Drupal Shops and Drupal Dojo?

In the five months that the Dojo has been active, it's been a constant objective of mine to remain independent, open and supportive of the wider Drupal project and community. Given the obvious and continuing market growth around Drupal, one aspect of this has been trying to keep the Dojo professionally-minded and helpful, but also vendor-neutral.

It's a mark of pride for me that active Dojo participants have found gainful employment in part through this group, but to date we've shied away from any formal involvement with Drupal shops. That seems like a decision worth pondering, and it occurs to me that an important part of establishing the Dojo as a sustainable institution may be finding support and engagement with the growing number of professional Drupal firms out there.

There seem to be a few key areas where help might be effective:

• Hosting for video files: Although the prospect has been raised of getting video up on drupal.org, it seems unlikely that over time this will really be a total solution any time soon. The sheer volume and variety of material we produce demands a more flexible and scalable solutions. We're making it work with free services, but if organizations with bandwidth to burn want to step forward, I don't think this is a bad thing.

• Other hosting resources: As we grow, it is quite possible that having other hosted services (e.g. VNC, asterix, sandboxes, etc) could also be very helpful. This requires a little more from the providers as we're asking to run applications, not just host files.

• Lessons!: By far and away, the greatest thing I think professional Drupalists can help the Dojo (and themselves, from a marketing perspective) is to step up and lead a screencast. I've heard that talks with APress may be resulting in Matt Westgate sharing some of the expertise from he and John Van Dyk's Pro Drupal Development in a Dojo lessons. That's a great development of a type I'd love to happen more often.

One of the things prompting this post is that the good people at Firebright have offered video hosting, which seems likely to be our the first step down this road. So let's talk about it. If there are contributions we can use which I've not listed, let's hear it, and let's hear what people think about forming closer ties with the professional Drupal world.

For shops, if you'd like to help out with hosting, we'd be more than happy to set up some round-robin action for the videos. Feel free to chime in on anything else you might bring to the table. And again, the #1 contribution you can give is to share your expertise!