Drupal in India

Wonderful idea Hussain. Its a +1 from me.

Hi Hussain and others

I welcome your idea, We can experiment with this, Infact I had several similar discussions on this with other community leads and the challenge i see here is the need for a committed team to run this and equal participation from different region, Community leads, organizations. Without equal and neutral participation, this concept may look biased and eventually we will loose support and may also bring in conflicts.

For the domain - I am not sure how India domain would help, We would face challenges like collaboration on content, managing the site, User personal information needs to be protected. Also, I see different regional groups are creating their own Drupal community portal - like Bangaluru, Pune and Mumbai. Managing content, infrastructure, peoples and participation could be very challenging. I believe our regional groups are maturing now and we should focus on strengthening regional community first.

One of the biggest challenge we(DrupalMumbai) are facing is to get people on Drupal.org, Mumbai, India Group and make them understand the Drupal Community concept. This is our biggest concern with DrupalMumbai.org site which is WIP, but want to use Drupalmumbai.org as a event management and information portal, user would still do all discussions on GDO / DO.

On Slack - It will be very difficult to manage large number of participants. I have been using Slack, it's good for a closed user group but won't work for large number of participants. We may try to have just community leads or active members.But then i strongly feel forum like this should be open.

My Suggestion -
1. Next year we have DrupalCon, from next year on, we can probably start having India level Drupal Camps where whole Indian Drupal community can gather. These events would be massive and hard to organize but we can definitely figure out a way.
2. Making Awareness , organizing events, is way simpler in small regional groups. My recommendation would to focus and address the needs of regional groups.
3. It's important to have a board comprising of all Community leads to share and collaborate on Ideas and Initiatives different regional groups are working on. Something Rahul from Srijan brought few years back.
3. Let's also do an analysis to see if some other country have taken a similar approach and understand what kind of challenges they are facing and success stories.

Awesome idea +1.

GREAT Idea +1 from me.!

I really appreciating the idea drupal.org.in

Nice initiative, good points from everyone in the community. Big +1 to the lead that Hussain has taken up.

Let me start with the problems raised by Hussain:

• A lot of developers in India are not on d.o. and g.d.o.
• Many developers are hesitant in posting their problems on d.o. and g.d.o.
• No solid medium of collaboration for developers in India

Solutions Offered by Hussain:

• d.o.in and g.d.o/in - help community in different regions learn from each other, help people outside India discover the enthusiasm/excitement about Drupal in India
  DI.slack - best team communication platform
• #drupal-in - this IRC channel is already there - not many are using

My take on the solutions offered.

d.o.in and g.d.o/in

I think its more of a corporate culture that people don't join d.o. and g.d.o. as in most of the large MNCs, developers have taken Drupal as a job and not career. We need to spread the awareness of the community - both to existing Drupal Developers and the new enthusiasts. So whether it is g.d.o/in or d.o.in it does not matter, it should be central. I'm not very confident with the idea of d.o.in as when I see the frequency of posts in http://drupal.org.uk, its very less. So I'd feel comfortable with g.d.o alone. And as Rachit said, let regional communities grow and contribute their work to both their regional group and India group. Plus, I strongly believe that d.o. is yet to create a platform as cool as stackoverflow and drupal.stackexchange which makes them the ideal location for problem-solution arena. Please don't take this as a "-1" but as something which needs to be a little more specific as to what we do with this new site.

Slack

Slack has revolutionalized communication protocol between small and big teams and I love it. I've not yet seen a lot of open source communities using it. But the idea is very thrilling. @Hussain: how do you plan to take the manual invites as this can be a roadblocker for going ahead?

I agree with Rachit over here that someone will have to stand up and create a core Drupal India Organizing Committee. It could focus on:

• Creating more awareness - by organizing more meetups and helping the Drupal developers come out of their shells and attend the meetups and the camps and the Con eventually :)
• Helping local leaders organize meetups + camps
• Facilitate Drupal Campus Ambassador Program which will take Drupal to the grassroot i.e. engineering colleges / universities.
• Allowing showcases of local Drupal work.
• Managing and maintaining Slack + d.o.in like platforms for more collaboration between individuals, groups in India.

Happy to contribute in any which way the community thinks is the right way forward.

Using slack if not as a common forum for all Indian drupallers, but at least for those who are major organizers in their communities and hence who will be important contributors to the Drupal con India and beyond that, makes a lot of sense.

There is still so much potential to be tapped that it will help to use systems that more people are familiar with. And most of the recent developers who have started using Drupal and the college students whom we wish to attract and retain as ambassadors (and who will form a very important part of the community in the years to come) will feel very comfortable in getting notified on their mobiles, live, in their areas of interest. Slack's ability to form channels within the main channel will also be so useful. I do see us getting too big for slack, but think we can get a good lot accomplished before then.

Having a website with relevant information on how to quickly scale up your regional Drupal community in time for drupalcon is also a necessity. Our regional websites alone will not be enough as we do need to realize that there are so many inputs from various other communities that could be helpful to all of us, and having them accessible at one place will save a lot of time and energy.

And we have reached a stage where we are going to be canvassing at a major level soon and having a place to showcase our progress and consolidation will make our canvassing that much more effective.

All these are great suggestions.

I see most of the folks are discussing a tool here and a domain there. IRC, Slack. India domain or not. Sigh.

I think it is pointless to debate tools when there is no consensus or cohesive strategy on a what a pan-India organising committee will actually be responsible for. It is (to me) like putting a spaceship before the cart.

India contributes the second highest traffic to Drupal.org. Nowhere close to in terms of code contributions. How will another website help? Drupal is not an inclusive community. It is an expansive community.

First. Lets understand what are we trying to accomplish here which is not getting done by the local communities or by Drupal.org? Does this actually add value here? Does it fill serious gaps?

Second. This is not something new. This has been discussed amongst the leaders in the Drupal community since 2011. Even as much as discussing a Drupal Association chapter or version of it for India.

There has never been much consensus on what needs to be done on pan-India level because each small Drupal focal group is focused regionally and still maturing. Mumbai and Delhi are taking different approaches to increasing participation. Both have had great success in their own distinct approach. Pune has another strategy altogether. There hasn't been much communication between any of these regional communities in India outside of the camps that crop up every year.

All this is changing. We are evolving. And quite rapidly. A lot of the interest is being driven by increasing business interest in Drupal in India, rather than being a purely developer focused community here.

With that huge traffic from India coming to Drupal.org from India, why do you need another website to divide the visitors? Drupal Association now has a dedicated group to work on a lot of updates needed for Drupal.org. Lets work with them to share information and avoid replication.

I would say there is enough work to be done in all the very diverse local Drupal hubs in India--Mumbai, Delhi NCR, Pune, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Kolkata, Jaipur, Chennai, Trivandrum, Dharamsala--than doing a pan-India initiative right now.

Focus on strengthening your community first and use that to empower others.

@aniG. couldn't have put it better.
We rather need to focus our energy on increasing community participation. It is already evident from D.o. traffic stats that India has a big hand to play.
The last time I checked, not many of them knew how to:
1. do an issue queue triage
2. how to use IRC
3. They were not even aware that we could go ahead and edit the documentation if they spotted something wrong.

How many Drupal users from India have a D.o. account?
I'm not even beginning to talk about code contributions. They're just a slice of the community pie. Not sure how fragmenting an Indian flavoured D.o. would help in that aspect.

Note to self: got to use "putting a spaceship before the cart" somewhere :)

Hussain,

I see domain drupal.org.in is now booked.
What are our next steps here, Are we moving ahead to adopt Slack as platform to interact ? For Delhi community, we have already adopted slack.
Lets please decide on the communication platform, we then have to discuss a lot more things going ahead.

With due respect to all the comments and concerns raised here I strongly believe that particpation will increase irrespective of the communication platform. People will flock towards the platform where they get the best HELP. If we all the seniors of DI points and contribute to D.O /G.D.O it will become the defacto platform for all and for all the purposes as is the case for the other regions.