SeaDUG Barnraising Wrap-up

It was definitely a great experience and one I know I would like to do again. Seeing certain things in action and collaboration is invaluable. I am been working tonight on one of my sites by looking back at some of the stuff other did and seeing how they did it and seeing if it can apply to my site. Good stuff!! Count me in for the follow up and any other one like this we would like to do. I like CCK the more I use it.

And next time I will make sure I have cash so as to not be late again trying to find parking.

Kirk

Great numbers! Thanks for listing them. Let's meet up again soon. I'm booked all week. Any chance we could meet on Saturday or Sunday (11/17 or 18)?

Robin

I participated on Saturday as part of the Configuration group. A couple of comments:

The space was excellent. I thought it was key to have everyone in the same room, in three different areas, since we were separated by function, and yet could talk across the room to the other groups, or walk over and have a conversation. This came up several times, such as "We need this module installed" or "Themers, you can theme the xyz content type now" or "Could you put the Terms and Conditions into the theme at the bottom of the Class display page?" or "Did you just make your new theme the default for admins? Can you change that back now, please?".

The Internet access may have been slightly slow, but I didn't feel it got in my way much.

Having a pizza place right around the corner was very helpful, since no one would have wanted to take a long break for lunch.

Now, regarding work flow within the Configuration group... The priorities of our group seemed to be (a) getting the our configuration tasks done (site config, user setup, content types, views), (b) making screencasts, and (c) partipation and learning for participants. Probably in that order, based on what happened... I personally think (c) should have been a higher priority than (b).

The relatively high priority for (b) meant that for the first phase (user/role setup, module setup, and module/site config), only one person could actually do anything, because only one person was making the screencasts. So, that phase had very little participation from other participants. Maybe next time this phase could be completed before the whole group gets together, like the installation of Drupal and modules was done this time? I am not sure that stuff can really be done in parallel anyway, or how participants could really help.

The second phase (content type creation) was more participatory - we all helped out, and I think a lot of learning took place by having people work in pairs on creating content types, editing them, etc. Also, we could coordinate and re-use fields on several content types, which went well. It was extremely useful to have someone from SCBA there to answer questions and clarify a few things while we were setting up the content types!

The third phase (views creation) was again non-participatory by our group members. Due to a time crunch, our group leader chose to do this phase by going into a private room and doing it alone, which meant that it got finished by 4 PM (a good thing) but that no one was able to watch and learn, much less participate (not so great). If we had had sufficient time, I think it would have been good to do that in a similar way to how we did the content type creation. Maybe moving the config to a pre-meeting time would help in that regard, since more time would be available for content and views (and maybe in the future, panels)?

One final comment is that I had made plans for later in the afternoon, based on the idea that the session was ending at 3 PM (the original plan, which was still on the web page as of Saturday morning, I think). I had figured it might go over, but had to leave around 4 PM... so I'm sorry I couldn't stay longer!

Well, those are my wrap-up thoughts...
--Jennifer