I had a slightly uncomfortable experience today on a mailing list I subscribe to which is for expats living in Delhi trying to help each other find their way around the city.

I signed up for it to try to find an apartment / stuff as I as setting up my flat, and I follow it from time to time. Some guy has set up a website tailored to expats, and also organizes “expat night” at a local club.

He sent the following advertisement to the list this morning:

Hi all,

I am looking for female expat bartenders for a bar/disco

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The workflow trinity: States, Owners and Rules

Amnesty International has 400+ employees in their London office who work in various capacities from research, to advocacy, to marketing and development of the organization. Their web and press divisions (primary admins of the website) need to create stories and press releases with input from all of these employees. As a result, workflow became a very important part of this project.
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Amnesty International goes Drupal

Introduction

Amnesty International has been advocating for and protecting human rights and human rights legislation internationally for the past 46 years. Its reputation and the foundation of Amnesty sections in most countries also has made it one of the most recognizable names in the world.

This project (code name IMPACT!) was the result of more than 5 years of attempts to upgrade Amnesty’s web presence and web CRM. Their previous site was based on a very antiquated Lotus Notes backend, a hodgepodge of dreamweaver templates, and dozens of offshoot micro sites.

Here are a few of the notable development efforts that were put forth for the project. Some are in contrib already, and others are on their way.

Workflow

Amnesty International has 400+ employees in their London office who work in various capacities from research, to advocacy, to marketing and development of the organization. Their web and press divisions (primary admins of the website) need to create stories and press releases with input from all of these employees. As a result, workflow became a very important part of this project.

Modules used:

• Workflow
• Workflow_ng
• Workflow_owner
• Custom Module for Amnesty Translation Workflow

More on our workflow setup

Stay Tuned:

Upcoming articles in this series include:

• Asset Management using the Asset module
• alFresco integration
• right-to-left drupal theming
• i18n + panels and views
• CiviCRM + i18n
• menutrails

I and some colleagues are starting a new consulting firm specializing in Drupal, specifically with a focus on install profiles, Rapid Application Design and Information Architecture. We’re still exploring different opportunities to find our niche in the drupal world, but we’ve already got a couple of contracts starting and need some help.

Specifically, I’m looking for people in the New Delhi area (that’s where I am now based), who have proven experience in the following:

• Application configuration - This means being able to take a messy email from a client, and produce easy to maintain and well documented panels, views and content types. Must have experience with panels 1, should have experience with panels 2.
• Light development - Most of us our heavy coders, so we don’t need a lot of heavy lifting. However, you should be able to at least create blocks, do light theming tasks (not necessarily design), and deubg stuff yourself
• Bonus: Light Linux administration. If you can setup drupal instances / create databases, etc it saves us the trouble of doing it.

College degrees don’t mean anything. Just need a portfolio of work, some references and an hourly rate / # of hours per week available.

Contact me through:
My Contact Form

I was writing a proposal for some new work today, and the task has become quite formulaic. I’ve done it so many times, and I never really liked the standard format of a proposal, but I guess I never had the guts to do something new either.

Here’s how a typical proposal goes (according to me):

1. Cover Letter - SS 25%
2. About the Company - SS 50%
3. Example Clients - SS 25%
4. Staff Profiles and references - SS 75%
5. Development Methodology - SS 100%
6. Project Goals and Objectives - SS 50%
7. Line Item Estimate - SS 10%
8. Timeline - SS 10%
9. Terms - SS 10%

Guide to Proposal Reading

I guess it’s effective and that is why people keep re-hashing it. I try to spend the most space on the parts specific to the client, #1 and #6-8. As someone who has also received a fair amount of proposals, I really couldn’t give a toss who you are until I’ve read those parts. But the formula is to throw the stock about us and way we work in the middle, hoping you’ll impress the client and some buzzword or super client will attract their attention.

Does this work?

What could be the new way to make a proposal with the following goals:

1. Not to be boring!
2. Not to use meaningless language and buzzwords
3. Client gets to see the brass tax quickly and clearly
4. The whole thing gets at least skimmed @ 50%, ideally read in entirety
5. Is not an environmental crime to print
6. Gives client reassurance that you are good at what you do

I’ve been thinking about structuring my proposals in a wiki. So that I literally send the client a link to a wiki page which has the whole proposal in it. The reason this is ideal is that you can use HTML to show only a small portion of “Company profile” (Yawn…), and then link off to more detail and try to be more enticing rather than verbose and confusing.

The other advantage of this approach is that it becomes easier to re-using existing content / organize it, and there are more tools at your disposal (such as animation, ajax, etc - what about an interactive proposal!).

Disadvantage of course is the layout thing, as well as the printable document which is of course 100% necessary, but getting around these technical limitations, it just might work.

Other thoughts? Ideas?

What’s the best proposal you’ve ever read?

I was reading Hank William’s blog: whydoeseverything suck, and I particularly enjoyed his last couple posts about the future of the internet and the barrier to entry for new online startups because of VCs proping up “free” software services.

Here are the posts:
http://whydoeseverythingsuck.com/2008/04/artificial-abundance-and-bubble-20.html
http://whydoeseverythingsuck.com/2008/04/chris-andersons-voodoo-economics-of.html

As an aspiring net entrepenuer who has primarilly built websites people don’t need for many years (as many of us do), I’m of course gun shy about throwing myself into a new venture. Anyone who has been developing web applications for last 10 years would be. I mean, for any webdevs reading this:

What percentage of businesses you have developed software / sites for have ever turned a profit online? Be honest with me, it’s not a mark on your abilities as a developer, but more likely the overzealous of your clients. I can’t say for sure in my case, I think about 5%, but then, I’ve done about 70% NPO, academia and government sites.

I’ve often told myself that I’m going to stop working on other people’s bad business ideas, because a non-prospering client is not always an easy client, where as a prospering one is. The question now is, how can we avoid free business. Here are a few ideas:

• Make something which costs money, which is just marginally better than a competitor and go for the corporate market. Corporates are affraid of free, because they think in terms of longevity and strategy, not costs. Software costs are about the same usually as the pay that goes to the CTO to evaluate it and their application team to integrate it, not to mention the training. The problem there of course is the fact that as an entrepreneur without VC, you’re not big enough for corp houses to trust you. They don’t know if you’ll be around.
• Build APIs (esp pay per use). By doing this, you are simply enabling other people’s dumb internet ideas, not risking your own The downsides to this are few, which is why so many people are investing right now. Developers are not like corps, they will bet on bleeding edge stuff quite often, so you can probably be small and make a big impression in this sector. Downside to this model however is that it’s fairly easy to be dethroned I think. You don’t have as many hearts and minds, so if some VC throws a shitload of money at a competitor or Google does it for free, they can probably replicate whatever tech you have, and all your developers will switch, they can even provide a middle teir conversion layer between your API and the new competitor
• Go very niche, and very small and try to be relevant for 6-12 months and then sell or move on. I like this approach because it means if you have sweat equity (or noggin equity as the case may be), you can throw something out to the world quickly, and just not expect much. Because you are very niche, marketing is easy (you can name your customers hopefully), and sales can be automated through a freemium service. Downside is you may not get any payday from it, but the experience from it is useful, and you can make a name for your firm / yourself in many areas, giving you lots of future possibilities and connections.

What do the people out there (all 3 of you) reading this think? Do you feel there are other models online which will still work and not be VC funded and free?

Google’s enterprise search technology is becoming an increasingly popular choice for IT managers to manage their intranets and pool data from multiple sources.

It provides:

• Excellent keyword searching (obviously) based on pagerank as well as customizable weighting factors
• Recommended links
• Source and Date Biasing
• Good support for different char sets
• Incredible speed and performance
• Support for multiple collections and frontends
• An easy REST interface for API integration

Leveraging Google’s technology on your CMS (Drupal) gives us the following benefits:

• Potential for more relevant results
• Integration with 3rd party databases and sites
• Advanced search features like synonyms, stemming and language detection

How the module works

See the Google Appliance for Drupal module page for more details on implementation.

First thing you need to do is to setup the module so it knows where to connect to:

At the minimum, you need:

• Search name (this will appear on a new tab on the search screen).
• Host Name ( the URL or IP where your GSA or Mini is located )
• Collection (which collection you wish to search ).
• Client ( This doesn’t matter much, it just has to be valid. This is equivilent to the “frontend” in the GSA ).

Okay, done? If you want to, enable caching (which will cache results so you don’t need to re-query for the same search within the timeout period) and set the debug level.

Now, you’ll need to tell the mini where to crawl. For this, just go to your GSA administration screen, and punch in the url of your site. For node pages, the module will add meta-tags for the following:

• Taxonomy (Advanced search filter coming soon!)
• Date Modified and Created (Date sorting coming soon!)
• Author
• Status (pub/unpub)
• Language (if using i18n)

After installing the module, you will see a new tab on the search screen:

Fire off a search and see your results (drupalified).

In addition, you can enable the recommended links block, and if you have configured key matches in drupal, they will show up in this block.

This module is still in Beta, so expect some issues. Here are a few I know of:

• No meta tags on non-node pages, means they will be found, but won’t have the type / author, etc fields in the results
• Does not use url() on incoming links, which means if the mini finds node/123 pages, they won’t get aliases

There are probably lots more, but hopefully, this will get people who are interested in this going and we can work on making it better.

I am available for GSA and mini consulting and custom integrations, just contact me