Black Mountain

Volunteering for an open source project has been a learning experience.

I have experienced the kindness of strangers
I have been thanked for helping others

I have had the privilege to meet a wide variety of people scattered around this world. This shows me that people have an intense drive to communicate and build.

I have also experienced the cruelty of those protected by their keyboards. This has been the most difficult experience to face. You do something routine, send an off line message you hope to clear things up and then you and others who have spent countless unpaid hours get accused of lying, deception and other random falsehoods from someone who makes money and benefits from your and countless others contributions.

This is the most difficult part of volunteering in an online community. Realizing that those with an ax to grind, an agenda, a fear will lash out and slander you in an attempt to justify their fears and desire for some goal or desire or power. It is even more difficult when these accusations come from someone whom you have provided help and trust in the past but has not been active for the last year suddenly do this.

It is particularly difficult when people use rhetorical devices to cloak their attack. When challenged, they accuse others of falsehoods and consistently ignore questions but answer with oblique mis-directions. It is much like the tactics made famous by Karl Rove.

It makes continuing to contribute difficult, but perhaps that is the goal, to drive out, poison collaboration, distort and cause confusion. That seems to paranoid. Perhaps that is the goal. I don’t know, it’s hard dealing with people’s fears and cruelty.

I am going to try and ignore the attacks and the cruelty but am not sure I will succeed. I don't know that I have that much patience and understanding.

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.

Now this was interesting. A well written article on why one site is switching over to use Drupal's built in forum rather then continue to use vbulletin.

I understand that vbulletin is a popular forum purchased for use on a variety of sites. People using it and another popular open source forum software phpBB often use the 'Drupal forums aren't standard' argument to justify their position.

Neither are standard. They are like Windows. Widely used so people are accustomed to the same look and feel out the box. Not a bad thing, just not a 'Standard'. They are also dedicated to one thing, a feature rich forum rather then a feature rich, flexible CMS.

To achieve a similar setup out of the box with Drupal you have to do a bit more work, add contrib modules, theme appropriately and perhaps a bit of code. Not always the easiest thing depending on what you are trying to achieve. For those who take the effort, I think, the reward of a forum directly integrated into the sites content will out weigh the initial difficulties. You end up with a site that is and looks like yours, not yavbs/yaphpbbs (yet another vbulletin/phpBB site). It has integrated search built right in along with all the other Durpal features.

For those interested in continuing the improvements that have occurred for Drupal 6 for Drupal 7, please help out like minded others on the groups site.

Part 1 on the article can be found here. I am looking forward to Part 2.

note: You can tell they are using Drupal because they forgot to change out the Druplicon favicon. :)