Somehow, I have been using Drupal for years but still felt like an outsider. I know IRC but am not a developer. I use Drupal in an important, yet peripheral part of my jobs.

It was not until going to the the Drupal events in my local area in Ireland that I felt a great sense of community. I was encouraged by others in the group to go to Drupal con in Szeged. And then, finally I really think I got it…

I think we need to play up the face to face aspects of local user groups in Drupal. I am doing my part in Ireland to bring on more users, inspired by what I saw in Szeged. A lot of this is hiding on g.d.o. And it needs to be brought to the fore.

It has been a huge transformation in my own sense of drupal self, being at the conference. And I hope to share that with others I meet locally in the future.

It’s funny, my Drupal mates tease me about my user ID of 740 but I still am a self described noob and proud of it! I’m so busy with loads of things at work, drupal helps me create project sites on-the-fly… I help others out especially other noobs… And now, after being at the con I know my role is valid and important.

Best wishes for the redesign! Its going to be great.

As somebody new to Drupal at the start of this year, I think the level of technical knowledge makes a big difference to what you want to know when you first encounter Drupal. As somebody who knows PHP, MySQL etc, what I wanted to know when I first encountered Drupal probably quickly diverged from what somebody who didn’t would want to know. For instance, I was interested in how good the API would be for me to customise Drupal to do the weird things that I wanted it to do more than its out-of-the-box capabilities. I also wanted to understand things like the database structure pretty early on. I think this slightly different from a developer/non-developer classification. Lots of my goals *are* similiar to those of a non-developer but I might sometimes approach them in a different way.

Secondly, expertise and community involvement don’t necessarily go hand in hand. I know so much more about Drupal know than I did eight months ago. I have spent many many hours on drupal.org, know ‘Drupal-speak’, and have even evangalised Drupal to colleagues, but haven’t got involved in the community. I’d like to contribute stuff back at some point and get more involved in the community, but it’s not a current priority for me (especially as I can’t justify spending time at work on that!)

I agree that the idea of the ‘outsider’ is not a particularly pleasant one, it makes us feel uncomfortable to label people (or be labeled) in this way - and yet, it’s not something that I made up. This is the way that people have labeled themselves when I have been talking with them about their Drupal experience. For many people, it’s not a good experience, it’s not pleasant, and I think that the discomfort that we get from using the label ‘outsiders’ reflects that, and should focus our minds on changing this experience.

At the moment, it’s not the ‘outsider’s’ fault that they are an outsider - we’re just not doing a very good job of engaging people, or getting them to take the first few steps onto the ‘ladder’ (as David’ described it so nicely).

I have had thoughts of re-framing this around something softer and more friendlier… like a ‘tree’ (family tree?) and we’re all just in different parts of the tree… but I think that might just be a bit of a cop out.

I think we need to ‘embrace’ the discomfort of the poor experience we’re giving to people who are not yet part of the Drupal community, and make sure we improve it. Hopefully in years to come, we can look back at this segmentation and find that it is completely out of date!

@Joaquin - yes, definitely, there is still a time to look at things from a ‘role’ perspective, I agree with that. But I think these should be in specific instances (like the ones you’ve described) rather than our overarching approach.

http://groups.drupal.org/node/3761#comment-18895 discusses another way to ‘rise above’ using persona with Goal Groups:

“Goal Groups consist of users who share the same use goals, i.e. they want the same effects. Goal Groups can be comprised of many different personas since personas may share the same use goals. Goals Groups are groups of the users that usability folks call “stakeholders”.

Use goals should be relatively high level since they are NOT use cases! Instead, a use goal can be broken down into use cases. For example, the Goal Group “Committers” might consist of personas Themer and Developer. Committers want to easily track issues for their projects. That’s a use goal and it can then be broken down into the use cases such as “submits an issue”, “posts follow-up to issue”, “posts patch” etc.”

i can see the points about the words “insider” and “outsider” maybe having undesirable connotations — but, the great thing about personas is that you don’t have to use labels at all, you can just give them names and goals/tasks. thinking about them in terms of what buckets they fall into (and, i guess, what those buckets are named) can be helpful during persona development, but the end result doesn’t have to fit within them.

No one is an outsider, they are just not an insider yet.

PLUS, an information architecture that supports a ladder of engagement allows the community to empirically measure how many “webchicks in the making” are out there and how fast they are progressing on a ladder of engagement.

Reputation systems and other social networking concepts can be tied to that engagement ladder so users have an incentive and clear understanding that they are encouraged to move up the ladder of engagement if they want to.

I am not at all fond though of the terms insider and outsider. They just reinforce all the wrong ideas. At a retail shop, do we call the staff Insiders and the customers Outsiders? Surely the role of the staff is to engage and welcome and educate the customers. I think Insider might be better called a Guide. Dunno about Insider.