[documentation] Hitchhikers guide to Drupal

[Angie Byron]

Just a few comments...

> "Drupal hitchhikers are regular, layman users..."

There is a perception problem here with the word "users" in that (based on past 
discussions like this) core contributors tend to consider users as anyone who 
uses the software and doesn't contribute directly back to it. This includes a 
"Joe User" from somedrupalsite.com who uses the software to post their daily 
blog entry, but it also includes "Joe Web Administrator" who creates sites using 
Drupal as a tool. The latter group does not consider themselves users, but 
website administrators. So I think this needs to be more explicit.

> I used the term 'top brass' as a joke / parody, because I assume that
> readers will be aware that Drupal is open source and is an open
> community, and that it doesn't actually have 'management' (except for
> 3 people, who are too friendly to be managers anyway ;-) ). 

The very crux of the conflict between "developers" and "users" is that these 
users who are consistently complaining and maligning Drupal for not doing what 
*I* want the way *I* want it to and *yesterday* and *you* will fix it *now* (who 
I would argue is the primary target audience of this piece) in fact DON'T seem 
to understand how open source works at all.

And it's difficult as someone who does "get" open source development to 
understand where this misconception comes from... people certainly can't call up 
Microsoft and tell them, "I will refuse to buy the new version of Office unless 
it has this following list of features..." Maybe it's the increased 
accessibility of the developers over a proprietary, closed-source project in 
itself that leads certain people to believe that we're magical coding robots 
with no lives of our own who live only to eagerly fulfill end user's requests 
with only a kick in the teeth for not having it done sooner as our thanks. End 
rant. :P

I think here we should implement Steven's suggestion of a "philosophy" document 
(either within this text or in a separate page) explaining the community-driven 
development process so that people don't come in here with the wrong 
expectations initially; it will probably help to ease the frustration level 
somewhat, or at least have a page to point out to some of our more "difficult" 
users. ;)

> "Hitchhikers have no obligations, but if you've got some loose change
> in your pocket, a bit of petrol money is always appreciated."

People are going to take this too literally imho, and think they literally have 
to pay people to get things done, and they'll balk at this idea. It's important 
because this is far from the only option... they could help raise funds, they 
could garner interest from a developer, they could take the time to learn and 
code it themselves. So maybe name at least one of the other metaphor options in 
addition to the petrol money one. ;)

Btw, I have kind of a "sister" document to this one here:
"HOWTO: Enact change within the Drupal community" http://drupal.org/node/36602 
that I put up a couple months ago... its audience is slightly different, in that 
it's geared toward people making demands about Drupal.org itself, but there is a 
list of ways to contribute in it and a bit about how the community works, etc. 
It's possible this document could either be merged with the Hitchiker's guide or 
else linked to it if there's any useful tidbits you like.

-Angie