The community is a wealth of knowledge and while there may be a link for everything, it is very difficult for people unfamiliar with drupal.org to know where to look. The drupal.org site cannot be all things to all people, it’s time for the community component to be split into something more flexible and robust.

What we heard:

While community information can be held in many places, it is confusing for community members to find content, especially if they are new. Not being able to navigate to information and needing to ask creates a feeling of being an “outsider”. Other projects, such as Joomla!, are better handling this information sharing and transparency through a dedicated community site.

What we recommend:

We recommend building a dedicated community website. Drupal’s community site needs to be re-envisioned to centrally manage all community-related information, opportunities, and efforts.

The community site should consolidate information about events, local groups and associations, and governance. It should aggregate communication from all groups, including the DA, in appropriate formats i.e: blogs, requests for feedback, calls for participation, etc.

The Drupal community is multilingual, and the Drupal community site should be translated into multiple languages. Pathways to participation such as Drupal’s mentoring program, and involvement in specific Drupal initiatives, should be accessible from the new site. Usability, clarity, and end-user needs must be a priority — this should be implemented collaboratively with the Documentation Initiative.

The Community Governance Group would maintain a communication strategy to coordinate community messaging, especially through social media. Many members are unsure how to get information promoted through existing channels. It is hard to identify who manages which social media accounts, and coordinate messaging across these platforms. This negatively affects events as significant as global training days, which impacts recruitment and education.

Comments

rachel_norfolk created an issue. See original summary.

rachel_norfolk’s picture

rachel_norfolk
Primary language English
Location UK
CreditAttribution: rachel_norfolk at Drupal Association commented
Issue summary: View changes
Status: Active » Needs review
rachel_norfolk’s picture

rachel_norfolk
Primary language English
Location UK
CreditAttribution: rachel_norfolk at Drupal Association commented

Of course, I want to mention here that the work above neatly fits into that we have already begun in #3003061: [META] Description of page layout and requirements for headings as part of the https://www.drupal.org/project/drupal_org_community project

jhodgdon’s picture

jhodgdon
she/her
Primary language English
CreditAttribution: jhodgdon commented

Sounds great! Does that mean that groups.drupal.org would be migrated to be part of this new Community site? I think that would be a great idea.

Plus moving all of the existing stuff in the Getting Involved Guide over.

Possibly that would also be a good place to move the Forums (if we're keeping them at all), and make them more useful (more like Stack Exchange).

davidhernandez’s picture

davidhernandez
Primary language English
Location USA
CreditAttribution: davidhernandez at FFW commented

I wanted to note that this is also about strategic communications. I hope that having one place to centralize communication makes things like releasing this proposal a lot easier because no one knows where to look. With everything in one place people are more likely to check and stay informed.

rachel_norfolk’s picture

rachel_norfolk
Primary language English
Location UK
CreditAttribution: rachel_norfolk at Drupal Association commented

I have lots of feelings about groups.drupal.org, jhodgdon. It is *very* old now (Drupal 6!) and I'd really like to see it migrate to something a bit more modern. The work we are doing in the Community Section is not to replace groups.drupal.org, though.

Now, it might be that there are a number of teams that from the overall governance of the Drupal project that ended up existing on groups.drupal.org simply because it was the only suitable place at the time. I do indeed wish to make (in Phase 2) a place for any team that want somewhere to say who they are and what they are up to. Essentially, a "maintained documentation section for people, not code".

jhodgdon’s picture

jhodgdon
she/her
Primary language English
CreditAttribution: jhodgdon commented

I agree that interest groups and other teams from groups.drupal.org might want to migrate to having sections on Community instead, and they could use better features.

But the vast majority of the groups on groups.drupal.org are regional/local meetups (at least, I think so?). The format there, while antiquated, works fine for that -- you just really need a place where people can "join" and be notified when someone organizes a meetup (our group also uses the event page to post notes after the fact about what happened at the meeting), and a place to occasionally have a discussion (like "when should the next meeting be" or "should we change the meeting time" or "how about a camp?").

YesCT’s picture

YesCT CreditAttribution: YesCT as a volunteer commented

Concerns about building the separate dedicated community website include
funding for it's development, design, content,
and funding it's maintenance and moderation,
Security of its code,
Where it would be hosted,
Security of its data

Maybe the recommendation should be:
build a dedicated community section of the drupal.org websites.

except we have one
so maybe it should be reorganize and make navigable and translatable…
except the community has agreed to do that already, and have issues to, and they have not accomplished the goals.
this particularly is about resources and participation/enabling with the DA
Maybe this should be “fund” or “get people to work for free volunteering work that will take years and be blocked” on existing issues #NNNNN #MMMM #YYYYYY :(

hestenet’s picture

hestenet
He/Him
Location Portland, OR 🇺🇸
CreditAttribution: hestenet at Drupal Association commented

Wanted to chime in with a Drupal Association perspective here. I think probably rather than a wholly new site, we’d actually like to further expand the functionality and capabilities of the new community section.

@YesCT is absolutely correct, there’s a *lot* to do if we consider the entire scope of the project at once.

It will definitely be an iterative process.

  1. I think we can certainly start by creating official and maintainable sub-sections within /community for the critical non-regional community groups that need a platform for organization and communication.
  2. After that we can begin looking into translation support, as we actually have a good chunk of the infrastructure in place, way back from the Drupal 8 release announcement, and now we just need to figure out the last 20% of the technical side plus how to permission and govern it by section/content type. 

  3. Lastly we can start thinking about an answer for the local/regional groups. This is also relevant to supporting local associations, so we should consider all of those requirements together. If we were to make a new sub-section content type for local/regional groups we should think about what should be included. In particular - should we be doing scheduling/timezone handling ourselves, or just integrating with something like Meetup which many of the groups use anyway?

Just some initial thoughts on this issue! We’ll have thoughts on all the other suggestions coming soon as well.

Gábor Hojtsy’s picture

Gábor Hojtsy
he/him
Primary language Hungarian
Location Hungary
CreditAttribution: Gábor Hojtsy at Acquia commented
Issue tags: +2018 Governance Task Force Recommendation

Tagging with a common tag for easier identification.