DrupalCon Portland 2013: BUILDING A LEARNING COMMUNITY THROUGH COMPETITION
Channel: Drupal Association
Date: 22/05/2013

For a new drupalist trying to learn module development, there are so many great resources. There are a plethora of resources that come at no cost like the documentation on drupal.org, or the help you can receive in IRC. However, some of the highest quality resources like drupalize.me, lynda.com, and the Definitive Guide to Drupal 7 come at a cost. And rightfully so! It takes a lot of time, energy, and effort to produce the material.

This leads the central issue that inspired me to create The Module Off. How can we motivate knowledgeable drupalists to share their knowledge with the community if it takes so much time and effort to produce quality learning materials?

Enter The Module Off, a bi-weekly competition for Drupal developers where they submit some code and a screencast in response to a module development challenge. The best submission wins a prize provided by a sponsoring Drupal-related company.

This session will discuss the motivations for creating The Module Off and the issues that I ran in to when launching the project. We'll delve into questions like:

- What did it take to start a project like this?
- How do you find sponsors to provide prizes for the challenges?
- How did the community respond and how did you deal with negative reactions from the community?

I expect this session to be open ended, a chance for those interested to discuss different ideas to help increase community participation through non-traditional means - especially ideas involving competition, gamification, and partnerships with Drupal-related vendors.