Guild (was Re: [consulting] Proper Collections Procedure)

[Harry Slaughter]

Boris Mann wrote:
> 
> 
> On 8/19/06, *Henri Poole* <poole at civicactions.com 
> <mailto:poole at civicactions.com>> wrote:
>  
> 
>      > I'm not sure I think it is a bad idea, but I think that an official
>      > guild (for lack of a better term) with formal dispute resolution
>      > procedures would be necessary as a part of this. I'm not sure any of
>      > us have the time to do this right.
> 
>     I could spare some time each week for such a guild. Although I think
>     dispute resolution is probably a small part of what should be done. At
>     vivid, we had a quality assurance manager that told me that I should
>     fix
>     the faucet before mopping up the floor more often.
> 
>     The guild could certainly help with that and the trusted relationships
>     that would come out of it would enable private conversations of a
>     sensitive nature (like this one) to happen with more ease.
> 
> 
> I'm not against anyone taking the initiative and setting up a "guild" 
> (is that what the Marketplace on groups.drupal.org/marketplace 
> <http://groups.drupal.org/marketplace> is becoming? I don't know...) but 
> it makes me VERY uneasy.
> 
> Drupal itself already has the reputation of being very insular in 
> nature. I would like to continue to work to grow the ecosystem of 
> developers that "know" Drupal...everything from best practices around 
> the API to the "best practices" of community involvement. I suspect a 
> guild-like structure will prove even more of a turn off / barrier to 
> additional developers entering the community.

...

guild may not be the best term for the idea we're talking about here (it 
sounds plain snotty to me :), but the idea itself is pretty good. being 
an independent contractor is tough in any field. boris,  you are very 
fortunate. you've been in the drupal community long enough to have 
established relationships and knowledge that make your point of view a 
bit different from one of someone like me, who's only been involved in 
drupal a bit over a year. furthermore, you're working under the umbrella 
of bryght, so you have direct access to all sorts of resources indies do 
not. it's a tough road full of discouragement (ok, and a lot of fun too).

(IMHO FWIW disclaimers here) I see the drupal community as having two 
general groups, the haves and the have nots :) those that have the 
experience, knowledge, voice, authority regarding drupal and the rest of 
us who (and maybe i'm only speaking for myself) feel left largely on 
their own. with a *lot* of persistence, patience (and financial 
resources) it definitely is possible to advance into the more desirable 
group. i'm starting to see some of the benefits of meeting people and 
sticking around. but i have a suspicion (based mostly on what i see in 
IRC and in drupal forums) that we may be losing potential developers 
and/or drupal users simply because they have no idea what to do, who to 
contact, where to ask, what api call to make, how to apply their CSS 
skills to drupal, etc...

ok, i'm rambling. here's my point.

yes, top dollar clients can go to a number of small companies for drupal 
services . but there are a lot of not-top-dollar clients and a lot of 
indy developers/designers (or those aspiring to be) that could 
absolutely benefit from some sort of pool of talents and demands. a 
pseudo company, i guess. here are some problems that i see as extremely 
common in the drupal community:

- web developer without the design skills necessary to fully serve a client.
- web designers with insufficient technical knowledge to provide 
backends for their designs.
- clients who've been drawn to drupal for whatever reason, but do not 
have any experience building sites. they end up at drupal.org and have 
no idea what to do.
- $GLOBAL['problem'] = any time end-clients hook up directly with 
developers/designers, there is almost never any sort of official 
'project management' entity.  it's clients guessing what they want and 
developers guessing what that means. sure there may be a piece of paper 
involved that everyone refers to as 'the spec', but without someone 
constantly monitoring ever-changing client expectations -vs- 
designer/developer output, someone's probably going to end up less than 
satisfied.

i think this is where our 'guild' comes into the picture.

then again, this stuff is very easy to talk about and next to impossible 
to implement. so maybe we should all just stick to the current method.

either this rant makes a bit of sense to some of you or i need to talk 
to my court appointed psychiatrist about some med changes. %^)



-- 
Harry Slaughter <-> harry at slaughters.com
Web Developer
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