The Prairie Initiative is a family of projects that aim to make Drupal.org a more supportive environment for people who are new to the community and a more productive environment for our contributors.

1. The Prairie Initiative
Leisa Reichelt
disambiguity.com
Drupalcon London 2011

3. I want to help improve the registration form that comes out of Drupal.
Where do I go to offer my time/skills to the community?

4. where is it? how do I
get involved?

5. maybe I want to get started helping?

6. maybe this is for me?
forums?
IRC? (eek!)
Community &
Support Page

7. community: this looks like the obvious
place to a more obvious place to start...

8. where is the Drupal community? not here...

9. not here either....

10. eeek!

11. maybe here? (what am I
registering for?)

12. still don’t know what
I’m registering for...

16. from: info

17. welcome to the Drupal community... or not.

20. WTF?

27. so... this is Drupal right?
you’d better get used to it.

30. this is an (inadvertent)
statement of our values

31. we don’t value the
experience that new
contributors have

32. we don’t value the quality of
the products we produce
and/or the spaces we inhabit

33. could we make a crappier
‘onboarding’ experience
if we tried?

34. The term onboarding comes from the field of
human resources and the common practice of
new hire orientation. In that context, the steps
in the process are often referred to as
accommodate, assimilate, and accelerate—all of
which apply quite nicely to how new users ought
to be treated in order to bring them into the fold.
- Whitney Hess
http://uxmag.com/design/onboarding-designing-welcoming-first-experiences

35. alternate ‘onboarding’ patterns

36. how persistent people who
DON’T work for Drupal shops
and join the community must
be (desirability, passion?)

37. tactics//vision

38. tactics//vision

39. who do we want in the
Drupal community?

40. how should it feel to join the
Drupal community?

41. how should it feel to stay active
the Drupal community?

42. how much do we care?

43. as you are, so are your buildings;
and as your buildings are, so are you
Louis H Sullivan
‘father of skyscrapers’
Introducing the Prairie Initiative
Leisa Reichelt, Disambiguity.com

44. ‘The behavior you’re seeing is the
behavior you’ve designed for’
Joshua Porter
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jesper

45. designing for behaviour as a first
class object... change the context and
you get different behaviour
- Clay Shirky

46. backcasting from an ideal state

47. social architecture project
the prairie initiative

48. prairie school
organic architecture

49. goals:
1. to improve the collaboration tools on Drupal.org
so that we can do more and better work together
and make Drupal better, faster.
2. to grow the pool of contributors by making
Drupal.org a better and easier place to become a
contributor - to make it less intimidating to people
who want to get started contributing

50. Prairie Initiative is not a project
It’s a family of projects
with a shared vision

51. help us to be more effective
- allow us to make good decisions, quickly
- involve the right people at the right time
- encourage us to follow good processes for
designing and implementing solutions

52. we need to be more findable
and more joined up
- how do new people find the issue queue?
- you do you find issues you need/want to know about?
- why are there three different initiatives going on at
once to solve the same problem (this is ok, except that
they don’t know about each other)

53. we need to know about things
even if we can’t be on IRC or in the
issue queue for hours every day
- smart notifications!
- let me know when I should know something.
- don’t bug me all the time...

54. we need understand & support
modes of participation better
- 1:9:90
- easier to be a power user/leader
- easier to dip in and add value

55. we need a better way to plan
initiatives together
- planning something big is different to getting
work on a project done
- a place to plan complex, multi-stage projects
- a place to plan projects that don’t involve code

56. we need to be more inclusive
- a welcoming environment for noobs
- a way to efficiently provide friendly support
- an environment that supports all disciplines.

57. be considerate
be respectful
be collaborative
when we disagree, we consult others
when we are unsure, we ask for help
step down considerately
http://drupal.org/dcoc

58. we should behave online like we do in
the hallways at conferences & camps
- an environment that encourages friendliness,
politeness, constructiveness, proactivity.
- a way to channel passion positively
- ‘the shadow of the future’?

59. We don’t have a choice about whether we have
a reputation system or not.
We need to choose if/how we write it down .
- what’s measured matters
- a way to show influence
whilst remaining egalitarian
- a way to show expertise without being
a show off

60. a world of inspiration...

61. what if an issue was more like an Open Ideo challenge?

62. what if an issue was more like an Open Ideo challenge?

63. what if an issue was more like an Open Ideo challenge?

64. what if an issue was more like an Open Ideo challenge?

65. what if an issue was more like a Quora Q&A?

66. what if an issue was more like a Quora Q&A?

67. what if an issue was more like a Quora Q&A?

68. what if an issue was more like a Quora Q&A?

69. what if an issue was more like a Quora Q&A?

70. what if an issue was more like a Quora Q&A?

71. what if an issue was more like a Quora Q&A?

72. what if an issue was more like a Quora Q&A?

73. what if an issue was more like a Quora Q&A?

74. what if an issue was more like a Quora Q&A?

75. what if our profile pages were better designed?

76. what if we had topic pages like Quora?

77. what if we could see who was most expert in a topic,
like on Quora?

78. what if our dashboard was more like
Facebook’s News Feed

79. What if our Group pages were more like a Ning site?

80. What if we could see the Drupal community like you
can see a Stack Exchange community?

81. What if the issue queue looked more like
Stack Exchange?

82. what we’ve been working on...

83. http://www.yoroy.com/sites/default/files/Prairie-profile-topic-issue.pdf

84. Notifications
Link to topic based activity
‘Digest’ emails of relevant activity
Improve dashboard

89. Project/Module incl. Git

90. we don’t need to scratch an itch
we need a course of medication

91. Make no little plans.
They have no magic to
stir men’s blood
Daniel Burnham, Chicago architect.
(1846-1912)