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

[Ron Mahon]

It would be even more fun if that personae was based on research the
represented a group of Drupal users.
Ron

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-----Original Message-----
From: Andre Molnar [mailto:mcsparkerton at yahoo.co.uk] 
Sent: Friday, May 13, 2005 4:37 AM
To: drupal-docs at drupal.org
Subject: [drupal-docs] User Personas for Drupal Documentation: Calvin
theStudent Activist

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.