Posts by theme: sxsw

The last couple of weeks have been a bit of a whirlwind for us here at Palantir, full of site launches, module releases, and more! We barely got our feet back on the ground here in Chicago after DrupalCon DC before it was time to head off to the next event, South by Southwest Interactive (SXSW) in Austin, TX.

Tiffany Farriss, Colleen Carroll, and I had a great time, got to attend some really good sessions, and hang out with friends, including some folks from Lullabot who helped throw the awesome 32 Bit party. Colleen and I were even interviewed by Zadi Diaz for PBS about open source Web development and Drupal.

Of course, the biggest event for us was the Ultimate Showdown of Content Management System Destiny panel, which featured Colleen, Steve Fisher of Idea Market, and Matt Mullenweg of Automattic talking about how they led three teams of all-star developers from the Drupal, Joomla!, and WordPress communities to build out the same Web site in each of their chosen platforms to benefit community leadership programs. I served as the moderator.

It’s been just over a week since the Drupal, WordPress, and Joomla! teams uploaded their entries for the “Ultimate Showdown of Content Management System Destiny”, and with less than a week to go before our panel presentation at SXSW Interactive on March 16, I’m really excited by all the conversation and debate that this project has already generated on various blogs, message boards, and social networking sites.

While I don’t want to say too much here because I’m intentionally staying out of the discussion about the project for now, I did want to take this opportunity to clarify a couple of points about the goals of this project and the judging process for the competition.

The first round of panel selections for next spring’s South by Southwest Interactive Festival have just been posted, and I’m pleased to be able to announce that for the second year in a row, I’ll be one of the presenters!

The session that was selected is titled “Ultimate Showdown of Content Management System Destiny”, and it’s inspired by an idea that we came up with while planning this past spring's Content Management System Roundup session. While that panel provided a basic introduction to several widely-used CMS platforms, including SharePoint, Drupal, Expression Engine, and Serena Collage, this year’s session will be an Iron Chef-style competition where three teams of Web developers will build out an identical site for a not-for-profit organization in three different CMS platforms. The overall winner will be decided by the organization based on which site meets their needs best, and will hopefully provide a more in-depth look at the strengths and weaknesses of developing sites for each platform.

The folks at South by Southwest (SXSW) recently posted the audio podcast of Content Management System Roundup, the panel of CMS experts that I hosted there back in March. Even though I was fighting a losing battle with the flu and pumped full of DayQuil at the time, I think the session went very well, and the feedback that we got was quite positive. Matt McDermott, Jeff Eaton, Mike Essl, and Tiffany Farriss all deserve a tremendous amount of credit for the work that they did to make it such a great session.

One of the things that really struck me about the experience was the tremendous amount of interest in Drupal among the folks who attended our session. Nearly all of the questions in the Q&A sessions were about Drupal, and when Jeff asked how many people in the audience had heard of the software, nearly everyone raised their hand. What’s significant about this is that there were close to 1,500 people who attended our session; we had just been at Drupalcon in Boston the previous week, and that entire conference dedicated to Drupal had an attendance of around 850 people.

This disparity in numbers is made more significant when you consider that the audience at SXSW is pretty different from the one at Drupalcon. While Drupalcon is primarily attended by programmers and Web developers who specifically work with Drupal, SXSW attracts a wider audience that includes people involved in all aspects of interactive technology. This tells me that there’s a whole lot of people who are interested in and using Drupal that are not currently part of the traditional developer community.