Beautiful Drupal: Growing the designer community & impact + Slides + Video
Drupal would benefit from having more web designers passionate about Drupal (where "web designer" means people providing art/design and UI/UE). But our community has more coders than designers, a developer-centric culture and infrastructure, and few designers participating.
Why? What can we do systemically to nurture the growth and impact of the designer community? D4D is a good group to address this. And Acquia is willing to put some energy into this - but for what?
Let's change this.
Agenda
The format of this session is intended to be 15% kickoff talk by Jay, and 85% interactive with the session participants (if it's practical). I (Jay Batson, Acquia) have been investing some time on this topic for several months, and will summarize what I've learned so far - which is admittedly from an unscientific sample, but hopefully good enough to start to initiate a conversation. The remainder of the time will be spent discussing the topic.
Goals
Answers that would be great to come away with:
- "What about Themes": There's much ado about whether there's enough, whether there's a "Good base theme," and other items. Many thoughts have been shared on g.d.o - including whether to have a design contest (generally not favored), galleries of great work (generally favored, but doesn't solve the theme quantity / variety problem), building better base themes (the developer-centric approach to the problem), whether to have a robust commercial theme community. Can we at least conclude something and do something about that - and then do the next, the next, etc? What's the most important thing to do first? (And can Acquia help?)
- "Online interfaces": How can this sub-community interact online in a way that is useful for each other, and not be constrained by the limits of drupal.org? Are there some ways to get beyond the "Designers don't do CVS" issue?
- "Technical uglies": What technical things that typically turn designers away from working with Drupal, and are they fixable before D7 core code freeze? The answer is "Lots of big things." Can we prioritize a list of realistically-achievable ones, and get them knocked off before the deadline?
- "Outreach channels": Where do we find more currently-non-Drupal designers to recruit? What are the key messages we'd want to promote to recruit them? Are there some metrics we can use to measure whether we're being effective in growing _this_ portion of the Drupal community (vs. the overall community growth)?
- Sub-community "lead": Should there be such a thing as a designated "designer sub-community lead," who hunts down designers / UI/UE experts at critical times in the Drupal core dev cycle to get designer participation? (Vs. just informal leaders?) If so, who has the right set of passions, personal skills, and time? Does this person simply "arise to stardom," in the normal Drupal way, or should we seek out specific volunteers?
- "More camps": Design4Drupal is terrific. Can / should we repeat it elsewhere (US West Coast, Europe, ...)? Who cares enough to do the work to put it on? Are there online alternatives that would be (probably less, but still) effective (given budget limits for many participants)?
And any others we can come up with during the session.
Resources
Jay would like a projector to use during the initial part of the session. Jay may also have a wiki up for everybody to use during the session - to start to accumulate information and content. (URL to be announced @ session.)
Video
Slides
http://design.acquia.com/sites/default/files/09-D4D-Boston-jb.pdf