Defining The KF Proposal Content Type

Thanks to the tireless and amazing work of Mr. Moshe, we are now able to create our own content-type for prospective Drupal proposals with fivestar ratings. We're already getting some contributions in that vein, so it makes a lot of sense to me to get this built out ASAP so we don't lose any valuable ideas. Plus, I'd like to meet our initial goal of being able to accept submissions by March 17th.

Currently we're still waiting on some more bugfixing before the full power of og_panels is bestowed upon us, which will let us set up several group pages (e.g. guidelines, recent proposals, popular proposals, general group discussion, etc), but we can get started defining our intake form now, and get that online over the weekend.

Let's define ourselves a node-type! :)

Picking up from the BoF notes, the metrics we talked about for proposals were:

• useful to drupal
• match knight foundation goals (TBD)
• technical feasibility
• capacity
• before and after, makes a tangible difference (delta)
• target audience, scope of impact

Looking at those, the potential form fields that jump out at me are:

• General description/goals
• Drupal before/after
• Target audience
• Implementation plan
• Proposed budget
• People/organization attached to execute idea

The "useful to Drupal" metric will be informed by peoples ratings. The question of matching the KF's goals is implicit, though maybe some statement along these lines is actually warranted (we also need succinct language from KF describing these goals...). Technical feasibility and capacity will be evaluated by the community based on the people attached and the implementation plan.

IIRC what we want to do here is attract serious and substantive proposals, so having a small amount of complexity to the form is not a bad thing. We also want to be sure people provide sufficient data for the community to really decide what's a great idea for Drupal and what's either off-target or simply infeasible. However, this is just step one of a two-part evaluation that proposals will undergo before recommendation to the Knight Foundation, so we don't want things to be overly onerous at this stage.

This is just a kickoff to discussion about the process of accepting and evaluating proposals. I think six fields requiring no more than 500 words total is a good place to start, but maybe it can be simpler. Or maybe I'm totally missing something. Wouldn't be the first time.

Once we work out a spec, I will set up the content type and we can start accepting "real" proposals for voting and consideration. Let's try and get this hammered out by Monday!