wealth of networks

If Drupal was a newspaper story, it would list 492 people as authors. That may be a unwieldy byline, but the overall success and vibrancy of Drupal is a good testament to the power of peer production. As is true in many open source software projects, an open process that leverages the creative and technical talents of others can create some fantastic results. It is our pleasure to help bring this sort of thinking to the world of investigative journalism.

Over the last month, Chapter Three has worked closely with the New Assignment project to develop Assignment Zero which is described in detail at wired.com [Citizen Journalism Wants You! 03/14/07]. We encourage those with an interest in investigative journalism or open processes to get involved with their first story on the emerging practice of crowdsourcing and peer production.

As we’ve posted about before, the past year has seen almost 100% growth in the Drupal economy. Several great new companies and several good coders have emerged, and a new ethic of training and local groups has taken hold, and yet there just aren’t enough savvy web developers to meet the demand for Drupal-related services.

Like every professional services shop that plays heavily — our in our case works almost exclusively — in the wonderful world of Drupal, we’re feeling that talent shortage. And it occurs to me that poaching talent from our “co-opetition” and/or headhunting people with existing IT jobs — two popular ways to build out a development team — isn’t a long-term solution to this problem.

It Has Begun!

To that end, I’m excited to announce the formation of The Drupal Dojo, a community group dedicated to increasing the proficiency of apprentice and journeyman-level developers. The Dojo will work through the groups.drupal.org forums, and an IRC channel.

A middle-tier developer community is good for the project as a whole (#drupal intimidates a lot of people), and for enterprising individuals like myself, the idea of being able to build stronger relationships with up-and-coming developers makes obvious business sense. Seems like a classic win-win. I’ll be posting on group progress as it evolves.

I’ve arbitrarily said we need five learners and at least one other “expert” to start out. If you’d like to participate, subscribe now and help me get the ball rolling.

UPDATE:
Well that’s a surprise! 72 hours after creation we have 175 subscribers. The ratio of “master” to “apprentice” may be a bit off, but I think with the number of participants we’re bound to have some good results.

One of the projects we’re most excited about at Chapter Three is called NewAssignment.Net (“NAN” for short). We’re going to run this as the premiere of our Open Practice model. If you’re interested in following or participating in this project, contact us. We’d love to hear from you.

NewAssignment.Net is an ambitious and potentially groundbreaking venture headed up by Jay Rosen, professor of Journalism at NYU and a respected presence in the blogosphere (www.pressthink.org). The goal is to develop a successful model for open-source investigative journalism.

I’m personally very excited to be working with Uncle Jay (why try and hide it: he’s related to Zack), and to be taking such a bold step into an arena — the function of the Press in a 21st Century Democracy — that’s near and dear to my own heart.

For an overview on how the project will be run, and for answers to frequent/obvious questions like “how do you prevent cranks from ruining everything?” and “are you guys just massive sell-outs?” I refer you to the horse’s mouth.

Suffice to say, I think Jay’s got what it takes to make this work:

• He’s got real experience and connections in both the old and new (print/internet) worlds of the Press.
• He has a great vision for where this can go and how it can spread, and isn’t afraid of people stealing his ideas.
• He’s willing (enthusiastic even) to run the project in a radically open fashion. How open is radical? We’re going to let you all look at our budget more or less in real-time. Oh man.

And of course last but not least he’s got the brain trust from Chapter Three LLC in his corner, which we like to think helps. It’s going to be fun.

In upcoming posts, I’ll give some back-story about the idea, and talk in-depth about some open-source and techincal aspects of how it will work, and also about our Open Practice development process.

Stay tuned to the blog here, or to the NewAssignment.net project page for updates.