DSANews

DSANews

TL;DR (at the end, scroll down)

Hello Awesome and soon to be Awesome South African Drupalistas!

I'd like to get something of a newsletter going for our Drupal South Africa group: DSANews. Willem from e-Consultant kindly offered the e-mail subscription list from the old drupal.co.za and drupal.org websites for this purpose (we still have our strong disagreement about the commercial hijack of those domain names, but this is just one more example of how well our community works together even if the face of such strong contention). So I'll publish here on Groups.Drupal.org first, then format it a bit for HTML e-mail presentation and forward it to him too for distribution via that list. One of the first things I'd like to facilitate the sharing of communication and networking details in our community.

We have so many people in this group and the nature of Drupal development means we're a pretty pretty strong community on-line. Sharing communication information with each other should help us transfer skills and support each other better.

From the meet-ups with their excellent speakers that are a mere 3 hours a month, I learn so much and know there are people who explicitly offer their assistance to the community. To a person they are talented, but their days are packed and their available time is short, so communication for everyone would be most effective through their preferred communication channels.

To compile the first DSANews, I'd like to ask everyone a few questions in two batches. The first I'll keep updated and always post in the next edition of DSANews and the second I'll vary according to community input and interest.

First questions, please e-mail me (riaan.burger@burtronix.com) or send responses through my Groups.Drupal.org (GDo) contact form.

• Your full name and surname, nickname on Groups.Drupal.org and nickname on IRC (if any).
• Your preferred contact list for community communication.
• Your additional places to be found on-line for community communication.
• Additional communication channels you prefer to use less.
• Short tag list of skills you can help with.
• Your (general) location.
• Did you attend a Drupal user group meet-up in the last three months?

Keep in mind that we'll ask people to use your preferred contact. For many this is still e-mail which lends itself to a "task list" of people to get back to to assist at a time in your day that will be convenient to you. For those asking for assistance, always try to ask for advice. Help most often come in that form and an offer to assist most usually does not mean an offer to do work for free. That does not mean there are no help available, direction to the correct place to find help or the best framework or function to use, the best Google search terms, the most relevant book to buy or right module from the examples modules will save you a lot of time finding that information yourself.

Second set of questions (send answers together with the first questions). A few reference info bits:

• What operating system do you use most frequently on your desktop? Name and version.
• What is/are your preferred text editor(s)?
• What is/are your preferred browser(s)?
• Do you work primarily with Drupal and related technology?
• Link us to an interesting new website for this edition of DSANews and give a Twitter-short description of it. No sites built or company sites please.
• What new technology or interesting development kept you busy since the last edition of DSANews.

Finally, thank you to everyone who pushed me on doing this. Especially and most recently, Dinesh. It's only through community support and the amazing example set by others that I'm encouraged to such participation and hope that we can share this feeling of a supporting and inviting community with each other and an increasingly larger group.

TL;DR

For an SA Newsletter, e-mail (riaan.burger@burtronix.com) me your answers to:

• Your full names and nicknames
• Primary preferred contact point
• Additional preferred contact points
• Less preferred contact points
• Tag list of your skills
• Location (general)

• Did you attend a Drupal meet-up in the last three months?

• What's your primary desktop OS?

• Your preferred text editor(s)?
• Your preferred browser(s)?
• Do you work primarily with Drupal-related technology?
• Link to an interesting website (not site built or company sites, an interesting reference)?
• Cool new tech you read about recently; Description and link.