outreach

The Google Code-In recently ended and GSoC applications are closed. Now it's time to start preparing for next year's competition. One large problem regarding the contest is that there is not much involvement within development communities, which means many potential students aren't being introduced to the world of open source. This shows that Drupal, as a community, needs to encourage the future generation of programmers to contribute to open source, which this contest does a great job of doing.

How can we find and encourage these interested students?

Hey everybody,

Everyone uses email, and I use it to communicate with mailing lists for user groups pretty frequently. This made me think that I could throw a line or two of text at the bottom of my email to talk about something I'd like to gently remind people about. A great example is this DrupalCamp.

I have started a personal email signature campaign for things like Florida Creatives and Likemind which I host locally, and I think we could employ a similar tactic with our communications throughout the web.

I was at a meeting of Long Island Linux Users Group (http://lilug.org) at Farmingdale college last night and they were looking for a topic for their October (14th) meeting. I suggested a presentation on Drupal. While I'm bullish (if you will) on Drupal I don't feel that my skill level is up to giving a presentation. Would any one, two or more of you like to offer to give it? The meetings are from 8-10pm and the Farmingdale campus is convenient to the LIRR station if anyone needs transport to and from the city. I can help with that too, (pick up and drop off).

To promote continued growth of our local community i would like to start providing some "free" stuff to the group. I havent identified just what is it that we need to help us grow, but lets not have this put a stop to our plans.

Here are some of the things that i believe may/will be useful for our group:

During the Drupal Dojo Birds-of-a-Feather meeting at DrupalCon Boston we discussed two seperate items that I believe are interconnected: figuring out how to get more video lessons into the Dojo and doing a better job of attracting more potential teachers and students to the site. To address the first of these issues, I committed myself to doing outreach to individuals and companies who are creating video-based instructional materials to try and get them to submit their work to the Dojo. After that session I started to look around the series of tubes known as the "Internet" and I found quite a few videos. But, what I also noticed was that a good percentage of those videos already are being shared with the Drupal community, but through drupal.org/videocasts rather than the Dojo, which oddly doesn't seem to appear on the videocast pages at all. This brought to mind something that I've heard Josh and others talk about, the idea that we should consider moving the dojo to something more aligned with Drupal.org itself, and I have to say that the more I think about it, the more sense it makes to me.

So, my question is this: does it make sense to consolidate our collective efforts in one location that is better connected with d.o. itself? Something like video.drupal.org, or possibly as a subsection of a <a href="http://drupal.org/handbook/customization>tutorials section of the site (which is where the videocasts now sit), which could be called something like tutorials.drupal.org.