"The newspaper group is a place for people working at newspapers running on - or planning to run on - Drupal to share ideas, problems and solutions." is the introduction to this group. I was wondering how people feel about that? A group can only do so much - all discussions about existing modules and module development are spread throughout the pages; so are the links to newspapers that are using drupal; so are the use-cases; so are the job adverts; so are various ideas. People seem to have wonderful ideas for modules (esp. Tearsheet :-)) but they eventually get forgotten or set aside because of time constraints. Nikolai's post requesting case studies is now on the second page while it's still as important as when he posted it. And so on. So what's your take on the future of this group?
Platform & infrastructure
Obviously, a more orderly organisation of the knowledge we've all been gathering since the existence of this group or since our involvement with Drupal would be hugely beneficial, especially to those new to Drupal. Our Very Own Drupal-Powered Website could take care of that. I can provide the serverspace and bandwidth, so that's not an issue. A wiki-style documentation and a simple taxonomy could take care of most things, but the site will still need to be maintained. If this task can be shared among a few of us, it shouldn't take that much time to do.
Module development
From previous discussions I've gathered that most of the people on this blog are professionals with their hands full, making collaborative efforts like module development somewhat difficult because at first they actually demand more of one's time rather than less. It's always easier to hack together something that works fine in a single particular setting. I see two ways out:
- For a specific module, try to agree on a specific week where each of us can make some free time and devote it to development. In the weeks leading up to that, gather possible use cases and ideas for the actual design.
- Everybody who wants a certain module could chip in on a sort of "development fundraiser" for that module (or rather: ask your employer to chip in, as it's his clients or his newspaper that will benefit) and use the money to pay for initial development. I don't know how realistic this is though; perhaps some employers won't like the idea of outsourcing stuff they're paying you to do.
Installation profile
An installation profile could be handy, partly for the ease but also because of the attention that it'd bring. Apparently they are pretty easy to make from a technical pov, but of course to be useable they need to be based on extensive discussions beforehand. It's a bit of a vicious circle: it's difficult to do great things with a small group of already very busy developers, but making installation profiles or modules with our groupname on them seem like the best ways to get more people to participate.
Hopefully we'll get a lively discussion out of this!
Sincerely,
Stijn
Comments
UnCon
We need to have a NewsCamp or unconference. The idea has come up before.
I know that Moshe Weitzman and I will be at the New York Press Assoc. in Boston (go figure) on Sep 28-29....
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Thing is: that might not be
Thing is: that might not be very handy for us Old World folks :-) But some real-life discussions and brainstorming would definitely be worth it, that's true.
Agreed
Should we try to do a b.o.f. in Barcelona?
And maybe we can petition d.o. for a mailing list, unless someone else has resources to support one?
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no m/l
this group is our mailing list. people read via email or rss, their choice. and posting is one click away. and we have a proper repository of our work with classification and and a face wall and so on.
ok
Mailing list idea scrapped.
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It's true that tagging and
It's true that tagging and searching makes it pretty easy to know what's being said on any given topic; but the fact remains that anything older than a month is and will be forgotten unless people keep making new posts about the same thing (which may not be ideal). Also, for those newer to Drupal a bit more structured info might be better source of information versus digging in the group posts for something usable. But of course, if few people see the need for a website/wiki/knowledge base outside of these group pages, then there's no real reason to start one.
It seemed like a good idea to jumpstart the group a bit though - there's a lot of private development going on, and that's fine, but little in way of collaborative efforts, which could establish Drupal more firmly as the best CMS for newspapers and as a workflow solution (web-to-print) for smaller newspapers. But of course others might not feel the need to work toward such a goal, and that's also why I posted this message - to see what other people think about where we should go from here.
I think ...
I think you're right on target about the need for a persistent knowledge base that specifically addresses the needs of news organizations using (or thinking about using) Drupal, but I don't see any particular value in moving outside the framework of groups.drupal.org. In fact, there's a significant downside, as we have 237 people signed up (as of this afternoon) to the equivalent of a mailing list, wiki and forums rolled into one application. Moving outside would require starting over.
Pierce Presley recently started a list of media sites using Drupal, with links. It's still on the front page, but since there seems to be a concern about valuable items getting lost, I'll add a link to it in the group description. If other wiki resources are developed we can expand that into a navigation bar that is specific to this group.
just to let you know
i know that lots of "old media" are following this group and this group is mentioned in magazines for newspapers (ifra) and lots of mailinglists for newspapers. let the drupal-for-the-newspaper rev begin!
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bert boerland
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bert boerland
Suggestion for structure
I definately think that this group would benefit from a more structured site.
Trying to be a bit constructive, I'll write down categories of posts I've discerned:
As I am new to organic groups (heck, I'm even new to Drupal), I don't know if it's possible to make these categories into different forums (or whatever) in the same group.
If it's possible to make this group site comfortable enough to navigate, its probably best to stay here (even though drupal.org seems to experience heavy traffic). Otherwise, I don't see the problem of starting a newspapers-on-drupal.org and forward new users from groups.drupal.
These categories were written down pretty quickly, so if you like the idea of splitting the general (and rather messy) discussion it's probably best to start a new post to discuss and refine the categories.
That was quick!
I see that a Topics box has already appeared on the group site, as has the possibility to categorize posts. Wonderful!
I would like to suggest one further category: group administration. I'm not sure this is the proper term, but there ought to be a place to discuss things like "Future of this group".
I'm impressed by the speed things are happening here!
many thanks for your helpful
many thanks for your helpful taxonomy. i got motivated to use the 'categories' feature that each group here has. i setup some categories for us to post into. you can see them when you add or edit a post. further, i went back and affiliated some of our old posts into these categories. you can see the result of my handiwork in the block on the right hand side of this page. hopefully that block will grow into a useful structured way to browse this group.
the taxonomy is up for discussion.
Online News Association
A BOF get-together at the Online News Association conference October 17-19 in Toronto might be appropriate, as there will be hundreds of people attending.
My offer still stands to
My offer still stands to host a Drupal/Newspaper specific weekend event at the Reynolds School of Journalism in Reno. We have plenty of labs and classrooms with podiums, projectors, and white boards.
I know some members of this group have the travel budget to attend larger conferences like ONA, but my experience has been that getting together with Drupal folks attending another conference like SXSW (or the journalism folks at OSCMS) resulted in very short, social meetings if we met at all because of the time constraints of the conference we were being paid to attend.
In addition, folks at smaller, cash strapped papers might not be able to attend the larger conference at all.
Having an "unconference" in Reno would be about as cheap as you can get it. If a few of the "key" players in this group could agree on the weekend, I'll check my building's availability, and we could start putting this together.
Or we could keep talking about it.
Reno
Kevin-
I vote for Reno in early November.
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Reno!
Reno got my vote as well.
theopensourcenewspaper.org
www.theopensourcenewspaper.org now points to the group.
It might be an idea to build some sort of a front page with howtos, case studies, modules etc. to lure in more news organizations and to make the common resources easily accessible.