It’s the community, stupid! – DrupalCon 2009

Drupal, the open-source content management system that started in the student dorms at the University of Antwerp in 2000 has gathered a following of thousands of developers around the world in its brief lifetime.

From the Drupal site: Drupal is a free software package that allows an individual or a community of users to easily publish, manage and organize a wide variety of content on a website.

From Washington DC over 1,400 Drupalites attended 90+ sessions over 4 days of, to quote the Drupal song, Drupal Drupal Drupal Drupal Drupal Drupal Drupal Drupal Drupal Drupal Drupal Drupal Drupal Drupal Drupal Drupal Drupal.

What I wasn’t prepared for is the openness and communal orientation of the conference. It's like the sixties only without the patchouli. I almost didn’t go, thinking this was your typical conference where everyone would be bombarding me with monogrammed inner soles and PCB-laden travel mugs – promotional merchandise (junk) of every imaginable species intended to subliminally entice me to buying all sorts of things I don’t need.

I first suspected something was amiss when the first keynote I attended was entitled “Is Drupal Moral?” delivered by David Weinberger. Could you ever imagine this topic at other conferences? (Is sildenafil citrate moral? Litigating Slip And Fall Cases: Moral or Morass?) 

One comment David made that really stuck in my mind was that Drupal's primary foundation is based on connecting people to people while connecting people to content is secondary. Perhaps I grossly over-simplify, but much of web design and many business models for approaching the web is about content and connecting people to that content. Even more profound is the question posited over how much of education is not necessarily in the content but in the social interaction. But that's another blog post.

Back to Drupal, Neil Giarratana of Lucidicus gave a talk on Selling Drupal. Now while all this open-source I'll show you mine and you show me yours is all nice, warm and fuzzy, this guy basically shared his sales presentation with a room full of competitors. And it was a really good presentation too – lots of stuff I can use (and will).

Keep in mind, I come from the old school of development where source code is sacred. Where a client pays me to develop a piece of software and they basically get a license to use it and I get to take the source code to my grave.(Picture a coffin filled with 3.5" floppies, Syquest Cartridges, Zip Discs and 650MB CDRs).

To my old way of thinking, how can people afford to spend all this time and money developing code and then give it away? The best answer I ever heard came while speaking with a developer who developed a Drupal module as part of a project in the midst of a several months-long development process (sorry I can't remember who this was but if you're the one, let me know and I'll give you credit).

The module was created several months before the project was due for delivery and released to the general public. Within several weeks, feedback started coming in. Some people had found a few bugs, others fixed them and some offered improvements. Free beta testing as well as development. The community is paying back the original developer – the product is improving before the project is even finished. In the words of that developer, “How can I afford not to share my code”?