[development] One core, many distributions

[Dan Robinson]

>> 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
>