We realize that the Drupal community is growing. One of the effects of this is that there is a need for better segmentation of concerns and focus. The suggestion was for the formation of several "working groups", along with tools and assistance to allow members of the groups to interact with each other in a focused manner.

Resources For Working Groups

  • Forums: one of the first things that can be activated very quickly is dedicated forums for working groups. This would mean one central place on Drupal.org for communicating and coordinating activities related to the working group.
  • "Root" Books: currently we have two root books -- the handbook and events. The suggestion was that each working group could have its own book for notes and documentation (which doesn't fit into the general handbook). This could also allow groups to use the outline feature to gather issues together.
  • Mailing lists: additional mailing lists can be created on demand for groups. Mailing list administration may be expanded to share the load (e.g. Dries currently deals with 500+ messages per day, many of which are Mailman bounce/approval/admin messages)
  • Skype: Skype provides easy free voice communication, including group calls. It was suggested that regular meetings in voice chats would be useful. There is the potential for integration of some Skype services directly into Drupal.org (e.g. callto:// links in user profiles, etc.)
  • Other resources: determined on an as-needed basis (e.g. dedicated subdomains, etc.)

Initial Suggested Working Groups

Usability and Feedback
interface guidelines, usability issues and design, user community feedback channels
File management and Multimedia
binary file management and manipulation of native multimedia types: images, audio, and video
Community tools and social networking
groups, user interaction, karma, profile management, etc.
Metadata and Content Construction Kit
semantic field types, replacement of defined node types with field creation toolkits
Documentation
Continued work on end-user documentation, from site users to install, setup, and administration. Work closely with Usability and Feedback team.

Potential Development Tasks

While the intention is to get up and running as quickly as possible (e.g. use forums and mailing lists), some development would make some collaboration tasks easier. The list below contains some initial ideas, and developers are encouraged to help build them. Non-developers can help by providing support in forums or by donating (these donations can then be used to fund development of some of these upgrades).

  • Forums: add clearly visible RSS icons to all forum pages (all forums, per forum container, and per forum). "Locked" forums for (e.g.) moderated posting only.
  • Subscriptions: a desire was expressed to see email subscription/notification capability in core. It is likely that the subscription and notification modules would need to be combined. This module might also allow for per-user custom RSS feeds, where subscriptions to all content types (per blog, per forum, comments per node, etc.) could be output as a single feed (e.g. user/##/subscription/feed). Comment RSS functionality would come from the module of that name. Other related modules might connect in through the use of a _subscribe hook. It was pointed out that "notify subscribers" would be the label in the context of the actions module.

    For use on Drupal.org, performance would be a primary goal. The use of BCC (potential spam problems) or some form of mail queing was discussed, although the mail subsystem should actually handle the output queuing of mail itself.

  • Book Changes: it was discussed that book changes and diffs of content changes could be pushed to the appropriate mailing list.

Working with other projects

Chris Messina has been speaking with members of the Wordpress team. As well, concepts like sharing RSS feeds of spam comment between systems has also been discussed. Recent suggested upgrades to distributed authentication mean that this could be shared amongst other projects as a grass roots effort to create self-hosted digital identity solutions.