Dries is a "World's Top Young Innovators for 2008"

Just as the internet is bigger then 127.0.0.1,Drupal is bigger then Dries. However, every hurd needs a leader and within the Drupal community, Dries has proven that he is not just a good coder but a very wise project lead creating a very rich community around his product, not just around him.

It is the community what makes an Open Source project successful, not the code perse. Bad code can be used in a creative way by a smart community, good code without a community is just same as proprietary software.

And that is why it is good to see that Dries has been chosen as a "Young Innovator". Read the press release at prweb:

"The TR35 honors young innovators for accomplishments that are poised to have a dramatic impact on the world as we know it," said Jason Pontin, editor in chief and publisher of Technology Review magazine. "We celebrate their success and look forward to their continued advancement of technology in their respective fields."

You can see all the Top35 Young Innovators in the infotech section over at technologyeview.com and Dries profile as well. Congrats Dries! But remember -and this is note to self-, there is no "you" in Drupal Smiling

Great exposure, but bad research

"Since open-source projects tend to attract expert users, they often lack clear user interfaces and readable documentation, making them unfriendly to mere mortals. But Buytaert understood from the beginning how important usability is to the cycle of improvement, adoption, and more improvement that drives the development of open-source software. The core Drupal installation comes with voluminous help files. The central team regularly polls users as well as developers (which is unusual in an open-source project) to decide what to improve next. The process reveals not just features to add, but ones to remove, and ways to make existing features easier to understand. For example, the project's website has been redesigned to help people new to Drupal figure out how to get up and running."

I am wondering how they came to this text, voluminous help files? Regular polls? And claiming that Drupal is very usable and that there is a complete process to making existing features easier? Drupal has been redesigned?

Maybe I am bashing, but this whole paragraph sounds a bit optimistic and clearly lacks research.

I like it when Dries gets this kind of exposure as it attracts a different group to Drupal. And like you said, there is no you, so maybe someday we will see business magazines praising great communities.

By Bojhan (not verified) at Wed, 20/08/2008 - 7:36am | reply