RjSteinert.com

This past weekend over a dozen Drupal people came out to the Pirate Ship and the N.E.R.D. center for a three day long sprint for the Snowball Initiative. It was a great learning experience for me to work with such a large group who had so many great ideas. I think the direction the group ended up going has a lot of potential. Thank you to all who came! Below is a brief summary of what I think we accomplished and where I think the Snowball Initiative is going.

Starting at the BoFs of DrupalCon Chicago focused on "Paying for the Plumbing", I had been involved in discussions revolving around how we might be able to do a better job of getting developers the resources they need to do the work they want, and ultimately, grow a healthier open source community. We discussed things like "tip jars on project pages" to a Kickstarter-for-Drupal website. We all agreed that we needed to make it easier for those who have resources to give those resources to developers, but from all of the ideas we had, something was missing... So I called out on the community for the first Snowball Sprint.

After much deliberation over about a day and a half, we seemed to have arrived at a consensus that it is not the ability to donate resources to developers that doners lack, or really even who to donate to, but that the missing piece of the puzzle might be that which reduces the amount of effort it takes for doners to know WHICH IDEAS are worth donating to. So after a day and a half of discussions, we set out to design a transparent system that we hope will help facilitate community participation and validation in the realm of hatching ideas. It's something we're calling Community Driven Project Planning.

When we decided that was our goal we took time to explore what was already out there. Two examples stood out in the crowd: OpenIdeo.com and Brainstorm.Ubuntu.com. Our discussions on those two models really deserves posts all to themselves, but to summarize, we found the simple voting in the Brainstorm model to be too shallow and while we really liked the OpenIdeo model, we think there is room for improvement. So after a whole day and a half of discussions, we came up with a series of wireframes and a general framework for what we hope to build.

Unfortunately much of that general framework is still in our heads and without it, the wireframes don't make much sense. Still, I think what we accomplished is a huge milestone in the discussions that have been evolving over the course of the past couple of months. In the coming week I'm hoping that those involved in the sprint this past weekend will find time to continure to document what we came up with in order to be ready for possibly building it!

There are no Snowball Sprints planned at the moment but we're hoping that our Snowball Sprint proposal is chosen at DrupalCon Denver so we can really get this project hatched!