One of the ideas that we share among regular visitors and friends is to create a network/ a pool/ a cooperative of persons who want to be involved in web-development and creating websites for projects that we believe in, both commercial projects (income generating) and non-profit projects (non-income generating), in order to free time & resources for people to commit themselves to certain projects while maintaining a sustainable base of income for all the people involved. Many different models could be applied here and quite some of discussions and brainstorming has to be done yet.
So far we also are aware of two other projects that seem to be somewhat similar.
* http://chicagotech.org
* http://techunderground.org
Drupal workshops
I like that idea!
as I was used to code that community stuff myself till now I like to try Drupal to save time and be able to concentrate on that networking stuff in future. Drupal seems to have a big community, so development could be fun there too. I really look forward to this!
I used moodle for some time for content presentation and collaboration on one platform before. The inital intention was to create a software for teachers and to create an online learning platform. Its all german, nut have a look at the usablity, I like it.
What do think about the idea of having a Drupal introduction site naming good modules for the beginning and example tasks for people to exercise with it a bit?
Let's do it here: http://casarobino.org/wiki/Drupal
How to learn the Drupal way.
Listen to 1 or 2 of these every day [Audiocasts | Videocasts]. They will teach you a lot. They don't just teach you how to do stuff but also discuss how things work, teach you how to think in those directions.
Drupal is not just a technology but along with it comes a philosophy of how to organise things. You basically have to learn how to do things the drupal way. Drupalisms. These change, no one was using CCK stuff one year a half ago but now you wouldn't even dream not using it. For example, the event module was a module with event features, but using cck views and calendar module, you could ceate similar functionality completely from the GUI, w/o even any extra cost or using a specialised module to enable event based features to achieve this.
Check also as a reference: http://drupal.org/node/176252
Drupal postcast for one week :)
6 podcast for a good basic understanding of drupalisms