The Problem

We lack a clear and inviting path from discovering Drupal and learning how to use it to becoming an active and productive contributor. As a result, our most active developers are plagued by the support demands of intermediate users who have outgrown the Drupal.org forums and don't know where to go. This effect is compounded both by our failure to attract and assimilate new highly qualified support-givers, and the myriad bad behaviors that newbies are learning in "newbie ghettos" such as the forums -- behaviors that make it difficult-to-impossible to adequately support them and bring them into the wider Drupal community.

The Solution

• Phase out the Drupal.org forums in favor of a more straightforward Q&A format resource.
• Treat posts that resource as not just the answering of this question here and now, but building a useful searchable reference into the future. Be brutal in eliminating off-topic chatter and duplication (but as kind as possible in explaining why a question was closed) ala StackExchange.
• Provide easy gateways from that resource to more active participation in the Drupal community: IRC, issue queues, doc team, translation teams, GDO, etc.
• Improve the consistency of IRC and Q&A moderation by setting up a venue for moderator docs and discussion.

I was recently asked what one needs to know before becoming a Drupal developer. It's a tricky question, both because Drupal draws strength from the diversity of our community, and because it's hard to pinpoint the precise point where one becomes a dev. Below is my attempt at an answer

DrupalCamp Indy 2010 is coming!  October 23rd will be here before you know it.

Here are a couple of fliers I put together, short but sweet, emphasizing our newbie-friendliness, awesomeness, and how we have something for everyone.  Please help us spread the word.

Many web developers, especially Drupal developers (who are in particularly high demand these days), won't touch speculative work, period. With so many options available to us, we can choose work that will pay now over work that might pay some day. Still, not everyone who has an idea has the front money to build it. I have had some luck with speculative web development work over the years, and I thought I'd talk about why I do it and how I choose which projects are worth speculating on.

Not long after I diverted from my former career path to pursue life as a Drupal consultant, I received the following advice from a trusted friend: "Every good independent web developer has a project or two that is their own, besides what they do for their clients." It's turned out that he is right. Good speculative work gives me a chance to build a product I'm really happy with, free of portfolio-harming client compromises and NDAs. It also provides me with important experience following a project through its entire life cycle, so that I can jump into my consulting projects and easily answer "where do we go from here?" no matter what state the site is in. Finally, good speculative work gives me something potentially profitable to do when my consulting business slows down. Instead of having tons of work or no work, I have tons of paying work and a little speculative work to fill in the gaps, which is better than no work!

Despite the potential benefits of developing a few well-chosen speculative projects here and there, there will always be far more demand for speculative development than there are developers available to fill it. I, like every other developer who considers speculative work, must somehow separate the wheat from the chaff. There isn't a formula for a successful project (if there were, we'd all use it and be rich) but here are some key points to consider before taking (or offering) a speculative web development project:

Support leeches are a fact of life in the open source world.  Some people don't understand how to be worth supporting.  Others are just so obsessed with their own short-term wants that they are willing to destroy the community they are trying to get support from in the process.  Below are my observations, gleaned from years of actual support leech encounters.

Anatomy

There are two subspecies of support leech, however hybrids are not uncommon:

Today's BoF for new Drupal contributors went better than I could have hoped. I've seen three of the participants in the issue queue already! One thing that came up at the BoF session was taht new contributors aren't always sure how to set up their dev environment and choose tools that will make playing in the issue queue easier

My activitystream_identicagroup module is included with activitystream_identica as a submodule. You may still want to use my view to dress it up a bit -- that will be contributed upstream when I have time. If you previously downloaded and installed activitystream_identicagroup from my blog post, you should disable it and delete it from your modules directery before installing/upgrading to activitystream_identica version 1.1.

If you've tried activitystream_identicagroup module for Drupal, but still don't love the display, here's what I did for Frog and Owl: I installed and enabled activitystream_identicagroup module, then edited one user's settings to add frogandowl group to their activitystream. Note please that the identica field (if enabled) and identica group field are totally different things -- identica group is toward the bottom of the form. Then, I created a view for what I thought was a nicer-looking identicagroup block.

Frog and Owl now has a group on Identi.ca, an open-source microblogging service (like twitter, but without a culture that thinks I want to know when people use the restroom). The activity stream module seemed to be a good way to get the Identi.ca stream on to frogandowl.org, but the activity stream identi.ca module only supported user streams, not groups.

I am almost sorry to see winter break drawing near. For the past two weeks, I've had the privilege of introducing an amazing group of kids to open source software. Inspired by GHOP, Google's pilot Highly Open Participation contest, I've put together an extracurricular computer club for interested students at nearby Sandridge Elementary. We meet twice per week after school for an hour and a half.  I came into this with the slim hope that the school's new administration would let me shepard a couple of students through GHOP. Mr. Hollingsworth's (Sandridge's principal) and Dr.