Kieran Lal's blog

We had over a dozen volunteers from the South Bay, San Francisco, and Berkeley group at the Drupal booth. We also had at least four people ask about a North Bay group. One of the problems when you have so many fun and interesting people working at your booth is you start talking to them instead of all the people who are looking at you with the "What's a Drupal?" look. But we did a great job talking to hundreds of people in three days and I believe that this will help to grow Drupal usage in both the Bay Area and the broader Linux community.

One of the unfortunate aspects of marketing events is the use of the Booth Babe. We were lucky to have Dmitri at our booth and we were joking at the Drupal booth that we were booth babes. More about LinuxWorld in San Francisco.

The Drupal community got together to help promote Drupal at Hostingcon, in Chicago last week. We learned some important lessons. One hosting company told us they were sponsoring their local Joomla group and had managed to grow it to over 300 users in less than a year. Wow! Hosting companies promoting open source projects. When you consider that hosting companies are paying anywhere from $5 to $200 per affiliate sale providing office space and snacks seems really cheap in comparison.

Last night I met with Tiffany Farriss and Drupal association board member Larry Garfield at the Palantir offices in Chicago. I was in town for HostingCon. We reviewed the six proposals we received from 6 design firms.

We have some good news for Acquia watchers: the Carbon distribution and Spokes network service have entered private alpha testing and are steadily marching towards beta.

This year we had about a dozen members of the Drupal community show up to help run the Drupal booth at OSCON. We frequently needed at least 4 people at the booth to answer all the questions and still had people waiting to learn more. A large part of our visitors were already Drupal users and they were just coming by the booth to say "hi!". They wanted to let us know how many sites they were running or wanted to know how add a new feature or meet some new business requirement. Where we had time, we were able to answer their questions.

Last night the San Francisco user group celebrated Bastille Day at the Paris SoMa (South of Market) co-working office, and San Francisco office of AF83.com.

In the month of June we enabled Google Analytics on Drupal.org as part of an effort to build a user experience toolkit. The toolkit was designed to provide insight on: what users were searching for, what traffic patterns and workflows vistors were following, and what usability feedback we can get from field studies. If you are interested in Drupal.org analytics you should attend the web conference on key performance indicators tomorrow.

Acquia and growing Drupal

Part of my responsibilities at Acquia are to help grow the number of Drupal users. The Drupal community is growing quickly and the credit for that growth belongs to thousands of contributors and hundreds of Drupal evangelists. I’ve been personally working on growing Drupal for years, but recently I’ve begun working closely with my fellow Drupal association members Jacob Redding and Moshe Weitzman to explore how we can work with local groups to grow Drupal. In the rest of this blog post I cover information that I’ve gathered working with various members of the Drupal community and have shared with the Druapl infrastructure team, groups.drupal.org managers, and the Drupal marketing group. On Monday, June 9th, 5PM PDT Jacob and I will be hosting a web seminar to share our research and solicit feedback from local group organizers.

Groups.drupal.org is growing

Currently, http://groups.drupal.org , GDO, acts as a rallying point for community events and helps reduce friction in Drupal event organizing. There are 8300 GDO users who are members of local groups, and events appear to be on track to grow from almost 400 in 2007 to 800 in 2008. GDO user growth is accelerating at a rate of 34 additional users per month, with almost 1,200 new users in March 2008 alone. This site now has over 1 million page views per month.

GDO has slow growth in the number of unique visitors climbing from 64,000 unique visitors to 84,000 unique visitors per month over 9 months ending March 2008. We believe that some improvements in user workflow and interaction design could dramatically increase the rate of participation on GDO.
Currently, 73% of visitors stay less than 30 seconds, with an average visit of 466 seconds. An upgrade of Drupal properties to Drupal 6 would enable the use of OpenID to further increase the total amount of users who could become members of local Drupal groups and ultimately attend local events. The authenticated user re-use rate for GDO is approximately 20% based on analysis over the last 24 months. This assures the Drupal community that GDO is a growing web property and worth putting further effort into.