Drupal Executives Meetup in Brussels

Posted on Oct 12

This is my first blog post as a NodeOne employee :-) and I have to say that my first week was already very eventful, resulting in going to DrupalCXO in Brussels for the weekend with Jakob Persson.

DrupalCXO (Drupal Executives Meetup), organised by Kristof van Tomme, is a result of a European Community dinner held at DrupalCon Copenhagen 2010 and organised by the Drupal Association, where key community people from all over Europe got together to start a collaboration on EU Drupal Events.

(On a side note) Upcoming EU Drupal Camps:

What was the goal with this event?

Basically, get decision makers from small and big and medium sized Drupal or Web solutions companies together to start an exchange of experiences, knowledge, strategies and collaboration on topics such as how to get more people involved in Drupal, marketing, services, project management tools used, project estimates, and lots more.

How did it go?

The format of the discussions was the Open Space format. It was a bit rocky in the beginning but we quickly developed a format of discussions and sessions with documentation, moderation and developing action points.

A complete list of sessions/discussions can be found here with comments.

Some notes on sessions visited

DRUPAL POSITIONING The basic questions was: How can we communicate what Drupal is? Personally, I suggested and would have liked to see a complete SWOT analysis of Drupal in the EU market and define the target groups more to be able to better define the strengths and weaknesses and better target the messages. Here are the notes I took (this is certainly not definite):

Strengths

  • Community
  • Modularity
  • No license fee
  • ease of development
  • openness
  • fast development cycle
  • scalability
  • broad market adoption
  • strong brand (?)
  • install base
  • drupal adoption is viral
  • credibility
  • multi-language

Weaknesses

  • performance
  • entrance barrier
  • usability interface --> decision maker (marketing vs. IT?)
  • no drupal demos targeted towards clients (not on enterprise level)
  • new concept of how to manage content --> from a consulting point of view, and internal company organisation
  • dependence on modules --> conflict
  • IPR + liability (GPL provides problems)
  • GPL is no sellable product

Messages

  • freedom to move quickly/ innovate
  • no locked-in
  • time to market
  • long history and here to stay
  • adaptable
  • easy to integrate (modules)

Outcome Scalable, inexpensive, stable web platform (content framework) with long history, good references and a lot of developers.

COLLABORATING ON DRUPAL MARKETING Drupal has grabbed attention of big clients wanting to go with Drupal and we need to combine efforts and get strong messages across. This discussion revolved more around what each of us did as a company. Currently, there is no real marketing and often technical benefits tend to be described rather than the “normal” benefits/values that Drupal can offer companies.

Some resource spots were pointed out, where marketing materials can be found. (don’t hesitate to add more as a comment below).

One method that seems to work well to attract clients are case studies. While working on DrupalCon Copenhagen 2010, I realised that there is a lack of case studies written together for the purpose of showing non-tech people what Drupal can do, though there are a lot of excellent projects out there to be shown. Creating those takes time, but will definitely build up the general Drupal image.

GETTING OTHER TECH-FOLKS INVOLVED IN DRUPAL This discussion was held on Sunday morning, focused on specifically creating action points to be carried out. Some ideas:

  • attend Web Mondays
  • target specific barcamps
  • a Drupal speaker attends European TechReady, a Microsoft Event (suggested by a Microsoft representative)

As we already have an events calendar on groups.drupal.org, why not use it to add non-Drupal related events, that are potentially interesting to the Drupal communities. These events can then be posted in local groups and key community members recruit people to speak at these events (as long as there is not much overhead). As a long term goal, it would be great to create generic presentation templates to reduce preparation efforts for non-Drupal events.

Although, we are somewhat competing in Europe, there is a desire to collaborate and making Drupal better together, so that everyone gets a piece of the cake (at least I’d like to believe so). Let’s hope we do not lose this momentum and continue the efforts of strategic sharing and collaboration.

A big thanks to Kristof van Tomme for taking the lead and Microsoft and Acquia for sponsoring.

DrupalCXO

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