I am here as the keynote speaker in the Media track, which is focused on the opportunities and challenges facing newspapers, magazines and other "traditional media," with a focus on how Drupal might be leveraged to solve specific problems. After my overview talk about the philosophy behind Drupal and open-source software, Rob Purdie presented on The Economist and their move to Drupal. Later, we'll hear a presentation on InfoMaker, a newsroom content management system that directly integrates to Drupal, and the Krimson team will discuss why NRC Boeken chose Drupal.
I wrap up today, as well, discussing Migration, Deployment and Staging in Drupal, which discusses best practices for getting a site moved to Drupal, maintaining the code and synchronizing sites across multiple servers. (Much of this talk is lifted from work done by others at Palantir, notably Greg Dunlap's Deployment API and Matt Butcher's QueryPath.) In my first talk, about sites like Foreign Affairs and Skirt.com, I touched on the deciding factors for companies thinking about moving to Drupal:
- Freedom
- Cost
- Features
- Flexibility
- Speed
- The Network Effect
Freedom is most fundamental. The primary joy of working in open source is that you have complete control over the code and the products you can build with it. This is a powerful shift from using proprietary software. So is #2, the cost factor, which can often be a 6-digit number with some software packages.
That Drupal has great feature and is a flexible framework are both well known, and the effect of both of these is the speed with which you can deploy your ideas.
Of all of these points, the Network Effect is the most powerful, yet the hardest to grasp. Drupal is more than a CMS; it is a distributed development framework. That means that people you don't even know are working on projects right now that will meet needs you will have in the future. For example, I need to integrate a multi-point Google Map onto a site I am working on, one of the developers at NodeOne, our Swedish hosts, maintains the Mapstraction module, which provides exactly what I need.
This kind of luck comes up frequently in open source projects, but luck is not the right word for it. Choosing Drupal means choosing to participate in a community of cooperative development. And, as Addison Berry said in her introductory keynote here, cooperation is the key to our community. (She also stressed, by the way, that not all Drupal work is development; you can contribute in myriad ways, including documentation, training, interface design and testing, to name a few.)
The problem for news organizations is that sharing, well, it isn't really in the business model. Learning to contribute as part of a community is a vital change in attitude, which includes the desire to release improvements back to the Drupal project. Find a bug? Report it. Patch it. Explain it. Help people fix it. Build a great new feature? Try to abstract your business model from the code, so that you build a reusable and extensible tool that others can build on.
This philosophical shift is, I think, in line with the historic mission of journalism, which wants to improve communities by encouraging the free flow of information and civic debate. If you find this challenge provocative, I'd love to discuss it with you. If you find it banal, then we're working towards the same goals.
I'll have more to say at the end of the conference, especially after the special performance by The Kitten Killers, tonight after the lat session..
