Note pad for web site strategy. 


People involved in this conversation:

• John Britton
• Philipp Schmidt
• Paul Osman (Drumbeat Lead Developer)
• [Adrian Rousseau - Development Seed - Haven't heard back]
• [Joeri - Edunode - Waiting to hear back]

Strategic Goals for P2PU.org Website

• (1) Create an amazing social learning platform that acts as a hub and connector for various services provided by other platform (e.g. twitter for micro blogging, wordpress blogs, github activity streams, etc.)
• (2) Create an assessment engine that can reliably expose assessment data to enable partners to award "badges" or "certificates". We would handle the assessment and expose the results to third parties for certification. 
• (3) Reduce P2PU responsibility for maintaining core platform, focus on learning and assessment specific aspects.
• (4) Get help. Establish and leverage a community of volunteer developers to help with ongoing improvements and experimentation. 

Possible Options

• A Improve current site and continue building on Drupal
• B Rebuild site using a web dev framework (Ruby, Django, Cake, ...)
  • Concrete opportunity to collaborate with Mozilla on Drumbeat site redesign, using Django. https://wiki.mozilla.org/Drumbeat/Batucada

Discussion

• About (1) - Current site feels too much like a Learning Management System (LMS). It doesn't pull in and push out enough information. It's difficult for users to "hack" and customize. It feels rigid. 
• About (2) - The assessment specific feature would need to be broken out as a clearly defined module/component (nice to have: that can ideally be used independent of the underlying platform.)
• About (3) - The idea was to use Drupal as a way to minimize our involvement in the underlying development. However, as in the case of the Discussion Forum, it seems that basic Drupal modules are so limited in features that they require significant customization and custom development, which might break upgrades.
• About (4) - Challenge with Drupal is the integration of code and database / building out "features" will help with this, but reality is that a lot of the customization is internal to the actual drupal site we are runninng. At the same time, there is a large Drupal community, who we might be able to drawn on.
• Cost

Other considerations

• Upgrade to Drupal 7 is likely to require significant dev resources, countering the perceived advantages of regular updates and improvements that we expected form building on a CMS.