In case you are going the Drupalcon Paris, we have the option to meet in person since I was able to get in as well. But be sure to talk to your boss / yourself and convince him or her that presence in person is a great way to align with the community, but sponsoring the con is the best way to get more out of it; love, a better conference for all, potential employees and most of all prospects.

Dutch Open Projects became a silver sponsor some time ago, and so should you! Now I do not know how the economic downtime is hitting on you, but in the Netherlands this crisis is only bringing more companies towards using Drupal. It used to be true, that people choose Drupal for the quality and stayed for the (lack of) costs, but there is a complete new mantra now: come for the lack of costs and stay for the quality!

So if you are being hit by the crisis, invest in your product and become a sponsor! If you are doing well -good for you-, refund some of your love in cash to the community by aligning your wallet with the community.

Dear friend Pat Patterson (twitter) pinged me the other day to let me know he actually wrote a module for Drupal. If you do not know Pat, he is the leading authority when it comes to all things "Identity Management"; process, vision and actual code in Sun's OpenSSO project (Sun's open version of the previous proprietary Sun Access Manager. And now Pat released OpenSSO module for Drupal.

Identity management is complex, it is more then 1 slide per second or a technical solution. The biggest problem in ID management is trust, procedures as well as installed base. Migrating a corporation with thousands of employees that is fully AD based (like most enterprises are) towards something like OpenID is impossible. And OpenID by itself only solves parts of the AAA problem. Where OpenSSo might for a corporation migrating towards a more open way of dealing with identities ("persons") a far more better way.

Logging in to a website with Single Sign On (or more often: Single Log On) is only a small part of the problem of an enterprise. Sure, an increasing part since more and more applications are webbased; AJAX replaced RDP and ICA for many tasks. But still, only a small part. So if one wants to push Drupal into the heart of an enterprise as an Intra- or extranet, one needs to understand that OpenID / OAUTH might be good for an all webbased company, but not for any company that is older then 10 years.

OpenSSO however is. And Pat's work to integrate this into Drupal sure helps. Thanks Pat!

Omdat ik het leuk vond een andere vorm van presentatie en vodcasts te maken en omdat het onderwerp me aan het hart gaat:
een introductie over hackdeoverheid.

Hack de Overheid, een korte screencast from bert boerland on Vimeo.

Helaas kan ik er niet bij zijn maar hoop een volgende keer aan te schuiven. De presentatie boven gaat natuurlijk veel te kort door de bocht. En een medium als een blog kan dat goed aanvullen. NYTimes met al haar rijke API's wordt vaak als voorbeeld opgevoerd over hoe om te gaan met "tweepuntnul", data en het openbreken van walled gardens. Maar een overheid is anders dan een bedrijf. Een overheid bestaat over 100 jaar nog (hopenlijk), een overheid heeft geen inkomsten op een manier die in een kwantitatief business plan te vatten zijn. Een overheid heeft direct heel weinig baat bij het beschikbaar stellen van data en wel de kosten.

Aan de andere kant dient een overheid transparant te werken en za door "many eyes" van crowdtasken data nieuwe waarde kunnen krijgen door combinaties te doen die de overheid zelf niet voorzien heeft, bedacht heeft of nodig heeft. Die nieuwe gecombineerde data heeft potentieel zeer veel kwantitatieve en zelfs kwalitatieve waarde voor Nederland en dus voor de overheid. Het genereren van mashups van data (en dat is dus meer dan wat plots op een Google Maps) maakt dat meerdere bronnen gecombineerd kunnen worden. Bijvoorbeeld CBS data met kadastrale gegevens voor een academisch analyse om te bezien of een woonboulevard of 10 losse woonwinkels beter is voor verkeer en economie. Gooi de data op straat en er zijn mensen die er kennis mee maken!

Voor een overheid het echter kan doen -zie screencast- dient er het nodige te gebeuren. Met nam procedureel. Bijvoorbeeld onder welke licentie deelt de overheid de data? Een creative commons lijkt handig maar welke? En tot welk niveau kan de data terug te leiden zijn tot personen of huishoudens? Er bestaan 6 cijferige postcodes in Nederland die uit 4 huishoudens bestaan dus is dat bijna te identificeren tot een persoon. En omdat de overheid voor veel data nu geld vraagt (KvK, kadaster) i ze een marktspeler. Als ze deze data nu om niet gaat aanbieden, verstoort ze daarmee de markt. Concurrerende partijen die in de ladder niet verder gaan data data (dus niet informatie/kennis) zien plotseling een aanbieder die hun diensten gratis aanbiedt. Veel te regelen dus.

Maar het is onze data!

Today my employer Dutch Open Projects launched the website for Radio Nederland Wereldomroep. The public broadcasting system in the Netherlands is endless complex, so I will not explain that system here. But Radio Nederland Wereldomroep (Radio Netherlands Worldwide) is a very old international public broadcaster, with regular transmissions starting back in 1927 to the Dutch East Indies, now Indonesia. More information about RNW can be found in the wiki entry.

The site rnw.nl has more then 100 writers in eleven editorial staffs and writes in six languages, including Arabic and Chinese. Building the site in three months with Drupal sure was fun. We had a team of three coders and two themers (and me as consultant) that created the site using D6, lots of contributed modules and custom code. We choose to use Organic Groups for the editorial staffs, making it possible to cross-post content in multiple groups and write in one group in multiple languages. I am not the biggest fan of OG but it fitted the business requirements and worked very well.

By itself, the fact that Radio Netherlands Worldwide switches from a proprietary CMS towards an Open Source CMS is not the biggest news. However, the switch is a milestone since it symbolises that companies and NFP that didn't look to Open Source and only listened to the proprietary prietpraat are moving over; we are winning! Lost of newspapers, broadcasters and other companies are ditching the proprietary CMS-es and migrate towards Open Source. I have seen business cases where just the migrating costs from a proprietary CMS towards an Open Source CMS were lower then the yearly license costs. In the Netherlands, the financial crisis is not as bad as in many other countries in the world, but the crisis sure make people look towards how to spend many well. It used to be true that people switched towards Open Source because of the quality and stayed for the (lack of) cost. Now people switch because of the money they save and stay for the quality! The Open Source market is booming in the Netherlands. (Note that it can also backfire, I see a lot of companies using Open Source tools without knowing the pitfalls, have a failing implementation and thereby give Drupal or Open Source a bad name.)

The site is not finished yet, both content and coding wise there is some work to do. That is one of the disadvantages of a time boxed approach. However, meeting a deadline, having a dedicated professional team that worked 36 hours in two days during Pentecost, sure is a adrenaline boost. With the Wereldomroep being a switcher and another public broadcaster in the Netherlands (NCRV) that has been using Drupal for a long time for many sites and more to come (more news soon :-) ), the future of Drupal in the low lands is looking bright!

Over at consumerist is some bad press on Drupal

GoDaddy demanded $6,579 from Adam Fendelman after his disk usage skyrocketed to over 250 GB without warning, vastly exceeding his account's 150 GB allowance. GoDaddy's security department launched a "full-scale investigation" and quickly determined that Adam was responsible for both the data binge and the extraordinary bill. Adam refused to let the matter drop...

The massive data splurge was apparently caused by a bug in the widely-used open source website management software Drupal, which, like a cancerous tumor, was unstoppably copying thousands of temporary files into Adam's account.

Short story: someone used lots of local disk space on godaddy's hosting service caused by a bug in Drupal? Apart from the fact that GoDaddy should have set a quota, should have had procedures and transparent billing / monitoring mechanisms, Drupal a "cancerous tumour"?

Anyone knows what was happening here? Is GoDaddy blaming Drupal and why? Core? Module? I sure as hell /never/ saw Drupal eat 250GB harddisk space and I would like to know what was happening and if it has nothing to do with Drupal- as would be the case I think- that this news should be corrected ASAP.

BTW: 100GB of storage is 6.000 Dollar over at GoDaddy? Another reason to stay away from GoDaddy like "the plague"!