Recent Blog Posts

Growing Venture Solutions needs a new name

Submitted by Greg on Sun, 2011-08-14 11:00

February 14 of 2006 was my last day as an employee of a US cable telecommunications firm. I immediately set about creating a new company as a vehicle for my work as a Drupal consultant and I knew from the start I wanted it to be a multi-person firm. Of course the first step is a name - I wanted something that expressed some of the values I had for the firm.

Each word, in priority order:

Solutions

So often I find people encounter problems and say to their boss or client "We have a problem because x, y and z." I am occasionally guilty of that and especially in my first job was guilty of it. Luckily I had a great boss who told me I should never come to him with just a problem but always with a set of possible solutions with pros and cons for each and a recommended solution. This rule, whether applied to a boss-employee relationship or the consultant-client relationship is a powerful one. Very few people like interrupting their work to solve someone else's problems. If you present them with solutions it makes their life easier: they weigh the pros and cons you laid out, maybe brainstorm a little to try to help think of alternative solutions, and then select one and move on. This policy also is useful for building trust and training employees for more complex job responsibilities. The more that the boss can see and approve of her employee's decisions the more easily she can promote that person.

Venture

Selecting conference session proposals: popular vote? selection committee?

Submitted by Greg on Wed, 2011-08-03 16:32

I was on the "Ecosystem" track session selection team for Drupalcon London, which motivated me to finally do some more analysis on the traditional pre-selection session voting. Specifically, I wanted to compare the votes a session receives against the evaluations submitted after the conference.

By the way, if you have the opportunity, I highly suggest going to a Drupalcon; they are always great events.

Here are some conclusions based on analysis of the evaluation and voting data from DrupalCon Chicago:

Voting was not a useful predictor of high quality sessions!
The pre-selected sessions did not fare better in terms of evaluation than the other sessions (though they may have served a secondary goal of getting attendees to sign up earlier).
We should re-evaluate how we do panels. They tend to get lower scores in the evaluation.
The number of evaluations submitted increased 10% compared to San Francisco, which seems great (Larry Garfield theorizes it is related to the mobile app, I think there are a lot of factors involved)

Is voting a good way to judge conference session submissions?

Drupalcon has historically used a voting and committee system for session selection that is pretty common. This is also the default workflow for sites based on the Conference Organizing Distribution.

Typical system:

Users register on the site
They propose sessions (and usually there is a session submission cutoff date before voting)
Voting begins: people (sometimes registered users, sometimes limited to attendees) can vote on their favorite sessions
During steps 2 and 3, a session selection committee is encouraging submissions and contacting the session proposers to improve their session descriptions

Voting, Profiles & Hot content: Tools to help the Drupal community scale

Submitted by Greg on Tue, 2011-05-24 16:12

Drupal is growing in complexity and growing simply in sheer numbers. We need more tools to help people manage the information overload and find the best voices in our community quickly. We should build dynamic tools to empower community members to join in and share their voices (if those voices are valuable) rather than walled gardens that keep people out. I believe voting, richer profiles, and the hot content are steps to help enable that vision. That said, the implementation has to match the community values. Below I've laid out the story of how some improvements to Groups.Drupal.org were made, provide data behind some of those improvements, and ask some questions so we can keep refining them.

At Drupalcon San Francisco there was a sprint for groups.drupal.org features where Josh Koenig and Brian Gilbert helped out add some new features. In particular we added voting on nodes & comments and we added a "hot" page which incorporates several elements to determine which content on the site is interesting in the last week.

I wanted to look back on the past year to think about these changes and whether or not they are an improvement.

Hot Content: G.d.o is a differentiated piece of $#!@$&

You should come to Drupalcamp Colorado June 11-12 2011

Submitted by Greg on Mon, 2011-05-16 17:25

Drupalcamp Colorado 2011, co-hosted with Commerce Camp, is shaping up to be another amazing event.

In 2010 we had 312 people registered, delicious breakfast and lunches, 2 parties, all for less than $50 in attendance fee. For 2011, we have all that and more. You may consider registering before reading the rest...but if you still need to be convinced:

Drupal Camp Colorado: An Amazing Value in 2011

Session submission is closed and session selection is under way, but BOFs will be managed online in the lovely Conference Organizing Distribution based BOF manager which was used for Drupalcon Chicago and is being enhanced as it makes it's way into COD.

And the sessions accepted are looking amazing. There's a good mix of the best-of Drupalcon Chicago combined with what will certainly become favorites at Drupalcon London.

The content team has made sure that we cover all skill levels this year. Some particularly new user friendly options include:

Pre-camp training on Friday the 10th from Lullabot and Chapter 3 will give you a 1 day trip forward a few levels in your Drupal journey.

Contributors for Drupal 7 - Final Numbers*

Submitted by Greg on Tue, 2011-01-04 17:09

Well, here we are. Drupal 7's release is imminent and once again here are some statistics for folks to review. This is a truly amazing feat: over 950 people were credited in the commit messages as a contributor to Drupal 7. There were, of course, several thousand people involved in the issue queue but a mention in the commit message is reserved for people who did a serious amount of work whether that was writing code, design, reviewing, creating tests, writing text (i.e. documentation), or some other form.

State of Drupal Certifications in 2010

Submitted by Greg on Mon, 2010-09-27 09:04

If you ask most folks they'll say that there is no certification for Drupal. However, the truth is far from that. There are at least 3 launched programs and 1 planned certification.

Acquia Certified Engineer (joke name, Certification may really be coming)

Acquia has been talking for a few years about their certification. More recently "Certification" on Acquia.com is about their services to help with the United States Goverment Certification and Accreditation process, which is more about security than stating an individual's specific level of skills.

The name Acquia Certified Engineer was a bit of a joke started by @jhibbet on Twitter and propagated by Heather James when she retweeted it.

Though @hjames quickly recanted the naming and pointed out the irony in the initialism (ACE being UK slang).

Nobleprog Drupal Certification

NOTE: they updated their site and removed this certification, the screenshot below shows the details as does this forum post on drupal.org

Drupalcamp Atlanta and best practices for event websites in Drupal

Submitted by Greg on Wed, 2010-09-01 18:58

Drupalcamp Atlanta recently launched their new site for the 2010 Camp. I reviewed some of their features and found it to be a solid site. As the GVS team increases our focus on selling events with Drupal, I wanted to hear more about the backend of the site. So, I got in touch with Brent Ratliff who was the lead developer on the site, to find out how the site was built.

Adding Signups and Payment to an Event Site: UC Signup

In 2009, the site was a standard build relying mostly on Views and content types. For 2010 they needed all of the features from the previous year but also needed to charge an entry fee for the event, for individual sponsorships, as well as the ability to submit and vote on sessions. The Atlanta Drupal Users Group decided to base their 2010 site on the acclaimed 2009 Drupalcamp LA site that was released as a zip file. The LA code, updated with new module releases, handled the voting, some nice Views, helpful theme functions, context, and some of the "attendee logic," but not the e-commerce portion. Brent was familiar with using the UC Node Checkout module for building an event site, but ultimately decided to go with the Ubercart Signup integration module along with Rules and custom hooks to handle workflow. UC_Signup allows them to collect profile information from users during checkout and helps keep track of attendees using the Signup module. They also grant roles to users based on which products they have purchased.

Drupal module selection in the enterprise: lists and processes

Submitted by Greg on Tue, 2010-08-24 17:01

We are driving ourselves crazy, folks. Choosing modules is really hard. And it's only getting harder on enterprise Drupal sites (and enterprise just means big teams and with big sites with big requirements).

A recent conversation on twitter started by Drupal rock star Katherine Bailey shows how module selection on a big site can drive you crazy:

So, today I'm going to lay out some ideas I've found for reducing the madness: choosing good modules both as an individual and as a member of an enterprise Drupal site. Of course the enterprise practices build on the set of guidelines for an individual site builder. I'd love to get feedback on other techniques people have used for module selection in big team, big site, enterprise environments.

Drupal Security Report: Connect with Fans, Reason to Sponsor

Submitted by Greg on Mon, 2010-08-16 11:58

Recently our company worked with partners and sponsors to create a thoroughly researched, high quality document about the state of security in the open source Drupal project. You can download the report from DrupalSecurityReport.org, but right now I want to talk about the motivations, the audience, and the funding model behind the report because we feel that we've solved a tricky problem: funding expensive work in an easily copied medium (PDF downloads). We decided to try a variation on Techdirt's strategy to "Connect with Fans and give them a Reason to Buy".

This report was something that my colleague Ben Jeavons and I had wanted to do for a long time, but we couldn't fund it entirely from our own company resources. The target audience for the report is people who are considering Drupal and we didn't feel that they would be willing to spend money purchasing the report.

Connect with Fans

Fortunately, we have built up an audience among people interested in Drupal Security. Last fall I did a security webinar for a few hundred folks leveraging Acquia's webinars. Our blogs are directly read by a few thousand people interested in Drupal and are syndicated to over 20,000 readers readers interested in the topic. We've also done several presentations on Drupal security.

So, with a purpose and some fans in tow, we turned to business contacts we've made over the years to see if they could help with funding.

Reason to Sponsor

Based on discussions with them, our sponsors were motivated to sponsor the report based on three major ideas (and one sub-idea).

They sell Drupal in the enterprise space and are often confronted with questions about security and don't have a good answer. They wanted something they could point to.

What content is HOT on my site? Drupal's Radioactivity module to the rescue

Submitted by Greg on Tue, 2010-08-10 00:00

Earlier this year we supported the IxDA in launching a new version of their IxDA.org site. One of the many interesting new features of this site is the ability to sort content by "hotness". The goal of this tool is to create a list of interesting content on the site. Their analytics show them that most people who are involved in the site visit it at least twice a month. So, they wanted a system to highlight content over the last two to three weeks. Enter the radioactivity module.

Radioactivity Module for Drupal

The Radioactivity module works on the concept of adding energy to a piece of content which then "decays" (or diminishes) with a particular half-life. The exact behavior is up to the site administrator, but on IxDA.org we originally set it up with values roughly similar to:

Posting content adds a lot of energy so that the hotness favors recent items.
Commenting on a post adds some energy
Voting up adds a bit of energy, voting down subtracts some energy
Favoriting a post adds some energy as well

We've got a few other elements that affect energy to help offset any potential gaming.

We set the half-life for decay to 15 days. So, if a piece of content gets posted and 3 comments and 2 vote ups and 1 favorite with 100 views on the first day it will have about 500 units of energy. If it gets no new energy, it would decay down to 250 units of energy after 15 days, and then down to 125 after 30 days and so on. Eventually the energy and decay are really small and for efficiency the module simply deletes all records with less than 2 units of energy.

GVS projects

Certified to Rock

CertifiedToRock.com was created to allow community members and employers to get a sense of someone's involvement with the Drupal project.

GVS is now part of Acquia.

Contact Acquia if you are interested in a Drupal Support or help with any products GVS offered such as the Conference Organizing Distribution (COD).