Michael E. Meyers
Fri, 01/11/2008 - 04:10 — michaelemeyers
What is your motivation for being a member of the Drupal Association?:
As the founder and CTO of NowPublic.com, the first venture backed startup using Drupal, and as an individual who's used Drupal for many personal sites (my sisters wedding, a friends dissertation, etc.) I have a significant vested interest in seeing Drupal (the software, the site, the community, the association, etc.) succeed and flourish.
I've been looking for ways that, as an individual, I can give back meaningfully to the community that I've gotten so much from - getting more involved in the association is a great way to do this.
What are the primary goals you would like to work on?:
Work with the community to better define and build out the roles and responsibilities of the Association and working to ensure that there is clear and regular communication with the Drupal community.
I also want to get more individuals and organizations involved in building, supporting and using the software (regardless of usage: commercial, non for profit, personal, etc. ) so that we can continue to improve the product and strengthen the community. In particular, i want to get more NON developers involved so that we can develop out better QA and Testing, have more thorough and better documentation, work to radically improve the Design and Usability, etc.
Helping to raise money to support Drupal's needs (infrastructure and infrastructure support, marketing, legal fees, etc.)
What strategy will you employ in order to accomplish said goals?:
The first goal requires open sessions with the community: regularly scheduled opportunities to communicate what it is that we are doing, and talk to you about your needs and what you feel we should be focusing on and then working with my fellow association members to make this happen.
The second requires outreach, recruitment, and promotion/marketing - for example, approaching one of top online design communities and co-sponsoring a design and usability competition around Drupal. It also requires that we forge partnerships and develop stronger relationships with the folks in other communities, like the simple-test and selenium teams (two of the leading QA tools used by the drupal community) so that we can work together to meet the needs of Drupal users.
The third, leveraging my contacts, dialing for dollars, and tapping into the great community that we have.
What yearly budget would you need in order to accomplish said goals?:
i'd like to raise money, not spend money! i don't require much funds to support the above goals.
What strengths/experience you have to help you accomplish the goals?:
my passion is building companies and developing innovative and interesting products. i have over 12 years of experience leading very successful technology driven early stage startups in building web software applications across a wide range of industries.
Drupal is very much in its early stages - so i'm confident my experience building early stage startup tech companies applies directly to the Drupal community.
How long have you been using Drupal, and how'd you get your start?:
I've been using drupal for over 3 years. Initially i was looking for a framework to build NowPublic.com on, and I chose drupal because it was well written, clean, and modular with a vibrant and growing community. Drupal gave us the ability to rapidly prototype ideas and quickly build out proofs of concept.
Have you made existing community contributions, and if so, what?:
As the owner of a business that employs many well known Drupal developers, my company has spearheaded the development of features that are now part of core (like the caching api), we've donated resources, time, and money to build out the soon to be announced Drupal QA/Testing infrastructure and automated patch testing system, we've contributed modules and features back to contrib, we've worked very hard on issues like scalability and performance, etc.
As an individual I've donated money, contributed code, and run around like a lunatic zealot promoting the usage and adoption of Drupal
How much time can you invest in your Drupal Association work?:
11-15 hours/month
Apply for Board of Directors membership:
Apply for Permanent Membership only
Statutes:
I have read and understood the Statutes of the Drupal Association. I am prepared to participate by following those statutes.
Comments
Your contributions to QA have been awesome
I think it's kind of an open question as to whether or not QA is something the Drupal Association can get directly involved with, since hopefully unit testing will get integrated as a required core development process in Drupal 7 (or that's my personal goal, anyway :)), and we want to keep that line nice and clear that separates the Drupal Association from the Drupal project. But contributions like yours are definitely extremely valuable to the project, and laying important foundation for being able to ratchet up our development processes.
Could you provide more details as to your "plan of attack" for outreach? How do you envision these "open sessions" happening, and what sort of agenda would they have? What sorts of contacts do you have who you think would be able to provide funding, and what would they want to sponsor?
If the association accepts
If the association accepts donations and or applies for grants, the moment the Association decides where to apply those, isn't this line crossed? Putting money towards projects IS exerting serious influence over what does and doesn't get done, "the planning or development of the Drupal OS Project" ...and if it isn't appropriate for the association to make these decisions, who or what organizing body would? I'm not familiar enough yet with all the roles and responsibilities, but keeping the lines clean seems impossible when http://association.drupal.org/about/introduction states "Support development by awarding grants or paying wages." Some organizing body needs to make these decisions or the Drupal project won't progress.
WRT open sessions... there are clearly lots of questions as to what the association is responsible for, what it can or can't do, questions as to what it is doing, and so on - we need a way of collecting and addressing these questions, giving the Association due time to formulate answers and policies. So an anonymous drop box, or issue tracker type system would be helpful (where as an IRC room is a great place to get immediate feedback and has poor tracking capabilities). Also, time zones appear to be problematic for all the various folks involved - as far as "getting the word out" an association podcast would help spread the good word.
Before I get to "outreach" i'd work to improve the folks we already have interested - the easiest way of improving adoption would be to have better documentation on Drupal.org. I'm approached by a lot of companies that want to use Drupal, but they have difficulty getting answers to key questions about performance and scaliability, support for replication, etc. We need use cases and documentation targeted specifically at the various constituents using Drupal. I know we'd have a lot more people using Drupal if we could communicate better.
As for outreach though, I want to focus on the areas that i feel are currently undeserved - the less technical; i would approach the top design communities through friends in the design world that spend to much of their working days chatting in these communities :) i'd work to get talented UI and IA folks involved in improving Drupal. i'd work to co-sponsor design competitions...
Funding... there are lots of grants that we can apply for. The knight foundation for example has been giving away millions every year - many of the winning projects use Drupal, we should approach this group and see if they'd be open to giving money to support Drupal. There are many grant winners in the community already... through these individuals we can approach the organization. In addition, i'd tap into the community - those already and directly benfiting from Drupal. One quick and easy way is the chip-in stuff I see Chx using all the time. He's raised lots of money using this tool from the community.
Great
Great to see you applying, Mike. This next level of involvement with Drupal is awesome. I've seen you be converted into believing in the community, and I think you have a lot to add.