dasa.org.za

The DASA website really needs work.

Several hallway track discussions and even a key speaker's presentation at the recent DrupalCamp Johannesburg 2016 mentioned the need for the DASA site to be upgraded. Demands for functionality vary widely.

At the government and NPO meet-ups they need forums, some agencies want the site itself to present better to carry the brand of Drupal to the South African market (think things like case studies) and our meet-ups can really do with a central non-meetup.com calendar and listings of available speakers and their talks (tie-ins with forums perhaps).

Two of the toughest things about building a new dasa.org.za website are based on some of DASA's strongest tenets:

• We represent the Drupal users in South Africa, not companies. It is not a trade association but an association of Drupal users and all of them, not just the ones on Drupal.org or some other segment. It's very tough even to limit our board elections to just the GDoSA members, but we could see no other way to case votes, so it remains and likely will remain a compromise.
• We're radically open. We publish not just financials, but even bank statements in the open and of course vote in the open too. While we're also limited by the fact that we're volunteers and can only do so much, we even have a stated goal to get back to streaming our board meetings and then also saving them on YouTube.
• We work hard to try not to have board or other positions not be ones of unfair advantage to those people and the businesses they work for. Of course this may not always be possible, but for example, our policy states that we have last option for sponsorship slots if a limited amount are available and to get back to the voting on GDoSA, it means nobody at DASA has access to some membership database the people we represent does not. That last one is becoming moot as we now have various subscription and attendance lists going around without anything other than fiduciary commitments stopping them from being used incorrectly.

We've had gracious offers from companies to build the new dasa.org.za site to completion, but usually, when it is mentioned that the credit will go to the builders (not the company), that site build process needs to be radically open and that we still need to figure out where the users' data will reside and what measures will be in place to protect it, things tend to fall flat.

So we need some idea from you guys on how to do this.

I have a few, but not enough to address all concerns. We obviously strive for FLOSS solutions but also compromise when needed. So for example, we stream to YouTube and have a limited number of Google Docs, but have moved from GitHub to GitLab recently.

A features-based work-flow for the site published in the open on DASA's GitLab account and accepting pull requests will be a good starting point. Calling for potential designers on GDoSA before we start will kick things off nicely. But hosting the site can be a niggle. I'm leaning towards my usual way of trusting a sysadmin (they deal with direct access to all of massive companies' data every day) and in our case Lee who acts as a sort of keeper of the keys for DASA to also independently host the site, but it will be something we may need to budget for as this is more work than can be done as a volunteer.

We should obviously look at Drupal 8, but it has problems of its own. We need enough adoption in the local market so that we can legitimately say that we can take contributions to the site. For Burtronix, for example, we have no plans to adopt Drupal 8 until perhaps end of this year. We know it well enough by now to know the time is just not right for it and it's facing a slow adoption world wide too with growth just 2 percentage points above continued Drupal 7 adoption. Even community support is taking a dent: https://assoc.drupal.org/blog/megansanicki/reorganizing-for-drupal

In terms of radical openness, we still have to keep things private. For example, we can decide to publish a sanitised export of the site database for people to develop with, but what do we sanitise? Do we have a disclaimer at sign-up stating your e-mail address will be published or do we decide to sanitise that? I lean towards contact information being removed and everything else open.

Please post your thoughts and if you're shy, send them to me.

If, by the time we adopt Drupal 8, we don't have something going yet, we'll scaffold out a radically open project for a new site and won't make a move until there's been a heck of a lot of time to discuss it here on GDoSA to see if it can work for us all.

Cheers,
Riaan