After complete my tour Around the Drupal world in 120+ days, I want to share what I learn from all communities I visited, below some statistics.
In this session, I will cover the following subjects, explaining each one in detail and including some ideas I have about how we as a community could implement to try to improve the current situation.
"Link with the community"
In general, I found that the efforts coming from the Drupal Association to try to generate engagement with current users and newcomers is not good enough and don't impact local communities in countries outside the US, Canadá and in some European countries
People usually say it is because the tools Drupal community use are not dynamic enough in comparison with other social applications available today and in other cases, they mentioned specifically that the g.d.o pages don't work the way they communicate each other in a specific area or region.
"Language Barrier"
It's true that Drupal as a product is multilingual, but selling Drupal in Asia, Africa, and South America to non-English speakers is particularly hard, reasons I heard the most is that DO website is in English so it scares away people from the application / support and that lowest down their level of empathy.
Having the homepage and some of the sections like case studies in other languages would be really useful for those communities in terms of understanding and feeling welcome to the technology.
Also, language represents another dilemma "Who's first, the community or the market?"; as I said before the current status or our homepage in drupal.org doesn't help to create a market. The community has a problem with documentation because there is not a public and community repository in their language were they can find documentation in their language in an 'official' way. Also, when people have the courage to ask something in a language other than English, almost immediate they are repealed for it. Again, that doesn't help in the process of creating community in emerging markets for Drupal.
"Being a "knowmad" and share experiences with Drupal Communities"
Nowadays connection between people is everything if you don't believe that check the LinkedIn deal with Microsoft. Our Drupal Community is global and we have a lot of travelers, but for those guys, there is not an easy way to try to be in contact with local communities in an effective way.