personally, if you move everything online such as a drupal "facebook" it
might help, then again it could blow up in drupals face. Yeah, it would
be great to have a place where we could go and get relevant information.
I started with drupal around ver 4.5 with the civicspace version, I had
looked at drupal earlier but at that time was a infant with portals and
php-nuke was the best thing out there for quickly getting a site up.
Nuke went through the same thing drupal is experiening, rapid growth,
developer burn out, the consumers, and then the arrogance of what we at
drupal call ""core developers"". Got to say drupal's ""core
developers"" are not nearly as bad and this issue is nothing more than a
growth spurt.
In my early days people were more open, if you had a question it was
generally answered fairly quickly. It may not be what you wanted to here
but you were directed to a resource that did in fact have a solution.
Since then the whole drupal project, including contrib, has skyrocketed.
Instead of a few hundred modules there are a few thousand. Yet at the
same time the ratio of new developers to lets say core developers for
lack of a better phrase has not even come close to matching that of the
skyrocketing community.
I would say one of the reason for this has to deal with the response, or
lack of response, to these lists. For instance, in working on the 6.x to
7.x update functions, if I would post something I could almost guarantee
who would review it. Typically sun or catch and maybe chx or damz, and
yes I learned alot for working with it and the comments I received. but
there were other times as well when I would post something and get
totally shot out of my seat as I was a bother and didn't know what the
f*uck I was talking about and didn't understand. Of course these
responses usually came from names I did not recognize but all in all is
this the reputation we want for drupal. A couple of times I came close
to saying screw it do it your self.
Do I have any commits? NO!, Did I contribute? YES!, Was it worth it?
YES and why? I might have been able to contribute back to a community
that I have benefited from. Drupal is unique in that anyone can be a
""core developer"", yes there is structure there has to be and for any
community to thrive it must be structured accordingly. Success comes
from the top down in business or in a community the leaders down. Their
impact on the success (or failure) depends on their involvement and how
they interact with people.
Now getting back to a facebook drupal and possibly subsites. This could
be a good thing to distribute the load, but there still needs to be this
list and others so we, who have precious few minutes to contribute may
prefer to use. I believe at one time this was brought up (civicspace
days) and a bunch of drupal information sites started to crop up, then
came the tug of wars on who had the better information and drupal.org
itself started to suffer with the newer information lacking behind.
hence whether official of not, it was decided that it should be
drupal.org that was the main source for information. I think this was
right before Dries legally took ownership of the drupal copyright.
If drupal becomes another "Facebook", how soon will it be before the
same issues crop up, ie; can't find what your looking for , can't get a
decent support response, blah, blah, blah.... How soon will "Drupal
Facebook" become "Drupal MySpace"
If subsites crop up to help with the load, whose going to be the main
repository, drupal or the subsite if that's where everyone starts to go.
Social networking is great for some, but I have seen many sites come and
go. In the end it all boils down to the individual, what they want, how
they learn, and whether they are willing to give back to the community,
even if its only to say "Hey you might want to give drupal a shot."
As someone once said "everything matters", how we deal with "everything"
will eventually determine the outcome of drupal and whether our
community thrives.
On 3/19/2011 9:34 PM, Randy Fay wrote:
I agree that drupal.org <http://drupal.org> becoming "facebook", where
both real-time and support interactions would be welcome and managed
well would be fantastic.
And we could do that with subsites that don't need such careful
supervision.
Why couldn't we let members of the community launch subsites like
support.drupal.org <http://support.drupal.org> and make of them what
they could? Or launch a chat site specifically for support that had
far more sophisticated features than IRC?
IMO this is good thinking.
-Randy
