On Nov 23 2005, at 09:50, Gerhard Killesreiter wrote:
No, no, and no. The "community" (I hate that word) is not the reason d'etre for Drupal or the reason why anybody would develop for it. The reason is to get stuff done for our own needs. You are free to use it, too. But that's it.
Gerard, This is shocking for me to read. Seriously. I neve intended to offend people with my lame jokes about geekatude but this comment is ... well ... wow. I've had my eye on Drupal since 2002. Back then I did not had a clue of what a blog was. All I wanted was something that would make my life easier publishing on the web. I liked what you had but held off because, as a power user of blogging software and not a developer, I needed something that was easier to deal with. b2 is what I really wanted but by then the software had been abandoned (it reappeared later as both WordPress and b2evolution). So I went the route of MovableType because of its support and vendor communities. I came back to Drupal for one reason : CivicSpace. What Zack et al have accomplished with that distribution is impressive. And as political bloggers like me grow their practices from personal op-ed diaries to activist communities, CivicSpace is, in my not so humble opinion, the best thing out there for the potential growth of networks of online political communities. From a strategic POV, CivicSpace/Drupal makes more sense to me than Scoop. But most activist community sites in the US are going the route of Scoop. It took just one person, who happens to be also the owner of the largest political community site in the US, to make the decision of Drupal vs. Scoop and he went the route of Scoop for 2 reasons : it's support and vendor communities. Do you see a pattern here? Scoop, MovableType and WordPress are gaining big chunks of market share (especially in publishing) in the US while Drupal/CivicSpace is on tentative ground due in part to the dichotomy between the development and the marketing of Drupal. I am the only blogger from the top 100 moving to CivicSpace at the moment. MediaGirl runs a Drupal site (not CivicSpace). Bob Brigham of Swing State Project (another top 100) started a site on CivicSpace but that's another short-term campaign site. In this case the campaign is www.scalito.org. He was converted to CivicSpace in part by me. Epluribus Media, a citizen journalism site that came out of DailyKos, has 2 sites running : one on Scoop for their research work and the other one on CivicSpace for their blogging. They were converted to CivicSpace in part by Lynn Siprelle. Yeah, a lot of you call blogs hype and all that; but the reality is that blogging is here to stay. If anything, you are poised to get more development resources with long-term political community sites than short-term campaigns because you'll have people who've had enough time to understand the product --even if they were not developers . So your disregard about community in creating a community and content platform is troubling. / liza