Providing Professional Drupal Services

The light side: being fully engaged in the community as part of your business strategy
The dark side: making money by deploying Drupal without ever participating in the community

I will be holding an open discussion on how & why to contribute to Drupal, both on a contrib basis as well as to Drupal core.

Here are some of the questions that will be explored:
* how do you schedule contributions?
* do you charge clients for contributions? should you?
* how do you promote your community ethos to clients?
* will doing community contributions lead to more work for you?

The first thing any Drupal Project Manager learns is that clients only understand the power of the system when they see it. Once you get close to a final product, suddenly the client wants more. This new imaginative phase comes partly from the learning curve of any new system, and partly from simple human nature. Indeed, we are all prone to getting our best ideas towards the end of the project. Managed poorly, this tendency can be an enormous liability on your project budget; the term "scope creep" evokes the frightening image of a project that never ends.

Panel on integrating agile with Drupal

Placeholder copy. Will fill out shortly.

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Maecenas sit amet urna sit amet est eleifend hendrerit. Phasellus ut ipsum eu est ultricies ullamcorper. Quisque sagittis, enim ac tincidunt varius, nulla velit dapibus nulla, ac vestibulum turpis lorem et nibh. Aenean at orci massa. Donec eu pretium nibh. Vestibulum non nisl sit amet orci facilisis sollicitudin vel eget purus. Aenean fringilla viverra nunc, vel posuere ante iaculis id

This session will focus on opening your mind to the point of view of your clients. Whether you are working for a non-profit, a corporation, or your mom... we will cover some tricks that will help you understand what they want even if they can't explain it to you in Drupalspeak.

Ultimately, the aim of this session is to help you build skills that will enable you to understand your client's desires. Your clients get the Drupal site that they want. Your save time and energy (and money and aggravation) while you build it. This leaves both you and your client happy.

Almost all clients who approach your agency about a project want to know up front what the total cost will be. They hand you some loose notes and expect a fixed number of hours or price. To many this presents an impossible task. What is often forgotten is that an exact estimate isn't expected. What you need to produce is one that is accurate enough to close the sale. In this session you'll learn a method for producing early estimates to support your sales process.

Drupal thrives when it is supported by robust communities of both Drupal users and developers. To ignite these communities we need to provide opportunities for people to learn about Drupal and how it can help them. To sustain these communities we need to provide support and opportunities for growth.

Are you still not using Drupal to manage your projects? Since July 2009 excuses are running thin. And if Open Atrium didn’t do everything you ever expected from your project management system, it’s about time that we join forces and build our own dog food.

In this session I’ll present a review of Drupal built tools for project management. You'll get an introduction to Open Atrium and the tools we developed for Knowledge and Project management in Open Atrium.

It's easy to make a living building Drupal solutions, and there's a good business case for contributing patches, documentation and new features to modules. But increasingly, we all depend on "tools to build tools", such as CCK, Views, Drupal core enhancements, and other frameworks or API's that make our work point-and-click easy.

Drupal is only in the second place an open source software. In the first place it’s a collective of humans, more so than most other softwares. As a result we can recognize both in the code and the community patterns that are also present in biological systems and ecologies.

When Rasmus Frey was 7 years old, his parents took him to the largest buffet in the world, at the CircusCircus Hotel in Las Vegas. Confronted with the overwhelming abundance of the table, Mr. Frey was confused. This session is about what happens when you try to serve everything at once: You go to bed hungry.