• Scalable infrastructure / don't have to worry about hosting
• Drive G.D.O development

The impetus for starting this group was community service, and I am committed to keeping that at the core of what we do. Given that the nature of the group has gone in a different direction than I initially expected (which is cool!), I see one of the main ways to make the dojo valuable and integrated is to have it serve both as a gateway for developers new to Drupal and/or the community, and also as a hub for active project participants. Sticking with groups.drupal.org means we're close to home, easy to find, and it encourages our group members to explore and join other more specific groups.

Another reason is logistical. Hosting an active community site is a headache. I think the drain on personal resources that would come from hosting our own community site (especially as we continue to scale) would be detrimental to the Dojo's purpose. I'm happy to leave that hassle with the good people at OSUOSL and Moshe.

Now, I know that the groups system here isn't perfect, but the "Drupal way" is to collaborate, not to fork. With over 500 subscribers, we are the largest group on G.D.O, and we have some ability to make requests in terms of how the functionality of this site works. We've already been able to use it to some effect -- wiki pages, for instance -- and I would like to make the most of this. Making G.D.O better is a service in its own right.

IRC is for The Elite

We have 500 group subscribers, but the IRC channel tends to have somewhere between 20 and 40 people idling in it (not including bots). This is partly a function of IRC's relative difficulty, and also a matter of self-selection.

I see the "average IRC population" as a good measure of our hardcore support. There are plenty of people who really just want to get their drupal-learn on, and there's nothing wrong with that. The number of people who want to be real dojo-heads -- idling in IRC and/or actively posting on the groups page -- will always be less. IMHO this is a good thing.

I'm relatively confident that the IRC channel will remain a very small subset of the total group population, although the scale of use during designated "active" times such as lessons and coffetalks will likely increase. No need to say much more about this.

Odds 'n' Ends

Some other points I'd like to touch on since this is turning into a big ol' brain dump:

•  CoffeeTalks: I'm really jazzed that Sunday's discussion went well, and I'd really love it if the people who helped pull that together would pick a repeatable time for that to happen. Regular times help drive participation over time, and I think a weekly Dojo chat is probably really useful. Perhaps even more than once a week. International time-zone scheduling is difficult, to say the least. If there were two regularly scheduled CoffeeTalks, one in the 'morning', and one in the 'evening', developers from disparate regions could meet in Skype and discuss the issues that sometimes take on a life of their own while in voice chat. Summarizing the information gleaned from these talks right back onto the pages of the g.d.o would help others who didn't get to listen in. If they feel, after reading the synopsis, that they should have been listening, they can download the audio file and give it a spin. What say you? Is the idea of having two separate CoffeeTalk times a helpful thing or a divisive thing? Sound off in the poll!
• Guest Teachers: With the group pulling together to talk on its own, and Greggles running a lesson on CVS, I'm feeling very confident that we can begin trying to incorporate other teachers into the mix, and/or have more of our own regulars step up to give lessons. This is important, as I can't sustain a weekly lesson schedule forever. ;)
• Integrating With Other Groups: We've already been doing some of this by default, working with the documentation team, taking up the Themer Pack as a subject, but I'd like to highlight the importance of having dojo-members take part in other Drupal community projects. This is really how to grow sustainably: network style.

Well, that's about all I've got. Please feel free to add to this page (it's a wiki) if you like, or respond in the comment section.