Willy Dobbe - Drupal Association

DrupalCon's lead to DrupalCon's

Sat, 07 Mar 2009 14:28:23 +0100

There is an old Dutch saying that roughly translates to "Weddings lead to weddings". And though attending a DrupalCon is not the same as getting married, it does share some characteristics. It's about sharing, passion, learning and helping without xpecting anything back. DrupalCon's are great places that reach farther then just the Drupal code, the Drupal site, CMS-es or even Open Source. Drupalcons are about people, about technology, the future of the combination of these and how we -as the community- can build this future in our products. Without DrupalCons, Drupal would not have been what it is today. And without future DrupalCon's, Drupal will not be where it should be.

So there are many reasons to make sure we will continue to have DrupalCon's. I do not know what holds the future for DrupalCon (bigger, smaller? separate business con's? one per continent?) but I do hope that the sharing, passion, learning and helping will continue in some form in the future. Maybe you would like to make this possible. By attending DrupalCon's and maybe even by organising a DrupalCon. If this is the case, do not feel intimated by the extreme quality of the DrupalCon DC09 but do tender for organising a DrupalCon. The next stop of DrupalCon will be in europe, Paris. After that we are looking for people that want to organise the Con in N-America. All you need is time, passion, a location, some fellow Drupalaars and .. a bit of time... If you are interested, do contact the Drupal Association. Let's make sure "DrupalCon's lead to DrupalCon's".

Mind you, I'm living together with my better half for over a decade and have two of the sweetest kids on earth I am not married myself. So I atually do not know if attending a DrupalCon is the same as geting married. But I know I will tender for organising a new DrupalCon in the EU anytime.. again .. ;-)

An echo from the blast of the past

Sun, 23 Nov 2008 11:43:23 +0100

Johan Janssens -the Most Valuable Person in the Joomla community- has an article on his corporate blog about a presentation he held more then 3 years ago on the second DrupalCon in Amsterdam.

When I met him a a month ago, he challenged me to recall what his message was. And I was sad to say I didn't knew anymore. Looking back at his slides a couple of thing are clear:

DrupalCon 2005 - Joomla!, Drupal and ... You.

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: drupal joomla)

(RSS readers and aggregaters not seeing the embedded slide-show, please visit slideshare)

The first thing to notice is Johan was very optimistic in his roadmap. Clearly not all his goals -numbering issues apart- have not been met by the Joomla! community. By the end of 2006, Joomla! wasn't a full blown WAF like Symfony for example is. However, things Johan did not anticipate did happen; Joomla! is clearly one of the best well known CMS-es with a very very big audience! Please note that his presentation was only month after Joomla! was founded ("forked"?) so it is only logical that his goals were optimistic.

The second thing to note is that Drupal and Joomla! still think of each other -mostly and by most- as rivals. And while I did do some sessions on building bridges between both systems, I am very guilty on placing Drupal on top of Joomla!

This while we have the same problems and could (re)use each others solutions. To name a few problems that are generic for both of us and where we can learn from each other.

Now lets try to differentiate while learning from each other. Learn from each other how to deal with GPL violations, learn setting up local "associations", leanr and share patching exploits and learn to love.

Note: During a recent session I had with Johan, the question was asked what I think Drupal could learn from Joomla. I answered "marketing". And Johan was amazed since he wanted to give the same answer on what Joomla! could learn from Drupal. One year ago, Joomla! was clearly in the lead when it came down to market the product. However, since one year, I think Drupal has better press then Joomla!, so we were both right.

Renew your Drupal Association Membership

Sun, 21 Sep 2008 13:53:27 +0200

If you are a member of the Drupal Association (and thereby helping the community and showing off you care about the community) you might want to check if you should renew your yearly membershipssfee! If it has been more then a year since you have paid, you should remove the cool "member" badges from your site! Or.... you could renew your membership at the association site!

Please do check to see if your membership is up for renewal and wear your badge with pride! Your financial support is important for the community.

Drupal Trademark policy in progress, please provide feedback

Sat, 20 Sep 2008 18:55:14 +0200

As anyone who visits Drupal.org more then one a year will know, Dries owns the trademark of "Drupal". Dries want this mark to be protected from The Bad People and to be used by The Good People. Since law doesn't really "see" good or bad people but good or bad actions, he had to write a policy on how and when you can use the word Drupal in a service.

For example, you are not allowed to say that you provide "Drupal Certification" programs, but if your company is called ACME, you are allowed to use "ACME Drupal Certification". This makes sense, we are not a MySQL AB or RedHat Inc; we are a passionate Open Source community. So you are encouraged to build your own brand "ACME" and lean on the shoulder of the Open Source giant Drupal, fair enough I think. Mind you: if you spot a "Official Drupal Certification program", you are encouraged to contact the Drupal Association and file a trademark issue. Also note that as an engineer you are probably better of a taring center that does not claim to have "Drupal Certifications".

Some might ask why it took so long to create this policy For those Dries / Kieran created an timeline explaining all steps. My own answer to questions with "when" in it, would have been "done is a four letter word". So if you want to make this policy better by asking question, hinting, dropping suggestions, please point your browser towards http://groups.drupal.org/node/15023 and read the post, the comments, the answers and step if if you think you can add anything to the discussion.

Drupal Association presentation from DrupalCon Szeged 2008

Sat, 13 Sep 2008 22:16:02 +0200

With pressreleases like this...

Mon, 19 May 2008 17:27:07 +0200

The Drupal Association has two main goals:

To facilitate the Drupal community
To protect the Drupal community and her assets

Communication and hence promotion is an important part of making sure we get closure to reaching our goals. And for that, we write press releases for important Drupal (community) events, for example the release of Drupal 6.

I am not a big supporter of the idea that the Association has to do payed press-releases, for example pay a news agency like PRNewswire to spread the word. IMHO we should use the power of the community to spread the word, the quality of the product to speak for itself and use mouth to mouth for getting our product out there. I know that the Association is not a community and in fact more "a corporate" but we (the Association) should align with our biggest asset: the community. Not with some press agency; our proprietary friends can do that better and the commercial Drupal shops will as well. In fact some of them have been making lots of waves with the press releases.

But with press releases like this one from Mediacurrent the Drupal Association has a lot less work to do. I quote:

Drupal's powerful taxonomy system, fine grained security, and distributed architecture made it a natural choice to capture the in-depth functionality Carlos was looking for.

and

...the Drupal CMS will now allow Emory administrators to seamlessly update and edit content within their site.

The release looks more pro Drupal then pro Mediacurrent or the site they made.... hold on... there is not even a link towards the site they have been building? And as a logo, they did not use their client's or their own, but have chosen our Druplicon?

So thank you Mediacurrent for choosing Drupal and promoting it. You might as well join our marketing team. Really

BTW: Did anyone else notice that the Pagerank of Drupal.org went down from 9 to 8? Oooh my, the sky is falling.

BTW2: My official function within the Association is now Rabble Rouser, "see" podcast 58 from Lullabot. Thanks Earl! :-)

Dutch Joomladagen / days

Fri, 04 Apr 2008 20:57:20 +0200

Today I was a guest speaker at the business day of the Dutch Joomla Days. While this might seem odd, the subject of these days is "building bridges". Building bridges towards other CMS-es, other databases, other communities and hence towards Drupal.

I give these kinds of "pro Drupal" talks almost a bi-weekly basis now, where often other CMS-es are present as well. Last week I did one at eduvision where 100+ people where impressed by Drupal. Most often, the "competition" is Joomla and Typo3, both rather popular in The Netherlands (and Germany). While I do think that Joomla is good (enough) for the SoHo market and the audience of Drupal is much broader (from enterprises to personal blogs) and deeper (from video towards for example a resume site), these CMS-es are often compared. So normally, I try to make clear why Drupal is so much better then Joomla; better user management, roles, hooks, CCK, views, workflow, tableless design, multi-site install and almost forgotten but still miles ahead of any other CMS; taxonomy. There are zillion of ways where Drupal is clearly the leader in the field, but leading is sometimes not the same as "fitting".

This time however, I tried not too bash Joomla to much but to start building bridges. We do have a lot of the same problems that we can work on together. For example, we both use the GPL and we both have to protect our assets. Be both have a legal body protecting the community and facilitating the community, in Drupal's case, the Drupal Association.

That is why I was interested in the talk of one other speaker; James Vasile. James works for the SFLC and he is on the board of OpenSourceMatters and helping as a legal counsel for the Drupal Association. Most of the other Board Members of the Association spoke to James on the Boston DrupalCon ut since I was not there, it was good to speak to James during Lunch.

We taled about his passion, RMS, his other Open source projects / customers, how the SFLC is financed and the GPL3 as well as some other things. It is good to say the face you have exchanged mails with and it is good to build a relation between the SFLC, Joomla and Drupal. Communications is all about building bridges.

Vote for Drupal!

Mon, 24 Mar 2008 19:37:45 +0100

In 2006 Drupal was the runner up for the precious Webware CMS Award. And last year our beloved CMS even was the overall winner. By winning the competition, the Drupal Association got 5000 Dollars that was used for amongst others funding Drupal Conferences and to buy hardware for hosting the Drupal infrastructure. But even better then the money, Drupal got more airtime and more and more people recognized the power of Drupal.

This year, Drupal was once again nominated in the category "Publishing" and you are encouraged to vote on Drupal to make sure we win again this year. Please help by spreading the word and vote, you deserve it!

Drupalcon, from Amsterdam (via Brussels and Barcelona) to Boston

Fri, 25 Jan 2008 19:41:21 +0100

DrupalCon Boston is comming up! And from what I have read, it is by far the biggest DrupalCon so far and the best organized!

Looking back at 2005 (only 2.5 years ago!) I brought by own WiFi 802.11b access point, borrowed a beamer from my work and layed down some powercables. A -semi- anonymous client of Bryght paid for the venue, coffee, lunch and opening drinks. Things surely changed since then, 20 people have been busy for months to raise the money needed to hire the venue, have a logo contest (vote!) and do everything that is needed to make sure 600+ people can have the time of their life. And they have done a great job so far and I am sure it will the "even more best-er DrupalCon ever".

You can find some old snaps of Amsterdam 2005 on Flickr. I got only one question: what did Gaele saw on the desktop of Dries? Either way, we have come a long way.

If you want to become a sponsor of the DrupalCon Boston, look at the direct benefits you gain from becoming so. The indirect benefits are far bigger though, both for the community as for your own business. The community profits by making sure a lot of people can get together to talk about Drupal, plan roadmaps, exchange ideas, shake hands and even code! And when you use the code of "the community", you will gain as well. Your company also gets a better alignment with the community that really pays; prospects will find you! Looking back at 2005 Amsterdam, we have come a long way baby!

I recall a very good talk from Rasmus with an AJAX-ified XSS exploit searcher and a good talk as well from David. The slogan "Fail Fast, Fail Cheap, Be Lazy and 'the greatest inefficiency comes from solving problems you will never have'" is the best description of agility I have come across and has become my mantra. Looking forward to Boston I think we have grown in numbers but most of all in quality. Boston looks great!

So please make sure that you go to Boston and sponsor it if you can!

Drupal Association Membership Badges

Fri, 28 Dec 2007 21:47:12 +0100

If you are a member of the Drupal Association you can show your "status" of membership by downloading a badge and display it on your site. Not a member? Become one!

By doing so you help the Association to help the community. And therefor the small amount you pay for your membership, actually helps yourself. So be a bit selfish, become a member and show it on your site.

Google Ads on drupal.org

Sun, 11 Nov 2007 13:47:06 +0100

Kieran -on behalf on the Drupal Association- started an experiment with Google ads on Drupal.org. Currently it is only on the paid-services and hosting pages.

Personally I would be fine with running skypscraper format on all forum pages but this is just a temporary test to see how the Association can make some much money without giving the community the feeling that Drupal.org will become a linkfarm. There are lots of less irrelevant ads now, about Typo3 and Joomla related services for example so if you are a Drupal service provider, you might want to sign up at Google and run a dedicated ad on drupal.org. A good way to gain some attention and helping the Drupal community as well.

While we are on the subject of money and advertising, the Drupal Association had some positive news, a Google Summer of Code cheque, the price money from the Packt CMS award and a small profit from the DrupalCon in Barcelona. This money will be spend -amongst others- on hardware and covering maintenance costs of running Drupal.org.

BTW: if you are in to "Advertising 2.0", be sure to read IBM's statement on how the advertising will change the couple of years.

How do you see transparancy? And how open should a kitchen be?

Wed, 26 Sep 2007 21:10:57 +0200

How do you see transparency? And how open do you want a kitchen to be? Two rhetorical questions, hence they need no answer. But the best questions to answer are those who don’t need an answer. So here you will have these answers and some more.

When I was asked by Dries mid 2006 to take part of the Drupal Association I was thrilled. I wanted to have a central point for all things that concerned the community; I wanted a more enterprise approach within and for the Drupal community and thought that the Drupal community was ready for it. While some might think I was just thrilled by the fact that I could take part of this, I can assure you, yes I have a big ego but I know that Drupal is bigger. Bigger then my ego, smarter then I am on my best day and faster then I can do the 80 meters (I smoke heavily yet I can do 80 meters under 12 seconds). Yes, I have a big ego, but it wasn’t for the ego that I was thrilled. It was because I thought the community was big enough to have and need a professional organization guarding and facilitating it.

At the DrupalCon in Brussels DriesB –there is also a hard working DriesK in the association- and I briefly talked about what an Association should do and I gave some feedback on the statutes that were being written at that time.

And then the fun could start. Or so I thought. But I was wrong. There was no fun and not that much started anyway. We were bootstrapping, as Angie pointed out as well.

We were focused on the problems created by the association, not on the problems where we were here for in the first place. Let me explain this by a small story:

There once was a river and a road in the middle of nowhere. Someone made a bridge over the river. The person manning the bridge is asking 1 Euro for every boat that passes it. Business is going fine and he collects lots of money. He needs an accountant and that person is going to life next door to him. The accountant makes lots of money and wants to buy bread. A bakery is founded next door. The bakery is doing fine and the owners want their kids to go to school. A school is founded next door. Within 1 year, the bridge over a river becomes a village ("dr^Horp") and later a small city. When -after 5 years- the city expanded and expanded, the mayor looked at the books and finds out that the city is in the red. He has to layoff one person. He fires the person manning the bridge...

The point is that we focused too much on our own created problems and are not focusing on what our goal is. We forgot the purpose of the bridge, we forget the people. And more then that, we forgot to tell “the people” that we forgot them, or at least we forgot to tell them what we were doing while forgetting them.

As a permanent member of the Drupal Association my influence is limited. I get to vote board members and the task of the other permanent members and me is to guard over the board members. So this I did. I criticized them for not taking their job seriously, that is the easy part. So I tried to scratch my and their itches by helping them. Yet the progress -my progress as well- was slow and not visible.

At the last day of the excellent DrupalCon in Barcelona, the members of the Association came together. To have an excellent meal made by Boris and to face that we had to talk, face to face. Talk but more, Plan, Do, Check and Act. And while doing so, talk about this process to the community. Transparency was a keyword there, a lot has been done in the Association both for the Association but also for the community. So we talked about what we should do and that we should communicate about doing things. More then we have. And so we will do. While you can not see transparency, you will notice when something is less transparent. Blogging might help to show what the association is up to, what the progress is of the stuff we are undertaking and what are future plans are. So be sure to check out the blogs of the association at http://association.drupal.org/blogs.

The point about transparency is that it is not the goal; you have to see something through the transparency. The point about an open kitchen is that it is needed in an Open Source project. Yet, the Association is more and less then an Open Source project, it is also a legal body that has to obey to rules. Rules from the Association itself but also to rules that apply to the legal body we have.

And to get back to the rhetorical questions, I hope I answered them here for you. If not, they were rhetorical after all.

And, feel free to help us help the Association. We need you like you need us.