[documentation] Hitchhikers guide to Drupal

[Laura Scott]

Robert Castelo wrote:
> On 7 Jan 2006, at 15:07, Charlie Lowe wrote:
>> some do not see the value of having these "hitchhikers" (implying, of 
>> course, that they are parasites)
> Not at all, I wrote that they are 'not needed' - that doesn't mean 
> they aren't welcome, or that their company isn't valued, just that if 
> they don't contribute anything they will have zero effect on the 
> journey the rest of the participating Drupal community is taking.
>
This is an assertion that I do not believe is true. Now I realize that 
what I'm saying is heresy to developers, but really, just as an author 
benefits from readership, the Drupal development community benefits from 
users. This development does NOT happen in a vacuum. For example, would 
we even have a trackback module if trackbacks not only weren't thought 
up and implemented elsewhere but also if the idea hadn't caught on with 
users?

In other words, how many "itches" just happen spontaneously, and how 
many are inspired by ideas elsewhere, or even by a stray remark or idle 
musing here in the forums?

I daresay that if Drupal were being used only by the 150 or so 
contributors, it would not be what it is today. And many of those 
contributors would not even be here because they would never have been 
drawn to an obscure CMS with no user base.

I think that making the claim that the Drupal user base has "zero 
effect" on Drupal development comes from not seeing the big picture 
here. This community would benefit greatly if, in addition to the 
developer-focused discussion and activity and functionality, we could 
make welcome and help facilitate user-centric and site-admin-centric 
discussions of what Drupal could be. Who knows how many itches arising 
from talk about what's possible, what's desired, what's needed would end 
up being scratched by developers who just happen to like idea X, Y or Z? 
(For anyone interested, I wrote more about this topic here 
<http://www.pingv.com/blog/laura/200601/on-itch-scratching-hitchhikers-and-growing-within-the-interactive-ecosystem>.)

What I don't like about "hitchhiker" is that it gives the idea that 
Drupal users are flakes, freeloaders, Bohemians who have no interest in 
being a part of a community, let alone "the establishment," and that I 
believe is off-putting to a large percentage of users out there who are 
just as serious, just as professional, just as competent in their fields 
as the Drupal code developers are in their own. In fact, there's an 
entire science to interactive development that is not about code 
aesthetics but rather about user experience, data chunking, data 
matrices and so on -- things that everyone would benefit from, if only 
they were aware of them.

I strongly feel that we all would be better served by a more proactive 
approach. We would all benefit from more user participation, more 
discussion of user experience, and more discussion of application in the 
real world -- discussion that would nourish all areas of development.

Laura
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