Ideas for an Open Atrium Partners Program
Some ideas recapped from the SXSW presentation on open source business models
Yesterday while speaking on the SXSX panel Selling Your Milk When the Cow is Free, I talked about some of our plans on making Open Atrium development sustainable and for the first time publicly shared ideas on what an Open Atrium Partners Program would look like, in addition to plans for commercial support to follow. In this post I'll recap that and go into more detail on what we are seeing in a Partners Program and get feedback.
Why partners are a good thing
About two months ago I starting emailing different shops that are building on Open Atrium to ask what would be helpful for them if we were to move into the commercially supported space. What came back was a unanimous request for an "Open Atrium Partner Program" that would help teams build and deploy Open Atrium better and more efficiently. Honestly, I've always been cynical of partner programs because I had only seen a few that had done it really well. But after really looking at other companies that offer support and the feedback we got from different shops, we believe we are in an amazing position to offer real value that will help shops build better sites and sell more projects.
We want to make it easy for teams to prove their Open Atrium expertise and ensure Open Atrium custom development is always successful. This is why the main focus of our partners program will be on training and capacity building. Here are the main components we are seeing now:
- Training courses
- Developer channels for third tier support
- Partner meetings
- Partner section on OpenAtrium.com
- Partner bling
Our goal is to create a training course and support system that will bring in shops as real partners and give them real value - and not have something that is a a pay to play program. Below are more details on our current draft plan. We are very open to adjusting this to provide more value to partners, so if you have ideas please talk to us.
What the program will look like
Training
Training will be a major component of the Partners Program, and we are thinking of starting off with a two day training that would be held in person and remotely. Here are the possible topics we are seeing right now:
- The heart of Open Atrium- Context, Spaces, and PURL, something similar to the talk Young is giving at DrupalCon SF
- Features and Exportables and issues with keeping configuration in the database
- Building processes - Drush, drush_make, and sharing Features via Feature servers
- Building and rolling out Features (best practices)
- Theming Open Atrium
- Deploying Open Atrium with Aegir
- Security best practices
For this ninja factory to work, some of these will be broken into a few talks that have real depth. This is only going to work if we can ensure people leave this training with the ability to implement. Also, the kinds of partners we are going to bring on are already going to be solid developers, so there is no value in a cursory overview.
We will be finalizing the training plans in the next couple weeks and will post in detail about each training topic on OpenAtrium.com. Having the trainings listed in detail will be key for partners to assess the value of the program, and the curriculum will create a solid foundation of credibility for the program that shows value in the eyes of companies looking to contract Open Atrium Partners.
Developer channels
Each partner will get a dedicated support channel with our team for third tier support, and anyone who completes a training will get a seat in the channel. We will respond to all support requests within 24 hours, and that will happen during regular business hours (EST).
Partner meetings
We know developers are busy and can't hang out in the #open_atrium IRC chat room all day and that keeping up with everything that's happening on Community.OpenAtrium.com and Drupal.org can be time consuming. To help ensure that our partners are in the know on what's happening with Open Atrium, we will hold quarterly conference calls with all partners to review what developments have happened - a "State of Open Atrium" given every three months. While these will definitely benefit developers they may also be helpful for business folks who are selling Open Atrium.
Partner section on OpenAtrium.com
We'll feature partners prominently on OpenAtrium.com and include a fun profile that shares company information, a description of what the company does, and other information. We'll also publish the analytics we are getting on OpenAtrium.com to show how much advertising value this could be.
Partner bling
Every partner would get a hot set of Open Atrium partner badges that they can post to their website that will link back to their profile. We're interested in hearing what other sort of bling would be helpful to people too.
Business details
First, there will be no tiers. People are paying for a service, not branding. Here are some other quick details:
- We estimate, right now, that this will cost $4,000 per year. This could change as we spec out the program.
- This will include training for two people.
- It will also include refresher courses for employees who have completed the training included as well, down the road.
- We hope to host Partner trainings every four months.
In short, our primary, big picture goal with an Open Atrium Partners Program is to help our partners really know how to make Open Atrium dance. This is why we are designing our program around building skills and capacity so that people can develop on it in the best and smartest possible way.
We look forward to hearing what people think of this, after all this is only going to work if this more than pays for itself. Email me ideas and suggestions eric@developmentseed.org.
Immediate thoughts
I am glad you guys at devseed are thinking about this because I feel I am always wanting more from you guys, either videos, or code, or whatever. Everything you have mentioned here would be incredibly valuable. I am in the same boat as Mark, a site builder more than a site developer, in a one man shop. I like the idea behind the Acquia partner program, user submitted ‘knowledgebase articles’, but from talking to people at acquia it sounds like they don’t want to deal with companies with less than 20 employees or who would not bring in thousands of dollars for them. This is mostly a guess, but I have a feeling that if you create a program designed for the people who only create a couple sites a year, maybe do this part time, people would come out of the woodwork who are interested in it. 4k sounds a little high but reasonable. I think you could get a great community together for this. Count me in!
International partners
This is a great product and we look forward to using it for clients – whether they are already running their sites in Drupal or not. However $4000 is a lot – particularly when it sounds like most of the benefits for membership would be for those in the US.
Will the level of remote training be the same (can it ever be) for partners outside of the US?
Looking forward to finding out more.
Dan
count us in
Hi Eric,
Great to see the partner program mature.
Even without seeing the finished curriculum this sounds pretty good to me. Count us in (does that make us the first shop to sign up?).
Support and Code Maintenance
This sounds great, Eric. Congratulations on the success of OA thus far.
One of the biggest challenges I see with embracing the Open Atrium or Managing News stack and “productizing” or otherwise making it into reusable code for our projects as we hope to do is support for the core DevSeed modules you mentioned above – Context, Features, Spaces, etc that form the foundation of these platforms. Encouraging partners to learn the platform and then customize and extend the code will certainly result in good features being pushed back into the core modules or extend functionality through new mods, but is DevSeed committed to ensuring that these core modules are maintained in terms of bug fixes, security updates, and major Drupal upgrades (D7 for example)? Do you see the partner program pulling together into a community of developers who will rise to this considerable challenge?
With a small development team like ours at NDI and a good understanding of the challenges that standard Drupal maintenance can be, making a strategic move toward embracing the DevSeed stack would be easier with a level of confidence that the core platform and modules will be well supported so we can focus on customizing or extending the platform. While we want to carry our weight in terms of contributing back to the community, we’d prefer to do that by extending these tools toward the needs of our democracy partners and programs around the world. And to be successful in that we’d need to focus as much of our limited technical resource as possible on innovations and new functionality built on an otherwise solid and reliable base platform.
In short, yes :)
The "devseed meta stack" is made up of modules that have a long history and are under active development, so, yes we are going to continue to push all our energies into these key modules. As long as we are in beta with both Open Atrium and Managing News and we are only committed to ensuring that things will get better :), thus we are still doing major changes to core components like Open Atrium (for example the Beta 4 release had a new Strongarm and new versions of both context and spaces) What our commercial support for Open Atrium will do here is to embrace the change factor. One of our major value points in providing commercial support will be to help with upgrades. Rather than saying "we will support this for a year or two" we are going to say "we are only supporting our current beta, but will help you upgrade to that." Everything we do, no matter how drastic, will always have an upgrade path. Once we are on a stable 1.0 release, we will commit to a longer term stability plan for the platforms. Working on building strong capacity through a Partners Program is key to help ensure that the custom work people build on Atrium can be upgraded too (since our commercial support offering is only going to target core Open Atrium).
Re "core" I know some of these tools, like context and features are considered 'real time R&D for core' by some of the main core developers, and will heavily influence a push for exportables in Drupal 8 core. As for long term support of the modules, we will support them as long as they are great. For example, it made sense for us to recently end support for FeedAPI and move to Feeds. This flexibility is key for making great applications, which is why we really like the idea of a small core, for example, the development cycle is so long that having tools like an aggregator in core do not give us the flexibility for iterative development that will come up over the course of say a year of data heavy sites. For this reason, we stopped our work on Drupal 7 core aggregator. A lot of things make sense to stay in contriblandia.
In short, your team can have very little tech skills to use things like Managing News and Open Atrium in mission critical situations because we are committed to supporting upgrade paths, fixing bugs, monitoring security issues. Now as for really embracing the DevSeed stack, this comes down to having a team that wants to read the code and really understand the concepts so they can be extended for customization. More important than this code, are the concepts that we are capturing. Anyone taking Managing News or Open Atrium and planning to treat them like a platform to customize them is going to really get a lot more out of the process once they understand the concepts of this meta stack and well worth the little extra time up front, and of course is a very technical process.
Thanks for sharing your ideas
I really appreciate you posting this, and I share your feelings about partner programs in general. But as Fusion continues to pick up steam as a theming system, we’re getting more interest from development shops looking to integrate it with their workflow, and recognize that like any system, it requires education and support in a business environment.
We’d been discussing doing something similar like this down the road, and this post is great inspiration. I’ll be eager to see how it develops!
details on the trainings
Thanks Stephanie, The next main action for us is to post more details on the trainings, and better flush out how the third tier support work. I will blog this as soon as we get it up on OpenAtrium.com and at this time we will also be sure we have the costs covered, so we can officially begin bringing on partners :).
Practitioner Training
I may not be your ‘target audience’, but let me share some ideas none the less? I’ve been using Atrium since the first beta releases, and clearly see the value and promise.
Mine is a one man shop, and I am not a developer, but rather a “cook” of sorts. I keep up with all of the drupal modules/development, and am able to offer a solid solution to my clients bases on that knowledge, and the generosity of the drupal developer community.
My clients have included the Cracker Barrel Restaurants, LeapFrog, a small division of Kodak, and others. I say all of this to try to frame the following:
Perhaps there should be another layer/level of training focused on practitioners rather than developers? While $4,000 is not out of the question for me, it is steep…and I would benefit little from code/module development, and much more from practical implementation philosophy and method?
My 2 cents
Mark
Questions like this are exactly what I want to start to address
Mark,
This is feedback is great to hear. Yeah we were seeing the partners program targeting more than one man shops, and I can really see how $4,000 is steep for a one man team. I would think that for situations like this we can cut this in half, since it will cost us half as much with one man shops. Questions like this are exactly what I want to start to address in the next couple weeks.
As for an another training focused on practitioners rather than developers, yeah we are thinking about this too :). We have ideas for something in Mid May here in DC. Not sure how formal it will become, but we are looking at the very least to do a lot of other meetings.