Acquia Inc. podcasts

This is the second part of a two-part conversation with Acquia's Chief Marketing Officer Tom Wentworth. In it we discuss Tom's understanding of data-driven marketing, the rise of the "Chief Digital Officer", You can listen to part one, in which Tom discusses his background in computer science, his perspectives on the early web, the rise of the content management system, and how open source solutions like Drupal remove risk and add innovation for businesses. Both parts of this interview were recorded at Acquia headquarters in Burlington, Massachusetts in March 2013. Fact-based decision making On the importance of data, Tom says whether 'big' or 'small', it makes a huge difference: "The more we understand about our customers, the better we can market. The core of Tom's understanding is to move Marketing "from a culture of speculation to a culture of fact-based decision making. I've gotten good at building a team that knows how to look at data, understand data, and use data. Marketing is a lot now about the technologies that can make us more effective, make us more data-driven, and help us deliver a better customer experience." Digital disruption? Hello, Chief Digital Officers! Digital technologies, and the shift to moving the core of business to digital is disrupting every industry. The move to having a "Chief Digital Officer" began, according to Tom, in the media industries, where they had to confront digital distribution and consumption of their products early on. The idea of a Chief Digital Officer is now making its way from media companies to health care companies, financial services companies, and higher education companies because digital is so transformative for their businesses. Some CDOs fall more on the CMO side, some on the CIO side. Ultimately, says Tom, CMOs will have to embrace digital to guarantee success. "Whether you're a super-technical CMO or a CDO, the real important point is embracing technology and digital transformation. Don't shy away from it, because it is inevitable that digital is going to disrupt your business." The first part of the Chief Digital Officer's role, "is to build up a team that equips the organization with all these transformative digital capabilities: from web platforms like Drupal to social media monitoring, to big data and analytics, to CRM. The CDO needs to harness all these digital customer touch points and arm each of the departments in an organization to better achieve their goals through digital technologies." The second part of the CDO's job is to play a central role in knowing what's working, what are the right tools to use, "It's a hybrid of what the CIO used to do, from a tools and technology standpoint, with what the CMO should be doing around data and customer experience." Beyond websites, Drupal as a platform "The Drupal community has built an incredible platform. As a CMS guy, when I look under the hood, the technology is fantastic. When I look at something like Spark [a huge leap forward in the Drupal content-authoring experience], it's clear to me these things couldn't happen without a passionate, super smart, active community." "Drupal has an opportunity to become the 'connective tissue' of digital marketing. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of technologies that marketers harness to solve their problems; the problems around customer experiences, analytics, multi-channel delivery ... there's all sorts of categories. Drupal is a platform that helps you connect all the things that you need to deliver a fantastic experience through your website, mobile devices, social networks, and social communities. Drupal has modules that connect to all these other things: web analytics, CRMs, marketing automation," and so on. "If I can connect my website directly to my CRM, I can show them something that is directly and personally meaningful to them. That's an integration point that's available in Drupal today. The biggest strength of the Drupal platform is that it's so flexible,

Acquia's Chief Marketing Officer Tom Wentworth is a great fit for a technology company. He has a computer science background and has been working with web content management since it was a concept. Tom wasn't interested in marketing until a few years ago, "What really got me excited about Marketing was seeing the intersection of marketing and technology, because technology is where my passion is." This is part one of an interview recorded at Acquia headquarters in Burlington, Massachusetts in March 2013. Web 1.0 Tom's been around the web a long time. At the University of Illinois, where the Mosaic web browser was invented, he built his first webpage (a fan page for the band Phish) in 1993, using VI on a Sun Sparc station. He later worked at Macromedia when the web started to take off: he saw Dreamweaver 1.0 released and saw the technology acquired that became Flash. Web Content Management "Having worked at Macromedia, I saw the challenges of trying to use Dreamweaver to build a large-scale website." Tom's research led him to content management and Interwoven in the late 90s, then on to Ektron ten years later. His combination of technical knowhow and more than a decade of enterprise business experience in the web content management space bring useful perspectives to Drupal now that it is a serious competitor at this level, too. "It's always interesting to see what happens when you put a lot of smart people together in a community and see what they come up with. It was easy to dismiss Drupal [as a competitor] five or ten years ago. It became a lot harder to dismiss Drupal a couple of years ago." When it became time for Tom to move on, he said to himself, "I gotta go talk to these guys!" From commercial to open source "I was very good at telling the anti-open-source story: 'It's scary, it's fraught with risk, these are not professional developers. Who is going to be there to support you when something goes wrong?' A typical litany ... But then you start seeing success stories. You start hearing about large companies moving to Drupal. You recognise the improvement in the product," for example, "It became crystal clear to me that Drupal did scale. When the Grammies Drupal website hits massive peaks, they're performing. The [Drupal] community has done such a great job of bringing this thing forward incredibly rapidly." "What got me disillusioned about the commercial software space was that the roadmap was often misaligned with what customer wanted to actually do." In the commercial and proprietary software world, "Whatever you think is going to help you sell the most big licences is what gets put into the roadmap, which doesn't necessarily align with what companies really want to do with the software. What I truly love about open source and the Drupal community in particular is they scratch their own itch. They build [solutions] to solve problems they find. That's a better way to develop software. It results in something people actually want to use. Open source is a far better way to develop software." Taking the risk out of open source "The role for companies like Acquia is taking the risk out of open source and making open source something that companies can adopt, bet their business one, bet their careers on ... If you're a Chief Digital Officer at a big media company, and you make the decision to go Drupal, you're betting your career on Drupal. When you bet your career on a product, you really have to bet your career on the organisation that is going to support you, too. That's the role that Acquia is playing in the Drupal community. We make sure out customers don't fail; we take that risk out of deploying Drupal. When you bet on Drupal and Acquia, you can be wildly successful." tom_wentworth_1_final.mp3

Acquia's Chief Marketing Officer Tom Wentworth is a great fit for a technology company. He has a computer science background and has been working with web content management since it was a concept. Tom wasn't interested in marketing until a few years ago, "What really got me excited about Marketing was seeing the intersection of marketing and technology, because technology is where my passion is." This is part one of an interview recorded at Acquia headquarters in Burlington, Massachusetts in March 2013. Web 1.0 Tom's been around the web a long time. At the University of Illinois, where the Mosaic web browser was invented, he built his first webpage (a fan page for the band Phish) in 1993, using VI on a Sun Sparc station. He later worked at Macromedia when the web started to take off: he saw Dreamweaver 1.0 released and saw the technology acquired that became Flash. Web Content Management "Having worked at Macromedia, I saw the challenges of trying to use Dreamweaver to build a large-scale website." Tom's research led him to content management and Interwoven in the late 90s, then on to Ektron ten years later. His combination of technical knowhow and more than a decade of enterprise business experience in the web content management space bring useful perspectives to Drupal now that it is a serious competitor at this level, too. "It's always interesting to see what happens when you put a lot of smart people together in a community and see what they come up with. It was easy to dismiss Drupal [as a competitor] five or ten years ago. It became a lot harder to dismiss Drupal a couple of years ago." When it became time for Tom to move on, he said to himself, "I gotta go talk to these guys!" From commercial to open source "I was very good at telling the anti-open-source story: 'It's scary, it's fraught with risk, these are not professional developers. Who is going to be there to support you when something goes wrong?' A typical litany ... But then you start seeing success stories. You start hearing about large companies moving to Drupal. You recognise the improvement in the product," for example, "It became crystal clear to me that Drupal did scale. When the Grammies Drupal website hits massive peaks, they're performing. The [Drupal] community has done such a great job of bringing this thing forward incredibly rapidly." "What got me disillusioned about the commercial software space was that the roadmap was often misaligned with what customer wanted to actually do." In the commercial and proprietary software world, "Whatever you think is going to help you sell the most big licences is what gets put into the roadmap, which doesn't necessarily align with what companies really want to do with the software. What I truly love about open source and the Drupal community in particular is they scratch their own itch. They build [solutions] to solve problems they find. That's a better way to develop software. It results in something people actually want to use. Open source is a far better way to develop software." Taking the risk out of open source "The role for companies like Acquia is taking the risk out of open source and making open source something that companies can adopt, bet their business one, bet their careers on ... If you're a Chief Digital Officer at a big media company, and you make the decision to go Drupal, you're betting your career on Drupal. When you bet your career on a product, you really have to bet your career on the organisation that is going to support you, too. That's the role that Acquia is playing in the Drupal community. We make sure out customers don't fail; we take that risk out of deploying Drupal. When you bet on Drupal and Acquia, you can be wildly successful." tom_wentworth_1_final.mp3

In this interview from the Oregon Convention Center, where both DrupalCon and Symfony Live were taking place, Juozas "people call me Joe" Kaziukėnas talks about PHP's unique combination of ease of implementation, speed, and scalability. Data science, competitive intelligence, and PHP Joe is the CTO of E Revolution Ventures - an eCommerce company using PHP to run data-driven eCommerce and drive 25 million dollars of business a year, "and growing quickly": 3-year sales growth of 228% according to the INC 5000. "A lot of people do eCommerce in very basic terms," according to Joe, "What we do is use data-driven solutions. We go around the internet, we pick a lot of different data, combine it and make decisions based on that. The whole stack - both the back end system and all the processing of the data is all written in PHP." Big data and business logic At this point in the conversation, I made the easy assumption that Joe was talking about "Web Experience Management" stuff, analytics and the user-facing side of eCommerce, but I was dead wrong. What eRevolution Ventures is doing is much bigger, "We focus more on the business decisions like buying and selling decisions. Rather than focusing on the customer experience, we focus on what products we should have, what we should have in warehouses, how many, at what time, at what price and cost, etc." PHP scales with your needs "A lot of people are shocked that we wrote it all in PHP," but as he explains, this is one of the great parts about choosing PHP, "We started off pretty small as everyone does and it was a good choice to use PHP at that time. We've scaled quite quickly in the past couple of years and PHP has stayed with us for the whole time. It was exciting and pleasant to see PHP handle the loads we put it through. And it's still working fine!" "It works better than you think it does" "Once we migrated from PHP 5.3 to 5.4," at E Revolution Ventures, "we got a 5 times performance increase just from that ... and the processes use half as much memory." "A lot of people assume it is a very 'hackishly' built language, it's actually not the case. A lot of things in PHP are done pretty cleverly: Although it has a few inconsistencies in the APIs, it's actually way better than you think it is." PHP is on par with other languages, "I use Python constantly, and use other languages like R. The PHP ecosystem is extremely good. That's something that PHP has always had." "If you want to do a startup nowadays, you can do it in PHP and hack in your dorm room and then it grows to Facebook size. No other language is going to have that. For example, deploying Python projects is very hard for a novice. With PHP, you just install Apache, throw in a PHP script and it just works. It has this 'Apple feel' of 'it works'. That's very important." PHP has grown up "People need to know PHP can do a lot of things nowadays," if your last taste of PHP was version 5, "which was released a million years ago," you need to see what it's got going on now. "Current versions are very, very fast. They do everything you want to do with them. And they give you this freedom of being able to implement pretty much anything you can imagine." "Having the karma to commit" Listen to the audio to hear the story of Joe's first patch to the Zend framework (and the excitement in his voice as he tells it!) and how it led him to participate in other open source projects. You can follow Joe on Twitter @juokaz and read more about him at http://juokaz.com. joe_final.mp3

In this interview from the Oregon Convention Center, where both DrupalCon and Symfony Live were taking place, Juozas "people call me Joe" Kaziukėnas talks about PHP's unique combination of ease of implementation, speed, and scalability. Data science, competitive intelligence, and PHP Joe is the CTO of E Revolution Ventures - an eCommerce company using PHP to run data-driven eCommerce and drive 25 million dollars of business a year, "and growing quickly": 3-year sales growth of 228% according to the INC 5000. "A lot of people do eCommerce in very basic terms," according to Joe, "What we do is use data-driven solutions. We go around the internet, we pick a lot of different data, combine it and make decisions based on that. The whole stack - both the back end system and all the processing of the data is all written in PHP." Big data and business logic At this point in the conversation, I made the easy assumption that Joe was talking about "Web Experience Management" stuff, analytics and the user-facing side of eCommerce, but I was dead wrong. What eRevolution Ventures is doing is much bigger, "We focus more on the business decisions like buying and selling decisions. Rather than focusing on the customer experience, we focus on what products we should have, what we should have in warehouses, how many, at what time, at what price and cost, etc." PHP scales with your needs "A lot of people are shocked that we wrote it all in PHP," but as he explains, this is one of the great parts about choosing PHP, "We started off pretty small as everyone does and it was a good choice to use PHP at that time. We've scaled quite quickly in the past couple of years and PHP has stayed with us for the whole time. It was exciting and pleasant to see PHP handle the loads we put it through. And it's still working fine!" "It works better than you think it does" "Once we migrated from PHP 5.3 to 5.4," at E Revolution Ventures, "we got a 5 times performance increase just from that ... and the processes use half as much memory." "A lot of people assume it is a very 'hackishly' built language, it's actually not the case. A lot of things in PHP are done pretty cleverly: Although it has a few inconsistencies in the APIs, it's actually way better than you think it is." PHP is on par with other languages, "I use Python constantly, and use other languages like R. The PHP ecosystem is extremely good. That's something that PHP has always had." "If you want to do a startup nowadays, you can do it in PHP and hack in your dorm room and then it grows to Facebook size. No other language is going to have that. For example, deploying Python projects is very hard for a novice. With PHP, you just install Apache, throw in a PHP script and it just works. It has this 'Apple feel' of 'it works'. That's very important." PHP has grown up "People need to know PHP can do a lot of things nowadays," if your last taste of PHP was version 5, "which was released a million years ago," you need to see what it's got going on now. "Current versions are very, very fast. They do everything you want to do with them. And they give you this freedom of being able to implement pretty much anything you can imagine." "Having the karma to commit" Listen to the audio to hear the story of Joe's first patch to the Zend framework (and the excitement in his voice as he tells it!) and how it led him to participate in other open source projects. You can follow Joe on Twitter @juokaz and read more about him at http://juokaz.com. joe_final.mp3

Balazs Dianiska, Acquia Professional Services Consultant, has a lot of insight about the needs of enterprise businesses. Whenever he can, he shares that insight with the Drupal community at events and meet-ups. Balazs, aka snufkin on Drupal.org credits entry his into Drupal to Angie "webchick" Byron: "She participated in the Google Summer of Code program," mentored by Robert Douglass, "and it became so popular, partly because of her involvement that I tried to participate as well. That's how I got into Drupal and Open Source as a whole." Drupal 4.6 to today Balazs says that despite how keen he was to get into Drupal, his earliest memories of it – from the Drupal 4.6 days – were "painful". Now, though, it has gone from being "a toolbox for hackers" to "an amazing powerhouse that everyone from media companies to non-profits use. It's just an amazing evolution." On Community Gatherings "I love these small camps, when 100 or 200 people meet. We can talk to each other. The size is not too large, so I can actually get in touch with everyone and I feel that I can contribute back to these people more efficiently. Visiting these small camps is an amazing feeling." The "Honorable" Module Balazs picks the Devel Module as his favorite module. He points out that "As a developer, the Devel Module is built by developers for developers." It is not something that your clients or users might ever touch or even know about. It is a contribution that helps us all work better and deliver better projects. Resources Drupal Camp Alpe Adria Google Summer of Code (Drupal is sadly not included this year) Angie Byron talks about how she got into Drupal, Drupal 8, and more: "My job is to make Drupal awesome": meet Angie Byron - part 1 "Now I break other people's modules!" Meet Angie Byron, Part 2 Devel Module: "A suite of modules containing fun for module developers and themers ..." balazs_dianiska_final.mp3

Balazs Dianiska, Acquia Professional Services Consultant, has a lot of insight about the needs of enterprise businesses. Whenever he can, he shares that insight with the Drupal community at events and meet-ups. Balazs, aka snufkin on Drupal.org credits entry his into Drupal to Angie "webchick" Byron: "She participated in the Google Summer of Code program," mentored by Robert Douglass, "and it became so popular, partly because of her involvement that I tried to participate as well. That's how I got into Drupal and Open Source as a whole." Drupal 4.6 to today Balazs says that despite how keen he was to get into Drupal, his earliest memories of it – from the Drupal 4.6 days – were "painful". Now, though, it has gone from being "a toolbox for hackers" to "an amazing powerhouse that everyone from media companies to non-profits use. It's just an amazing evolution." On Community Gatherings "I love these small camps, when 100 or 200 people meet. We can talk to each other. The size is not too large, so I can actually get in touch with everyone and I feel that I can contribute back to these people more efficiently. Visiting these small camps is an amazing feeling." The "Honorable" Module Balazs picks the Devel Module as his favorite module. He points out that "As a developer, the Devel Module is built by developers for developers." It is not something that your clients or users might ever touch or even know about. It is a contribution that helps us all work better and deliver better projects. Resources Drupal Camp Alpe Adria Google Summer of Code (Drupal is sadly not included this year) Angie Byron talks about how she got into Drupal, Drupal 8, and more: "My job is to make Drupal awesome": meet Angie Byron - part 1 "Now I break other people's modules!" Meet Angie Byron, Part 2 Devel Module: "A suite of modules containing fun for module developers and themers ..." balazs_dianiska_final.mp3

It's the DrupalCon Portland Floor Show! I went around the exhibitors' area and through the halls of the Oregon Convention Center asking two vital questions to our community: What is your favorite thing about Drupal? Why should other people come to DrupalCon? This week's podcast is a selection of some of the answers I got and the conversations I had with (not nearly enough of) you wonderful Drupalists! Drupal's new spokesman? The answers of the Con, for me, came from Drew Jarvis of Sandstorm Design in Chicago. Picture him doing amazing yo-yo tricks during the entire interview, because he was. Me: What is your favorite thing about Drupal? Drew: The fact that it gives me super powers! Without it I would be "just" a front-end developer who could make things look pretty and make things responsive, but with Drupal, I can do all sorts of back-end stuff that I don't really need to understand ... and could never write myself. Me: Why should other people come to DrupalCon? Drew: If you are not already sold on Drupal, you can see the power of it. You can see that there is literally an army of nerds from all over the world working constantly on it. I think that if you are sold on Drupal, there's just so much that you can learn! You can get inspired by the community. It's a very open community; it's people who want to give back to each other and celebrate Drupal and try to do good with it. Thank you! David Huang, Common Sense Media - "Come to DrupalCon. You'll see that we're all in this together. There are people working on the same hard problems as you and we come to solutions together." Allison Steele, Acculynk/PayLeap - "Drupal can handle enterprise-level accounts. It's really cool how easy it is to integrate our product into Drupal through Commerce Kickstart." Chris Vanderwater, Commerce Guys - "You should go to DrupalCon because it will change your life; it certainly did mine." Ray Saltini, Blink Reaction - "My favorite thing about Drupal is that it levels the playing field for everyone. You will love Drupal for what it can do for your business, and what it can do for your cause." Erin Marchak, My Planet Digital - "DrupalCon is a really interesting place to go to. As a woman developer, I get a lot of excitement out of seeing the other women also working in the community. Sometimes you don't realise how diverse the Drupal community is." Jason Yee, OpenSourcery - "My favorite thing about Drupal is how flexible it is. I like the idea of nodes not being pages and the idea that what you're building doesn't have to be a website ... it's content and you can use it however you want." Drew Jarvis, Sandstorm Design - "Drupal gives me superpowers." Awakash Bodiwala, American Civil Liberties Union - "Come to DrupalCon to learn all about Drupal and all the technologies around it." Tim Deeson, Deeson Online - "My favorite thing about Drupal is the flexibility it gives you to create solutions that aren't defined by anyone else. It really means you can create anything you need to and scratch you own itches, which I think leads to the innovation and creativity that you see Drupal used for." Amitai Burstein, Gizra "My most favorite thing about Drupal? It pays my bills. DrupalCon is the essence of Drupal." John DeSalvo and everyone else I spoke with, thank you, too! drupalcon_portland_floorshow_final.mp3

It's the DrupalCon Portland Floor Show! I went around the exhibitors' area and through the halls of the Oregon Convention Center asking two vital questions to our community: What is your favorite thing about Drupal? Why should other people come to DrupalCon? This week's podcast is a selection of some of the answers I got and the conversations I had with (not nearly enough of) you wonderful Drupalists! Drupal's new spokesman? The answers of the Con, for me, came from Drew Jarvis of Sandstorm Design in Chicago. Picture him doing amazing yo-yo tricks during the entire interview, because he was. Me: What is your favorite thing about Drupal? Drew: The fact that it gives me super powers! Without it I would be "just" a front-end developer who could make things look pretty and make things responsive, but with Drupal, I can do all sorts of back-end stuff that I don't really need to understand ... and could never write myself. Me: Why should other people come to DrupalCon? Drew: If you are not already sold on Drupal, you can see the power of it. You can see that there is literally an army of nerds from all over the world working constantly on it. I think that if you are sold on Drupal, there's just so much that you can learn! You can get inspired by the community. It's a very open community; it's people who want to give back to each other and celebrate Drupal and try to do good with it. Thank you! David Huang, Common Sense Media - "Come to DrupalCon. You'll see that we're all in this together. There are people working on the same hard problems as you and we come to solutions together." Allison Steele, Acculynk/PayLeap - "Drupal can handle enterprise-level accounts. It's really cool how easy it is to integrate our product into Drupal through Commerce Kickstart." Chris Vanderwater, Commerce Guys - "You should go to DrupalCon because it will change your life; it certainly did mine." Ray Saltini, Blink Reaction - "My favorite thing about Drupal is that it levels the playing field for everyone. You will love Drupal for what it can do for your business, and what it can do for your cause." Erin Marchak, My Planet Digital - "DrupalCon is a really interesting place to go to. As a woman developer, I get a lot of excitement out of seeing the other women also working in the community. Sometimes you don't realise how diverse the Drupal community is." Jason Yee, OpenSourcery - "My favorite thing about Drupal is how flexible it is. I like the idea of nodes not being pages and the idea that what you're building doesn't have to be a website ... it's content and you can use it however you want." Drew Jarvis, Sandstorm Design - "Drupal gives me superpowers." Awakash Bodiwala, American Civil Liberties Union - "Come to DrupalCon to learn all about Drupal and all the technologies around it." Tim Deeson, Deeson Online - "My favorite thing about Drupal is the flexibility it gives you to create solutions that aren't defined by anyone else. It really means you can create anything you need to and scratch you own itches, which I think leads to the innovation and creativity that you see Drupal used for." Amitai Burstein, Gizra "My most favorite thing about Drupal? It pays my bills. DrupalCon is the essence of Drupal." John DeSalvo and everyone else I spoke with, thank you, too! drupalcon_portland_floorshow_final.mp3

Short, but sweet this week in the Acquia podcast: Drupal 8 Accessibility Maintainer Mike Gifford, and accessibility contributor Vincenzo Rubano talk about DrupalCon Portland and say thanks for all the help that allowed Vincenzo to attend DrupalCon Portland and begin to make a difference to the project in person. Thanks for the help You may recall that Vincenzo ran a fundraising campaign on Indigogo recently. The donations he received there, plus Palantir's generous gift of a DrupalCon pass were enough to get him there! From me personally, and on behalf of Vincenzo, thank you all! Pics or it didn't happen Here are a couple of photos of Vincenzo and me meeting in person for the first time. vincenzo-n-mike-g.mp3

Short, but sweet this week in the Acquia podcast: Drupal 8 Accessibility Maintainer Mike Gifford, and accessibility contributor Vincenzo Rubano talk about DrupalCon Portland and say thanks for all the help that allowed Vincenzo to attend DrupalCon Portland and begin to make a difference to the project in person. Thanks for the help You may recall that Vincenzo ran a fundraising campaign on Indigogo recently. The donations he received there, plus Palantir's generous gift of a DrupalCon pass were enough to get him there! From me personally, and on behalf of Vincenzo, thank you all! Pics or it didn't happen Here are a couple of photos of Vincenzo and me meeting in person for the first time. vincenzo-n-mike-g.mp3

Gaelan Steele was the youngest delegate at DrupalCon Portland. Since I had had the pleasure of speaking with him and his father Douglas Urner while leading the Drupal Association scholarship committee earlier this year, I really wanted to meet this extraordinary 5th-grader in person. Dries himself showed up while we were talking and asked Gaelan how he uses and contributes to Drupal. The result of the interview hijack is really worth checking out! Gaelan is 11, in the 5th grade, and has been involved in Drupal for the last two years. He's an active member of the Seattle Drupal scene and seems to have made a big impression on the community in Portland. He lists his favorite things about Drupal as, "not having to do everything from scratch and a nice community ... that's pretty much it." :-) What do you do with Drupal? When Dries asks him what the most challenging, the hardest thing he's ever done with Drupal is, he says, "One thing that was definitely hard was integrating Drupal and this grading system that my dad uses called Active Grade. It has a pretty much undocumented RESTful API. It's like a single page app, so you can use the web inspector to kind of figure out how it works, but it's pretty much undocumented." We asked him to give a session on this or something similar next time around. I'm hoping he'll submit a proposal. Best answer of the day After listening to Gaelan talk about some Drupal tech and techniques, Dries asks: "How did you learn all this stuff?" Gaelan: "Um ... The internet." gaelan_meets_dries.mp3

Gaelan Steele was the youngest delegate at DrupalCon Portland. Since I had had the pleasure of speaking with him and his father Douglas Urner while leading the Drupal Association scholarship committee earlier this year, I really wanted to meet this extraordinary 5th-grader in person. Dries himself showed up while we were talking and asked Gaelan how he uses and contributes to Drupal. The result of the interview hijack is really worth checking out! Gaelan is 11, in the 5th grade, and has been involved in Drupal for the last two years. He's an active member of the Seattle Drupal scene and seems to have made a big impression on the community in Portland. He lists his favorite things about Drupal as, "not having to do everything from scratch and a nice community ... that's pretty much it." :-) What do you do with Drupal? When Dries asks him what the most challenging, the hardest thing he's ever done with Drupal is, he says, "One thing that was definitely hard was integrating Drupal and this grading system that my dad uses called Active Grade. It has a pretty much undocumented RESTful API. It's like a single page app, so you can use the web inspector to kind of figure out how it works, but it's pretty much undocumented." We asked him to give a session on this or something similar next time around. I'm hoping he'll submit a proposal. Best answer of the day After listening to Gaelan talk about some Drupal tech and techniques, Dries asks: "How did you learn all this stuff?" Gaelan: "Um ... The internet." gaelan_meets_dries.mp3

Here is one more conversation I had at Drupal Camp Alpe-Adria in April, 2013. Ranko Marinic is from Croatia and has some great perspectives. He works as an IT consultant with a wide range of technologies and with Drupal "by night". He is studying economics and has become interested in the economic effects on local communities of implementing open source software. Ranko also talks about the moment he really started believing in open source as a social movement. Local Economies and Open Source The City of Munich adopted Libre Office and Linux (see below for links to more information). Part of this story inspired Ranko's thesis topic: While migrating to Libre Office, some bugs were discovered. The City of Munich "hired a local development team to fix it for them and in the end (I presume) pushed the bug fixes to the Libre Office community. I am interested in looking into how the fact that they hired local people to do development basically preserves the money in the Munich community, the German community, and in the European community. I would like to see if that is true in the first place, and actually see how big of an economic impact is made by keeping that money in the smaller, local community through the use of open source." When Open Source got real "There was a case study that Acquia published about the New York State Senate. They explained how they went into the redesign and one of the major points was that it wasn't only the New York State Senate, but also that every senator had a sub-site within that installation. Every senator had some guideline on the content, but could also develop some custom modules and themes for themselves to make it their own. The 'punchline' for me was when I read that the whole project was organised so that there was a list presented to each senator of accredited vendors that could provide them with custom development, consulting, and theming; all within the Drupal world." To Ranko, "It was a proof that all of these competing companies also look out for each other. So it's not the classic Neo-Liberal, capitalistic competition; it's 'we need to grow and other people need to grow because that keeps us strong.'" LiMux - Munich adopts Open Source - Resources The LiMux Project City of Munich IT blog Article: "Munich shifts to LibreOffice - LibreOffice gets some municipal love" Article: "The City of Munich Adopts LibreOffice" Mayor of Munich: "EU laptops should have LibreOffice or OpenOffice" Munich shifts to LibreOffice ranko_final.mp3

Here is one more conversation I had at Drupal Camp Alpe-Adria in April, 2013. Ranko Marinic is from Croatia and has some great perspectives. He works as an IT consultant with a wide range of technologies and with Drupal "by night". He is studying economics and has become interested in the economic effects on local communities of implementing open source software. Ranko also talks about the moment he really started believing in open source as a social movement. Local Economies and Open Source The City of Munich adopted Libre Office and Linux (see below for links to more information). Part of this story inspired Ranko's thesis topic: While migrating to Libre Office, some bugs were discovered. The City of Munich "hired a local development team to fix it for them and in the end (I presume) pushed the bug fixes to the Libre Office community. I am interested in looking into how the fact that they hired local people to do development basically preserves the money in the Munich community, the German community, and in the European community. I would like to see if that is true in the first place, and actually see how big of an economic impact is made by keeping that money in the smaller, local community through the use of open source." When Open Source got real "There was a case study that Acquia published about the New York State Senate. They explained how they went into the redesign and one of the major points was that it wasn't only the New York State Senate, but also that every senator had a sub-site within that installation. Every senator had some guideline on the content, but could also develop some custom modules and themes for themselves to make it their own. The 'punchline' for me was when I read that the whole project was organised so that there was a list presented to each senator of accredited vendors that could provide them with custom development, consulting, and theming; all within the Drupal world." To Ranko, "It was a proof that all of these competing companies also look out for each other. So it's not the classic Neo-Liberal, capitalistic competition; it's 'we need to grow and other people need to grow because that keeps us strong.'" LiMux - Munich adopts Open Source - Resources The LiMux Project City of Munich IT blog Article: "Munich shifts to LibreOffice - LibreOffice gets some municipal love" Article: "The City of Munich Adopts LibreOffice" Mayor of Munich: "EU laptops should have LibreOffice or OpenOffice" Munich shifts to LibreOffice ranko_final.mp3