Two weeks ago I attended a joint Web 2.0 (conference) and Web2Open (unconference) two part session on building a social strategy for your business. Web 2.0 and social software luminaries Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff presented a session " how to have a successful social strategy" based on their extensive research and book "Groundswell".

Pragmatist

They recommend that in order to lead a successful social strategy you should assume the role of a pragmatist. Pragmatists try to meet the company's goals, usually selling a product, as well as the needs of the community which wants complete access to the company's internal resources. In the case of Drupal.org this means carefully striking a balance between adding any set of modules the community wants on Drupal.org and respecting the time of the half dozen active members of the infrastructure team who are responsible for maintaining Drupal.org software and infrastructure.

Objectives

A social strategy should have clear business objectives. For over a year now, there have been active discussions about what a Drupal.org redesign should accomplish in the redesign group. The association is recruiting community and Drupal association leaders who are taking the responsibility of creating those business objectives. The leaders will be able to focus exclusively on the role of defining objectives and ensuring they are met. While those objectives have not been finalized yet, let's pick a few that are reasonable. First, a Drupal.org social strategy should make it easier to learn about Drupal. Second, Drupal.org should make it easier to contribute to the Drupal project. Third, Drupal.org should allow for income from association memberships and highly focused advertising revenue to help fund Drupal association activities like a re-design of Drupal.org. If you have some ideas about objectives for a social strategy, be sure to share them in the Drupal.org redesign group.

People, Objectives, Strategy, Technology

Charlene and Josh recommended we use their People, Objectives, Strategy, and Technology approach to frame a Drupal.org social strategy. For the Drupal.org redesign we've completed three significant People activities. First, we conducted a set of 10 interviews of Drupal.org users. Then we surveyed 1200 Drupal users about what they want to see improved on Drupal.org. Finally, we developed some personas to describe the different types of Drupal.org users. We are assembling a team of people to work on Objectives.

We've not yet spent a lot of time formally discussing our Strategy for how a re-design will change the relationship with users on Drupal.org. The Drupal community has often taken a very conservative approach to empowering users on Drupal.org. For example, we frequently leave technical barriers in place and restrict permissions so that spammers, and even legitimate businesses can not cross-promote Drupal and their business. We need further discussions on how empowering the community might change the workload of Drupal.org maintainers and how we can deal with it.

From a Technology standpoint, our choice is pretty clear, we should upgrade Drupal.org to Drupal 6 and allow for more capabilities to be handed out to maintainers. Currently, feature development on Drupal.org is restricted to half dozen maintainers who are responsible for maintaining the code. With the content listing Views module, page layout Panels module, and web form building Content Creation Kit module the 93 site maintainers don't need to install extra modules to help meet some of our objectives. This added flexibility will also help to produce better marketing landing pages.

Line up backers

The last step in building a successful social strategy for Drupal.org is to line up our backers. Who are these backers? First, they are the 9 members of the board of directors of the Drupal association who vote in association board meetings. Second, they are the general assembly of the Drupal association, comprised of the 26 members, who have already made a symbolic vote to make the redesign of Drupal.org the number one priority for 2008. The general assembly of the Drupal association will meet and approve a budget to fund a redesign of Drupal.org. Third, our backers include the 500 paid members of the Drupal association. Fourth, we need to line up advertisers who can help generate revenue by placing ads in limited areas of Drupal.org such as the handbooks, hosting, and paid services or jobs sections of Drupal.org web properties. This means we need to reach out to the 76 hosting companies that have posted in the Drupal.org hosting forums and see if the are interested in advertising on Drupal.org. We need to reach out to the almost 2000 people who provide Drupal services through hundreds of companies and see if they are interested in advertising on Drupal.org. Fifth, we will need to conduct a targeted fund raising campaign to help pay for the redesign. Sixth, we need to solicit and recruit a capable set of design firms who will choose to take on this project in a long term partnership. Seventh, we need to generate agreement with the infrastructure team, and maintainers who will be doing a lot of volunteer work to make the re-design happen. Finally, we are going to need to get the support of the Drupal community and ensure they are supportive of a re-design.

If you are interested in learning more about developing a social strategy for your business, read Groundswell. If you are interested in participating in the development of a social strategy for Drupal.org, join the redesign group, and look for an upcoming meeting between the redesign group and Charlene and Josh who have agreed to meet with us when we are ready.