[consulting] Drupal Primer Course

[Boris Mann]

On 12-Apr-06, at 11:50 AM, Lists wrote:

> Sure you can.  Volunteers are not autonomous workers who may do  
> what they
> like.  Volunteers are invited guests to any organization and they must
> comply with whatever strictures are in place.
>
> You set goals and milestones, you limit distraction, and you move  
> inchingly
> forward toward those goals.  Those who do not support the goals are  
> not
> given license to divert the goals.

There are no goals. The Zen of Drupal. It's an open source project  
where people contribute what they like.

> As a way to summarize my single mild criticism of my eight months in
> Drupal-land, I would put it this way:
>
>     Drupal seeks to aid non-profit and community organizations, but  
> it does
> not exhibit a top-down understanding of the real-world conditions  
> of such
> organizations.

This is not an accurate statement of Drupal's mission. It might map  
to what the goals of the CivicSpace organization are, whose  
distribution is built on top of Drupal. Community is also a very  
broad term (e.g. gamer community) which is perhaps where some of the  
confusion lies.

The accurate statement of Drupal's mission is the sum total of all  
developers working on an elegant PHP framework that makes it easy to  
create content and/or web applications "out of the box". Dries has  
said some high level goals around usability and flexibility that he  
would like to see. Anything more concrete is the domain of dedicated  
resources likely working around distributions with a specific user  
target/community.

And, this discussion has pretty much veered into "off topic" land --  
Gary, this post may be of interest in the forums, but I guarantee you  
that you will get pushback. I encourage you to join the documentation  
list if you would like to help work on re-vamping the current  
documentation.

Those discussing the "Drupal Primer Course", groups.drupal.org and  
the DrupalCamp group (http://groups.drupal.org/groups/drupalcamp) is  
probably a good place to continue the discussion.

Thanks,

--
Boris Mann
Vancouver 778-896-2747 San Francisco 415-367-3595
SKYPE borismann
http://www.bryght.com