Drupal Archives

Jay Batson on Open-Source Communities

April 28, 2011 By Jim Storer

The Community Roundtable has partnered with Voce Communications to produce a podcast series, “Conversations with Community Managers.” In this series, TheCR’s Jim Storer joins forces with Voce’s Doug Haslam to speak with people from a variety of industries about their efforts with community and social media management. Our series continues with episode #24, featuring Jay Batson, VP and Founder at Acquia, a provider of commercial services around the Drupal open-source web platform.

Podcast highlights include:

Considering long-term health of an open-source community hen launching a commercial enterprise from within it
The kinds of companies adopting open-source community platforms
Can developer communities provide examples for other types of communities

Download this episode

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MUSIC CREDIT: “Bleuacide” by graphiqsgroove

About Conversations with Community Managers*
To better reflect the diverse conversations our podcast covers we’ve changed the name of our long-running series to Community Conversations.
Community Conversations highlights short conversations with some of the smartest minds in the online community and social business space, exploring what they’re working on, why they do what they do, and what advice they have for you.
These episodes are a great way to begin to understand the nuances of community strategy and management.
Each episode is short (usually less than 30 minutes) and focuses on one community management professional.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

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Drupal Commons – Open Source Social Business?

August 9, 2010 By Jim Storer

Late last week we heard about a new offering from Acquia, an open source software company focused on the Drupal social publishing system and a partner of The Community Roundtable.

The product is called Drupal Commons and it’s focused on expanding the use of Drupal in business. This is an interesting development because it may force proprietary community platforms to re-think their pricing models. Drupal Commons is free. Yes, Acquia will offer a host of value-added services, but the total cost of ownership should be dramatically lower than with proprietary solutions.

Drupal already powers robust communities like Intel’s Atom Developer Program, Novell’s Solution Provider Community and Intuit’s Quickbase Community, so it’s not like Drupal Commons is starting from scratch.

We spoke with the folks over at Acquia and what impressed us the most is that they understand that technology is just a piece of equation in building a vibrant, successful community. Our Community Maturity Model makes sense to them. Keeping your eye on all eight competencies (of which one is technology) is essential if you want to be be successful.

So if you’re trying to do more with less and want a proven community platform, you might want to check out Drupal Commons. You can try out an instance on the Acquia site or sign up for a webcast happening later this week to learn more.

Once you’ve had a chance to kick the tires, we’d love to hear what you think in the comments.

Community Management Advisory Services & Webinar

March 9, 2010 By Rachel Happe

While The Community Roundtable is primarily a peer and educational network for community and social media managers, we have been asked by various customers to help them with internal education, advisory services, and feedback on their social strategies. We have provided two primary types of services in this regard:

Structured workshops for senior managers, executives, and stakeholders in preparation for social strategy development
Semi-regular advisory visits/meetings to provide our perspective, input, and feedback

By offering advisory services coupled with ongoing membership in The Community Roundtable, our advisory customers get consistently delivered professional and peer advice. This combination reinforces all of the information our customers receive and provides them with a comprehensive understanding of a discipline that is more a function of judgment and experience than of knowing the ‘right’ answers.

On Thursday, we are kicking off a partnership with Acquia – a company that provides products, services, and technical support for the open source Drupal social publishing system. Drupal is widely used across the commercial, non-profit, and government markets as a flexible social publishing platform. Join us for 8 Steps to a Thriving Web Community & The Role of Open Source Drupal on Thursday at 1pm EST.

If you are interested in our advisory services, please let us know here.