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.
Don't be shocked - there is no overall agreement about what this project is or whom it is for. Gerhard has his opinions. I happen to disagree with him that "The "community" (I hate that word) is not the reason d'etre for Drupal or the reason why anybody would develop for it." - but I get to have my own opinion.
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.
This doesn't mean that Scoop is a better product, that it has better support or that there is a stronger vendor community. From what I could tell Kos went with Scoop because people in his social network thought it would be a good idea.
Do you see a pattern here?
well yes this is the description of a pattern - but I'm not sure where the data is coming from. We all have our perceptions of where thing are going. In my view Scoop is a minor player (in terms of market acceptance)
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'm not sure how you arrive at "Drupal/CivicSpace is on tentative ground"... MoveableType - Drupal is not - yet.
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.
if the goal is to move Drupal into the top 100 blog sites then we should do that - in my view it would be pretty easy. That isn't the goal of this community (I don't think that is on many people's radar).
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.
So I think that your point of view is interesting and worthwhile - but I'm not sure that I buy into all your assumptions and metrics.
/ liza