Drupal: Toolsets for Community Developers and Designers

All this support for Drupal as a significant resource for enterprise, corporate and institutional solutions is great. Not only is there the embrace of a clean, strong, open-source platform, but in this adoption Drupal comes into its own and brings so many dedicated people with it.

Particularly at this time when Drupal and the community appears to step out, we have a real opportunity to reflect on our ability and perhaps responsibility to connect people around the world who remain outside the community-building power Drupal provides.

The question might be how do we continue to mature, all the while reinforcing our core strengths as damn good coders, builders, designers — and communitarians?

In this interest, I’d like to propose that a few of us get together around how Drupal can have its cake and eat it too.

I hope to meet and discuss how we might begin to channel some the power of our community into, perhaps, defining not just the platform but the applications, or, for lack of a better way of putting it, “shared components” to help people everywhere engage in, store and exchange meaningful information.

As a community of developers, designers, and entrepreneurs we might be able to create toolsets that will help people accelerate design and development. We could develop “News toolsets,” “Groups toolsets,” “Layout toolsets” “Photo-sharing toolsets — in other words, “best practice middleware” components that might, if done well, accelerate adoption and build orders of efficiency into a mature platform for building communities.

It could help us as we grow from one of the best development communities in the world to, perhaps, one of the best development, design and implementation communities in the world. I think that idea is kinda cool.

Let’s meet up!