Up until this last weekend I did not have any plans to go to Drupalcon. For various reasons I didn't take seriously Kieran's mention of sponsors (partly because I've never done it before, partly because work and family have me a little overwhelmed at the moment). Well he did something about it and got my conference fee taken care of and a place for me to stay (I will be thanking these folks in a later post). I am arranging my flight now and will try that chip in thing he told me about to help mitigate my credit card on that and I should be good to go.

I have two presentations I have proposed.

1. The first is on documentation . Where we are, how we got here, things that we've tried and what people can do to help.
2. The other is on revisiting the current drupal.org forum structure. Over the years we've evolved a new way to collaborate with the groups site but that is not always obvious to the new comers. Also, other forums have developed some differing practices that we can leverage to mitigate culture shock and present resources to new folks.

Should be fun.

Also finally added a Drupalcon tag to my site.

Small non-profits are in a bind. Despite the fact that they are small, they often need skilled technical services be it for computers or the need of a website. They are often staffed by volunteers who may have limited time or technical skills yet they need access to people with those technical skills and the time to help them.

Generic history

In small groups, their first website exists because someone figures out how to get a basic website up and they go on from there. Traditionally if someone wants an update, they need 'Bob' or 'Jane', the web person to hand edit and update the sites content. In smaller groups, often the person who is responsible and first put up the site is busy so things get delayed then missed, etc.... There is a bottleneck. Real life emergencies, drifting interests, volunteer burn out, all effect the life of a site. Neglect builds up and deterioration sets in.

If a group gets lucky and a skilled professional helps them out then they can have some valued services. But what happens when it's a custom CMS? What happens when that developer moves on? Then the sites custom features no longer get updated, the next person may not be familiar with the language, back end.... The site again suffers from neglect. The group fails to get it's message out.

Yay! The first draft is finally posted. The main focus of my spare time for most of this year. If you don't read the front page of Drupal.org, go read the new documentation path currently on the front page now and look at the attached document.

You can listen to some of the reasoning in my interview on the Lullabot podcast which was fun with my system crashing (seems to have been a bad sound card, replaced that and no crashes since).

As this is something I do in my spare time, I want to thank my wife who helped me find the free time to write this up. Without her, I couldn't have done this.

Dries posted about a need for more book authors on his site. Having done this now I think I am going to consider a more detailed book. I have to balance between sustainable documentation for Drupal.org done in people's spare time and something for a publishing house that generates a little revenue to justify the time and effort. I was approached once about it but the time was wrong and life / work hit me all at once. Now that I have a more rational idea of the process I think something may be possible.