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Robert Scales

Wed, 01/09/2008 - 04:09 — scales
What is your motivation for being a member of the Drupal Association?: 
Myself and our company; Raincity Studios have been working with drupal since 2004, I am not a coder, nor much of a designer, but I was part of the first wave of business people who believed in drupal and saw its great potential for future business and enterprise model. Over the past 3 years, I have been active at barcamps and various events around the world speaking about Open Source and business development using Drupal. I believe the future of the web is open source and Drupal is very much a part of that. My motivation in joining the drupal association is to continue to work with the community in the development of business support program to help young and established entrepreneur to access and work with peers around the world in the creation of better business process and support tools to facilitate the use of drupal and to provide them helpfull advice for the foundation of new shops and drupal-base business.
What are the primary goals you would like to work on?: 
Simply said: Business development process and management Marketing and promotion Enterprise and deployment solutions The active community is concentrating primarily on the code and development of the platform, for the past few years we have seen more design and user centric assistance emerging. Myself and my company have invested resources working on design solutions, marketing and business development using drupal. . I would like to help other business development and strategist in the creating of support groups for young entrepreneurs and business owners. By creating peer-based business support, we are able to assist the various companies and businesses using drupal to work together in the creating of cost saving operation and business process. These cost saving solution allow teams and project to manage our their resource allocation while working with other drupalist and peers in the community. Drupal as a platform is growing at a fast rate, but we still have a lot of work to do before it is enterprise ready. By working with other business owners, we can put our resources together to increase the quality of the work done out there and promote drupal as a business and enterprise solution.
What strategy will you employ in order to accomplish said goals?: 
I currently live in Shanghai, China where i have been working with the local community on the creation of the Shanghai Drupal User Group. So far we have over 25 people working together in the creation of support program to grow drupal in Shanghai and China. I am working with local companies, together we are creating support for local developers and companies to participate in knowledge sharing, training and community events. We are working on ways to grow the drupal community and use of the platform withing China and asia.
What yearly budget would you need in order to accomplish said goals?: 
I have been using funds from our company to sponsor local meet-ups and the Shanghai Drupal User Group. Raincity and a few of our clients have been helpful and generous helping us to cover various expanse here. Working with my team in, I have assign some of their time to assist with marketing and document/process creation. It would be great to commit resources for the creation of standardizing drupal business process and documentation. A small budget can be assign, but i personally think it is not needed, each contributing companies can cover their effort using internal staff. As for the Chinese outreach initiative, Raincity is covering various community events and we will be doing some training sessions and organizing a few drupal camps. We may raise funds locally working with various shops using drupal.
What strengths/experience you have to help you accomplish the goals?: 
I holds a diploma in Business Management and a Senior Management Certificate in New Media and Web Development. I am the founder and CEO of Raincity Studios, an open source, drupal full service agency. I have management skills and work closely with various companies and community organizers. Over the past 5 years, I have grown our small local shop into a 50+ person international agency. My experience working with various training and outreach program has helped me gain a solid understanding of community involvment and I have been an active volunteer with various organizations since a very young age. I speak 3 languages fluently and I am learning Mandarin and German. I have traveled and live in many places around the world, I understand open culture and I am dedicated to the open source cause. I have a lot of flexibility in my employment position and working hard to promote drupal and the open source community.
How long have you been using Drupal, and how'd you get your start?: 
Since 2004, Bmann was the first person that convinced me that the platform would grow to meet our needs. Since then I have never looked back and I am working with various other contributers to make the community a better place to be active with.
Have you made existing community contributions, and if so, what?: 
I lead a team of themers, designers, and marketing people, we contribute a solid % of our time and all of our new work is contributed back to the community. I am an active organizer of various events and camps, I spend a lot of my time doing marketing efforts and business development with other community members, I have organized several camps and training events. I motivate our team to contribute back and I have paid our of pocket countless hours of people time on my team to give support and continue to contribute back to the drupal project.
How much time can you invest in your Drupal Association work?: 
16-20 hours/month
Apply for Board of Directors membership: 
Apply for Board of Directors membership
Board of Directors position: 
Business Development Director
Statutes: 
I have read and understood the Statutes of the Drupal Association. I am prepared to participate by following those statutes.

Comments

Tue, 01/15/2008 - 19:36 — matthews

I had the pleasure

I was fortunate enough to attend a training with Raincity and Bryght a little over a year ago. I first met Scales there and was impressed by his easy going nature but also his business acumen. Since then, he has become a trusted colleague.

Mon, 01/14/2008 - 08:58 — webchick

Specific contributions?

You mention a %age of time that your developers contribute back to the community. A few of the other apps have mentioned some specific community contributions that their companies have made (Kieran with the installer, Michael with the caching API and QA stuff...). Would you be able to list a couple of these for RCS?

Also, same question I posed to Henry Poole.. how do you "sell" the successful Drupal companies on directly helping their competition be more competitive?

Tue, 01/15/2008 - 08:57 — scales

Contribution and collaborative model

The Bryght / Raincity team has contributed in many different ways over the past few years. Our time contribution has been dedicated to best practices including patching modules and connecting to issues as part of client build process. Helping with prepping a set of contributed modules for release from new crop of developers. We are as far as I know the only other team outside of the lullabut that have been doing client training on how to use drupal. We have organized several drupal training camps in Seattle, Vancouver and Shanghai. Contributed and participated in camps in Toronto, Austin, BAD / SF.

We dedicate the second Thursday of every month to do a Drupal Debug Day, our whole team (23 people) work with others in Vancouver and around the world to help debug and create documentations. Local drupal users and companies come to hang in our space and collaborate with us. Every Thursday afternoon, we do a local community outreach BBQ, Vancouver is lucky to have several shops using drupal and we all work together and share our knowledge with hopes to create collaborations.

I led the organization of the first camps in China with the help of several other individuals such as Kris Krug and Crystal Williams. Our initial effort pave the way for open source camps and drupal to grow in the Chinese market. So far there has been over a dozen camps hosted between Beijing and Shanghai since August 2006.

Since 2004, our management team has worked closely with other drupal shop to create standards and process around drupal use. We share our knowledge openly and have helped other team grow their operation. Our internal training program has helped other people such as Matt Saunder find work with other firms. We have since day one collaborated with the folks at bryght so we could offer better value services to our clients.

We feel the drupal market is large enough to create a collaborative environment between companies without having the impact of competitiveness. Sharing best practices make teh community stronger, our outreach program in Vancouver and Shanghai yield great results and follow open source philosophies.

The same philosophies that allowed us to "merge" the Bryght folks and the Raincity peeps in a larger collaborative last fall.

It is my hope to open our internal process documents and intranet to other companies wishing t learn from our experience. Growing the drupal market and the emergence of new shops is essential for our own growth and the growth the platform we build our business around. Our current work in Shanghai is focus on the development of a local user group, reaching out to local shops and promote drupal in China. We are hosting community meet-ups and sharing our work practices with the local market. "Call me silly for telling everyone about what we do, how we do it and how they can do what they do better", but it has always been part of our business goals and since 2004 I have presented this model at various conference. We are continuing to build our team, our goal is to have 30 person in Shanghai before end and we currently have 8 employees working with drupal and contributing back code to the community. We are about to complete the first Chinese drupal installed profile and we will deploy this on our bryght light product using hostmaster 2, another one of our contributions. We are working to host a drupal camp Vancouver and Shanghai in late April, and as pointed out to Dries and Kieran last year it is my dream to see DrupalCon Asia / China on the list by the end of the year.. 2 drupalcon is not enough, there is a growing drupal market in Asia and we need to set standards for all the new comers and contributers .

I am just some guy, but i am lucky to have a team of 30 plus talented developers and creative working with me. We are firm believer in open source and our company motto is "in drupa we trust!"

I hope these points answer questions..