[drupal-docs] User Personas for Drupal Documentation: Calvin the Student Activist

[Andre Molnar]

I was reading the personae and thought it would be a fun exercise to 
create another one.  I've posted to the wiki, but thought I would add a 
post here as well for discussion.


Calvin is a student activist.  He is his second or third year of a four 
year undergraduate degree.  He comes from a middle to upper middle class 
family. He has grown up with computers and has had his own personal 
windows PC in his room since he was 10.  He's been on-line since 1997. 
He's run his own blog since 2002, but first tinkered with HTML in 1998. 
  He first found out about Drupal while researching an alternative to 
his current proprietary blogging software and now sees its potential as 
the tool to build the community site he has in mind.  He is unsure of 
whether Drupal is the right tool for the job considering the many other 
open source CMS' available.  He has also heard of Civicspace in 
discussions about on-line political action and has a vague idea of what 
Civicspace is, but has yet to make the connection to Drupal.

He wants to build a community web site that has most, if not all, of the 
features that he has come to like in the sites he has visited and 
participated in for years.  He hopes to include forums, news 
aggregators, event calendars, polls, detailed community member profiles 
and a community blogging space for his fellow activists.

Calvin has a full course load, but finds the time to organize and 
participate in events that 'make a difference.'  He participates in 
on-line discussions related to his interests and tinkers with his blog 
when he should be doing his homework.

Calvin, like most students, doesn't have much money and the little he 
does have is barely enough for pints of beer after a rally.  Neither he 
nor the organizations he volunteers for can afford to pay staff let 
alone outside consultants and programmers.

Calvin is not a programmer, but is capable of extending the capabilities 
of his current blogging software by following step by step instructions 
on how to install 'add on' modules.

Calvin's fellow activists and collaborators on the web project come from 
a wide variety of disciplines at the university ranging anywhere from 
computer science to fine arts.  They are all educated, computer literate 
and at a minimum can use web forms.

Calvin's Goals:

To learn more about Drupal's core community oriented features.

To find other examples of grass roots student activist sites that use Drupal

To find out how difficult it would be to extend the core functionality 
of the CMS without prior programming experience (are additional modules 
available and are they easy to install).

To find out how difficult it would be to change the default look of the 
site so that his group can have a unique on-line identity that is 
different from other sites that use the same software. (Is it themable 
or skinable?)

To find links relating to the code and other technical information so 
that he can point his computer science friend to them and have her 
evaluate Drupal on that level.

Calvin and his friends like the idea of accomplishing things on their 
own.  When they finally do install Drupal they tend to try things first 
and go looking for answers later.  If Calvin doesn't find answers in the 
documentation they will post questions to the forums.  Calvin will also 
likely post solutions back to the Drupal community, but may not think to 
contribute formal documentation.