Drupal Day

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Comment by Michael Stoll on April 22, 2008 at 9:30pm

I'm a journalist who's relatively new to Drupal but I've got a functioning site at www.public-press.org. I'm psyched to participate in Drupal Day. The project I'm involved with is a proposal for a nonprofit daily printed newspaper that doesn't take any advertising, is focused on serious professional journalism and innovates in the use of multimedia and public-media content partnerships. We've had four meetings in San Francisco and are building out our Web tools as needed on Drupal 6. But the plans are to design the physical paper and the production Web site as an open-source community project. So far it is all volunteer, and we'd like to take a page from the open-source movement to build a robust development community in the San Francisco Bay Area. This includes tech development, but also business modeling, design, content management, staffing, distribution, partnerships, etc. Each area needs a plan. Our goal is to open as much of this process as possible to the community. Visit the Web site or contact me at mstoll [AT symbol] public-press.org, or flag me down at the conference. Also, I'll be speaking on a panel about nonprofit media models on Saturday at the Domain Hotel. Thanks!

Comment by News Tools on April 16, 2008 at 10:48am

Kieran Lal wrote:

Hello, I have a few questions.

1) I'd like to reach the maximum audience possible. With two weeks to go, won't most people's flights have been booked?

2) The conference aims to mashup news and technologists, but it feels like it's heavily weighted towards journalists and there's not enough technologists. If we add a special day, are we failing to achieve the balance within the conference itself?

3) I may be able to get Acquia to sponsor a Drupal day, but I'll need
some stats about this target audience to justify this event. In particular, which of the attendees at Newstools2008 are programmers, and which are decision makers, or technology influencers?

4) My involvement comes from the perspective of technology evangelism. To that end, the larger the audience the better. I'd be willing to consider a registration fee, but only if it was as a way to ensure attendees are serious and pre-qualified as serious about becoming aware or considering Drupal. I am not sure this registration fee justifies this.

5) I am going to need support to pull off these events. Are Sheldon and Benjamin flexible on their travel? I could solicit talent in the local
area: Neil Drumm, Drupal 5 maintainer, Earl Miles: Views and Panels, ISL Consulting who did the http://redroom.com, CivicActions who did project witness http://www.civicactions.com
/blog/civicactions_video_hub_client_witness_to_receive_humanitarian_award>,

Mark Burdett who does a lot of volunteer work in Journalism projects, and Stephanie Pakrul who did theming for Amnesty, Matt Cheney, Zack Rosen, and Neil Drumm who've doing data importing work for citizen journalism projects like http://maplight.org, and
http://www.newassignment.net/. But as soon as we start charging money,

It gets a little weird about why they want to commit time if someone is profiting.

6) Are there costs for an additional day I am not aware of?

Cheers,
Kieran