[development] One core, many distributions

[Liza Sabater]

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