FLOSS Foundations

Mollom.com website redesign (Woot!)

2012-01-30T22:13:41+00:00

We're proud to present a new design for the Mollom.com website.

We first launched the Mollom.com site in 2007. For more than four years, Mollom.com was using the same design. As we grew Mollom, we wanted to address some of the issues that we've been stewing over since our original design. We have been planning to redesign the site for over a year now but work on the Mollom web service and developing new Mollom products have always had a higher priority so we haven't found the time to complete the new design until now.

The old Mollom.com design that we used from 2007 to early 2012.

The new design is the first step in our plans to reorganize the website. We still have updates to make to the content of some pages, for example. Already, we think the new design is a fresh new change that improves usability.

Take a look at the new mollom.com, we hope you like it!

The new Mollom.com website design.

Core Conversations at DrupalCon Denver

2012-01-25T21:03:19+00:00

Like at previous DrupalCon's, I'm co-organizing a Core Conversations track at DrupalCon Denver.

The Core Conversations track is a place for people actively working on Drupal or Drupal.org to meet and plan the future of Drupal. Each session is either two 15 minute or one 30 minute presentation, followed by 30 minutes of discussion.

I know a lot of you contribute to Drupal or want to start contributing. If so, Core Conversations are a unique opportunity to present in front of key Drupal contributors, and to make the case for why we need to do more of A or B (e.g. authoring experience improvements, API overhauls, etc.). We need UX conversations, performance conversations, feature conversations, etc. Please share your ideas with the world through Drupal core.

If you have ideas for Drupal core, and you are attending DrupalCon, I suggest that you submit a proposal as soon as possible. The deadline is February 1st so don't wait too long. To get your ideas flowing, here are our conversations from Drupalcon London and Drupal Chicago.

Drupal Association community elections

2012-01-19T18:04:30+00:00

When we designed a new governance structure for the Drupal Association last year, we decided that most of the board is selected through a nominating committee with the goal to carefully balance many factors like needed skills and geographical and sector representation. However, it was also deemed important that we have directors chosen directly by the Drupal community to make sure that the community is always well-represented.

I'm excited that we're holding our first open community elections. Two community "at large" directors will be elected to the Drupal Association Board of Directors. If you'd like to consider running, please have a look at the "At-large" nominations page. And if you're a Drupal community member, please make time to participate in discussions with candidates and of course to vote, starting January 26. (This process was vetted openly in the community by the Elections Committee and numerous community volunteers at http://groups.drupal.org/drupal-association.)

Your participation will help us take this next important step in implementing a new improved governance structure to strengthen the Drupal Association. Thanks!

If you’re in Europe, go to Monki Gras

2012-01-18T06:02:23+00:00

To my European readers: if you care about the impact of social technologies like Git (and GitHub) & how they’re transforming software development, or the impact of social technology on communities, and you enjoy good beer, you need to be at Monki Gras. I just posted over at my RedMonk blog about how the previous conference in the series, Monktoberfest, was the best conference of my life. And I’ve been to many.

Monki Gras is Feb. 1–2 in London. The timing’s perfect to stop by just before FOSDEM (and that’s exactly what I’m doing). Registration is dirt-cheap, speakers are universally top-notch, and you’ll also get some world-class beers in the package.

Tagged: community, development, gentoo

PIPA/SOPA and Why You Should Care

2012-01-18T05:03:00+00:00

Congress is considering the most talked-about copyright legislation in a decade, known as Protect IP (PIPA) in the Senate and Stop Online Piracy (SOPA) in the House. Today, Mozilla announced that we’ll join with other sites in a virtual strike to protest PIPA/SOPA.

SOPA makes all of us potential criminals if we don’t become the enforcement arm of a new government regulatory and policing structure. SOPA does not target websites serving up unauthorized content. SOPA does not target people accessing those websites. SOPA targets all the rest of us. These costs are significant, wide-ranging and long lasting. To understand more clearly what SOPA does and the range of consequences, it’s helpful to use an analogy from the physical world where we all have many years of experience.

Assume there’s a corner store in your neighborhood that rents movies. But the movie industry believes that some or even all of the videos in that store are unauthorized copies, so that they’re not being paid when people watch their movies. What should be done?

SOPA/PIPA don’t aim at the people trying to get to the store. SOPA/ PIPA don’t penalize or regulate the store itself. SOPA and PIPA penalize us if we don’t block the people trying to get to the store.

The solution under the proposed bills is to make it as difficult as possible to find or interact with the store. Maps showing the location of the store must be changed to hide it(1). The road to the store must be blocked off so that it’s difficult to physically get to there(2). Directory services must unlist the store’s phone number and address(3). Credit card companies(4) would have to cease providing services to the store. Local newspapers would no longer be allowed to place ads for the video store(5). And to make sure it all happens, any person or organization who doesn’t do this is subject to penalties(6). Even publishing a newsletter that tells people where the store is would be prohibited by this legislation(7).

This is what SOPA and PIPA would impose in the online world. It’s very different than targeting the owner of the video store directly. The obligations to make websites hard to find apply to all citizens and businesses. Each one of us is subject to punishment and fines if we don’t follow these prohibitions. And, because SOPA/PIPA create a new regulatory structure, we become subject to punishment without the due process protections citizens normally enjoy.

Supporters say they are only targeting foreign websites outside US jurisdiction. However the burden of compliance that falls on all of us is not any less because the website servers are elsewhere. And in any case, many US companies with be affected through their locally-identified sites (for example, amazon.co.uk.)

Despite their over-reaching nature, PIPA and SOPA may not even be effective at stopping online piracy. People can still enter the actual Internet Protocol address of a blocked domain name. Sites can register new domain names. Continuously sanitizing the Internet of any mention or link to bad sites is a like the infamous game of “whack-a-mole.”

SOPA and PIPA are dangerous. So, what to do?

Legislatively:

Reject SOPA / PIPA soundly.
Congress must not adopt the SOPA position of protecting content AT ALL COSTS. Congress must represent all of us.
Focus specifically on the holes in today’s enforcement tools. Why are thePirateBay.ORG or MegaUpload.COM still operating? Why aren’t they part of the definition of “foreign site” in SOPA/PIPA?
Be very, very cautious about creating new liability because we’re unwilling to punish the people accessing unauthorized content

Philosophically:
Over time, developments in two areas are likely to make this issue recede dramatically. One will be the development of new business models that embrace technology, and consumer expectations of universal access. The second will be new technology that makes it easier for content owners to limit access. Content owners can decide if they want unlimited audiences and alternative revenue sources, of if they want potentially limited audiences and a pay-for-view revenue model. Today we are fighting over what to do in the meantime. The content industry has convinced many that “something must be done.” Even if one agrees with this (which many do not), one thing is clear.

Protecting content at all costs is a disaster.

Footnotes

(1) This is the phyical world equivalent of blocking DNS, which is required by SOPA. 112 HR 3261 Title I, Sec 102 c 2 A i (pp 14, ln 1)

(2) This is the physical world analogy for ISPs obligation to “prevent access” to suspected infringing sites. 112 HR 3261 Title I, Sec 102 c 2 A i (pp 14, ln 1) says that “A service provider shall take technically feasible and reasonable measures designed to prevent access by its subscribers located within the United States to the foreign infringing site.”

(3) Removing the video store from the phone book is analogous to preventing any search engines from showing links to a suspected infringing site, which is required under 112 HR 3261 Title I, Sec 102 c 2 B (pp 15, ln 17).

(4) SOPA requires that payment processors stop sanding payments to the accounts of suspected infringing sites. 112 HR 3261 Title I, Sec 102 c 2 C i (pp 16, ln 3)

(5) Advertisers are not allowed to show ads on suspected infringing sites, to show ads for suspected infringing sites in other places, or to pay for ads that have already been served. 112 HR 3261 Title I, Sec 102 c 2 D (pp 17, ln 5).

(6) SOPA allows the Attorney General (under 112 HR 3261 Title I, Sec 102 c 4 A (pp 18, ln 23) or a private party who thinks they’ve been harmed (112 HR 3261 Title I, Sec 103 c 4 (pp 42, ln 3) ) to pursue damages from anyone who doesn’t follow these rules, and doesn’t place a limit on the amount of any damages that could be assessed.

(7) “Circumvention tools” — anything that tells you where a site is, even after it’s been removed from the DNS (the Internet’s “map”) are prohibited by 112 HR 3261 Title I, Sec 102 c 4 A ii (pp 19, ln 8 )

User Sovereignty for our Data

2012-01-13T17:18:57+00:00

Our Internet experiences involve more and more data about us. Some of this data we create ourselves. Sometimes our friends and acquaintances create it, and sometimes the services we use create data about us. On one hand this enables all sorts of exciting new applications. On the other hand, there are some very disconcerting aspects to the explosion of personal data. The ability of big data and cloud service providers to monitor, log, store, use, correlate and sell information about who we are and what we do has huge implications for society and for individuals.

Right now there’s no convenient way for me to share information about myself and maintain control over that information. I share information about myself by putting it someplace where someone else makes all the rules. That “someone else” is the application. Most people think of Facebook or Google, but this issue is much bigger than either of them. This is an issue of the architecture of user data today, and applies across the Internet. Think of the big recommendation / review sites, or any other application you spend a lot of time living in. Think of any social network you’ve identified connections in. The only convenient way for us to have a “home” at one of these sites is to contribute our data and have whatever control the application developer chooses to give us.

These issues have big implications for Mozilla.

First, it means we should do some new things in the user data space. To really help people with the way we use and share data today, Mozilla will also need to offer people the choice of storing data in the cloud in a way that allows services to access it with your permission. This will be a new thing for Mozilla. It will involve new challenges. It’s important that we take these on and address them well. If we develop an offering that handles user data in the cloud properly we will help ensure choice and user sovereignty in new areas of online life. Each of us should have a meaningful choice about where and how our data is stored and managed. No other organization have both the ability to do something totally focused on user sovereignty rather than financial profit, and the ability to have wide impact. A Mozilla presence in the cloud will allow us to to fulfill our mission in important new areas of online life.

Second, this means our approach to handling user data must be different from the industry norm. It must put you at the center, array your data around you, and let you deliver that data to any app you want, on the terms you want. It should store user data when there is a measurable benefit to the user, rather than gathering everything in the hopes that data mining will provide value to someone else. It should allow people to determine if their data is available to others. The principle of user sovereignty will affect the way we design every aspect of our offerings. Mozilla offerings must embody the values of the Mozilla Manifesto and our privacy principles.

My colleague Ben Adida (tech lead for identity and user data and one of our resident cryptographers) has written a piece describing our thinking on how to build such products.

Blogaversary 2012

2012-01-09T16:43:02+00:00

Twitter, Google Plus, Facebook, Flickr, 500px. pinterest on the horizon. All that’s missing is a partridge in a pear tree, and sometimes that appears to be there as well. The world of online communication and connection is pretty different that it was nine years ago, when I slapped a bunch of Python scripts onto a server running in a closet in my house. For all the other forms that have emerged, blogging still has a warm place in my heart. I’ve used this blog to host long (some might say too long) and short form content over the years. I never really mastered the short form content, so it was easy for that to migrate off into Twitter land. Some of the more personal stuff that I used to write has also gone to Twitter, or to a lesser degree Facebook, but there hasn’t been a lot of time for that, so most of it has gone by the wayside. What remains is the much longer form content. Unfortunately, firing up Ecto and writing a few dozen paragraphs doesn’t come easily, and getting over some of that inertia is what’s kept more content from appearing here.

Despite my initial misgivings, I like Google Plus. I like the ability to write short to medium content, as well as really nice picture support. I like how easy it is for conversations to start. I’m probably going to put a little more energy into being there. Will there be a 10th anniversary blog post in January 2013? I’m not sure. I’d like there to be, and I plan to keep on posting, but at the same time, there are only so many hours in a day.

SqueakG+

2012-01-09T16:35:40+00:00

Need more news? If waiting for a blog post is not your thing, join the Google + Group.

https://plus.google.com/115950529692424242526/posts

Mollom 2011 retrospective

2012-01-06T13:39:16+00:00

2011 was another excellent year for Mollom. We ended the year having blocked 630 million spam messages, up from 352 million spam messages blocked in 2010 -- and that doesn't even count some of our largest customers like Netlog and other large social networks. And, as in 2010, we ended 2011 with a spam classification efficiency of 99.95%, meaning that only 5 in 10,000 spam messages were not caught by Mollom.

The number of active sites protected by Mollom grew from 28,000 at the end of 2010 to almost 45,000 at the end of 2011. Revenues grew by more than 50% with virtually no sales or marketing efforts.

Almost the entire Mollom team in the Mollom office in Ghent: sun, Ben, Cedric, Thomas, Johan and Vicky. Missing in the picture are Keith and Dries.

All our revenue is invested back into the company. In 2011, we used those funds to grow our team and to fund development on an entirely new product, which may end up rebooting or repositioning Mollom altogether.

Specifically, we have been worked hard on what will be a "hosted comment moderation interface". That interface will provide an optimized moderation environment that will make it easier to moderate multiple websites, either as an individual or as part of a team of moderators. To do so we introduced a new backend with a REST-based API to replace our original XML-RPC API, we rewrote the Mollom module for Drupal, and started to change our website.

We also faced some new challenges in 2011 -- our support requests increased substantially, mostly due to the variety of sites that are now using Mollom. Based on many of these user requests, we tweaked our classifier performance, which resulted in a dramatic decrease in how often Mollom presents a CAPTCHA challenge, and in doing so, solved a number of real-world issues our clients were having with Mollom performance. Rolling out changes without impacting our up-time statistics was no small challenge -- every change we made on the backend has to be weighed against the impact it has on the effectiveness and responsiveness of Mollom on the client side.

2012 may also bring us some additional competition -- some of the world's best venture capitalists invested $8 million in a company called Impermium. Investments like this validate our belief that the social web needs good anti-spam filtering solutions. Impermium is still building its first product but will definitely be a company to watch.

Regardless of what happens in the social web spam market, we'll be busy in 2012. The first half of 2012, you'll notice some new things popping up on Mollom. Our primary goal for 2012 will be to make the "hosted comment moderation interface" available commercially and to refresh our website. Along with launching a new product, we plan to ramp up our sales and marketing efforts. It is time to do so now the Mollom technology has matured after years of intensive investment. We've also got additional work to do to continue to improve accuracy, maintain our high uptime statistics, and work with other open source developers on improvements to Mollom clients for non-Drupal systems.

In short, 2011 was a great year for Mollom. We're happy doing what we do, and we feel that we're helping to make the web a slightly better place. We wouldn't have made it this far without you -- our customers, users and friends. Without you, we wouldn't be a company at all. Thank you for 2011! We're looking forward to sharing a great 2012 with you.

Acquia retrospective 2011

2012-01-05T19:59:35+00:00

It's that time of year again! In good tradition, here is my retrospective on Acquia's accomplishments for 2011. (You can also read my 2009 and 2010 retrospectives.)

While 2011 was only Acquia's third full year in business (i.e. revenue-bearing year), 2011 was absolutely jam-packed. Starting with executing on our product strategy and vision, to a trip to the Caribbean for the entire company, to being selected by Forbes magazine as one of America's 100 most promising companies, 2011 was full of amazing successes, both for Drupal and for Acquia.

In this post, I'll provide some more detail on what Acquia accomplished in 2011; I'll discuss our business as a whole, our products, our relation with the Drupal community and my role within the company. I have a separate blog post to reflect on how Drupal fared in 2011.

Acquia business retrospective

In 2011 we saw record bookings and continued momentum. We finished the year with 11 consecutive quarters of revenue growth and beating our plan.

Acquia, along with our partners, had more and more engagements with big and well-known organizations, like Paypal, Twitter, Al Jazeera, World Economic Forum, the U.S. House of Representatives, and many more.

Most importantly, customer satisfaction and renewals continued to climb, and are best in class compared to other companies in our industry. Rapid customer growth has resulted in surging ticket counts, now numbering in thousands each month. Sustaining high levels of satisfaction and servicing these tickets has proven to be challenging at times. As a result, we significantly evolved our customer on-boarding process, customer communication, and account management, and we've continued to invest in hiring many great people.

Because things went so well, we decided to accelerate sales and marketing and raised more money mid-2011. We raised $15 million in a fourth round of funding. Our previous investors affirmed their confidence by participating in this round, and they were joined by Tenaya Capital.

In January 2011, we also launched Acquia Europe and overachieved our goals there. We now have about 20 people in Europe.

We ended up growing the company from 80 full-time employees to 175, and growing our bookings by 230%. Mid-way through 2011, our existing office space simply couldn't contain us any longer, so we burst out at the end of August and moved to a bigger 35,000 square feet (3,250 square meter) office where we have had a lot of fun.

Despite our success in growing our staff, the availability of quality candidates continues to be the number one challenge for our continued growth. We're trying to help change that. Together with our partners, we delivered 200 training classes worldwide and we've launched an internal training program called Acquia U, to provide immersive training to a select group of new entry level employees (recent college graduates and career changers).

We've also grown Acquia through the acquisition of companies started by talented people within the Drupal community. This year, Acquia acquired two Drupal companies: security specialist Growing Venture Solutions and migration expert Cyrve. We wanted to do these acquisitions because they create a win-win-win situation for the Drupal community, our partners, and our customers.

Acquia product retrospective

On the product side, Acquia achieved everything in line with the product strategy and vision that I outlined in early 2011. If you're not already familiar with Acquia's products, it's worth reading that post first for context.

We rebooted the Acquia Network. We added two of our own services to the Acquia Network with the new Insight and SEO Grader tools, which provides active site testing for security, performance, and search engine optimization best practices for all of your sites.

In addition to adding our own services, we also added complimentary services and tools from our partners, including New Relic (performance monitoring), Drupalize.me (over 200 hours of Drupal video training from Lullabot), Blitz.io (load testing), Utest (crowd sourced manual testing), and Mobify (mobile delivery of Drupal sites). Lastly we re-built the Acquia Library, our knowledge base on everything Drupal and Acquia. Everything combined, we made massive improvements to the Acquia Network.

We also launched Dev Cloud, a single-server version of Managed Cloud. We now deliver over 4 billion page views a month and 70 terrabytes of data from our Drupal-tuned cloud platform. Our operations team now manages over 2,500 servers through Amazon EC2, up from 500 servers in 2011 and 100 at the end of 2010.

A major low-light was the famous Amazon outage in April 2011. Even though only two enterprise customers were affected, out of a couple hundred at that time, we made fairly significant changes to our roadmap to limit future outages. We've since added features to Acquia Cloud like multi-datacenter failover (both multi-region and multi-availability zone across continents) to increase the service level agreement (SLA) we provide to levels beyond what Amazon provides directly.

2011 was also the year that we commercially launched Drupal Gardens at DrupalCon Chicago after spending considerable design and engineering time on the new Views 3 user interface. Since then, Drupal Gardens has added many requested features and now is hosting over 75,000 Drupal 7 sites including some really large enterprise customers, though we can't talk about them quite yet.

We also did a lot of other things; from relaunching Acquia.com on Drupal 7, to adding support for Drupal 7 and Drupal 8 to Acquia Dev Desktop, to improving both Acquia Commons and COD.

All in all, 2011 was a very productive year for our engineers and product managers.

Community and Acquia

In everything we do, we try to raise the tide for the Drupal community at large. In 2011, we continued our long track record of giving back to the larger Drupal community.

Roughly 30% of our engineering time flows back to the Drupal community and resulted in numerous improvements, including core bug fixes, contributed module porting, and usability improvements to modules such as Date, Media, and Views. We participated in the University of Minnesota usability testing, in addition to performing more than 20 internal usability tests on Drupal and Drupal Gardens whose results have been fed into the community.

We participated in and organized many sprints, including the Drupal 7 media sprint, the Drush Code Sprint, and Multilingual Drupal Code Code Sprint.

In total, Acquia sponsored over 58 community events in the last 3 months of 2011 alone, and covered travel and accommodation costs for dozens of Acquians to contribute in person to the success of these events around the world. We also took the lead in organizing and running several of them.

Our marketing team contributed great sales and marketing collateral to the Drupal Association (creative commons-licensed), to help others in the community to promote and grow Drupal.

In addition, we also had some struggles …

Acquia is obviously interested in helping to make Drupal the best it can possibly be and we're proud of major contributions we make to the Drupal project. For example, due to concerns about the lack of Drupal marketing, we launched the Drupal Showcase site as a resource to enable the community to help market Drupal. And since the adoption and growth of Drupal is vitally important, I, supported by the rest of the Acquia leadership team, made a decision to fund a major usability initiative during Drupal 7's development.

However, some of these community investment decisions have backfired on us, and caused community backlash and criticism. Sometimes over smaller things that are easily corrected, as in the case of the Drupal Showcase (moving it from an acquia.com sub-domain and adding a field for attribution), and other times because of questions and concerns about Acquia's influence, as in the case of Drupal 7 usability.

Acquia is in a position where not only can we give back, we want to give back. And furthermore, I feel that corporate sponsorship (not just from Acquia) is important to Drupal's continued growth and success. But when major investments into Drupal like these backfire, it definitely gives us pause in continuing to make these kinds of large investments. Nevertheless, I'd love to contribute more and bigger changes to Drupal, particularly Drupal core, in a constructive and healthy way. As Acquia, we'll continue to refine how we work with the community to find the right balance. As a community, we need to figure out how to better embrace corporate sponsorship. Something to brainstorm about together in this new year.

On a more personal note ...

As Acquia and the Drupal community have grown, so have the demands on my time. Acquia's growing at a phenomenal rate; we're creating a product portfolio with multiple product lines; the Drupal Association is undergoing major changes; Drupal 8 development is underway; I'm traveling around the world evangelizing Drupal 7; and more. To meet all of these demands, I needed to create more time. To do so, I created Acquia's Office of the CTO (OCTO).

I made some amazing hires to be part of OCTO. It is kind of a dream team to work with on a daily basis. Together, we've been very focused on accelerating Drupal growth (enabling distributions on drupal.org, streamlining the contribution process), Drupal 8 (launching initiatives) and Acquia (driving the acquisition of GVS and Cyrve, creating recommendations on Drupal and mobile, researching new product ideas, and working with some of the largest Drupal users in the world).

This was definitely a highlight for me, as it has allowed much more velocity around these important aspects of what I do. We hope to extend OCTO in 2012 with additional people.

In summary …

In general, I'm very optimistic about Acquia's future in 2012. The decisions we've made early in the company's life, despite skepticism by some, have proven to be correct. Enterprises want commercial-grade support and cloud computing. Open Source, Software as a Service (SaaS) and Platform as a Services (PaaS) continues to be on the rise. More than ever, I'm convinced that Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) will become the de-facto standard for building and hosting web applications, especially in combination with Open Source web applications. The question is not if it will happen, but when and how fast. When it happens, Acquia will be in a great spot.

We've always been very transparent about our goals and roadmap (Acquia 2009 roadmap, Acquia 2011 product strategy), so in the next month or two, I'll provide more information on Acquia's goals for 2012 and beyond.

Of course, none of this success would be possible without the support of our customers, partners, the Drupal community, and our many friends. Special thanks to all those who helped organize my many visits to India, Brazil, Australia, France, etc. Thank you for your support in 2011, and I look forward to working with you to find out what 2012 will bring!

Drupal 2011 retrospective and 2012 predictions

2012-01-05T15:11:26+00:00

2011 was a tremendous year of major growth for Drupal, and also a year that kept me very, very busy.

Drupal 7

At the beginning of the year, thanks to the efforts of nearly 1,000 contributors, we released Drupal 7, celebrating the event together as a community with over 250 parties in over 90 countries. An incredible achievement for all of us.

A map of all the Drupal 7 release parties around the world: over 250 parties in more than 90 countries.

With a new release comes a fresh round of evangelism. I traveled 412,000 km (or 256,000 miles) in 2011, up from 300,000 km (190,000 miles) in 2010 and about 100,000 km (62,000 miles) in 2009. Given that the world is about 40,000 km (or 25,400 miles), I flew around the world approximately 10 times, or roughly once a month. Or put differently, I traveled an average of 1100 km a day (or 680 miles a day). Needless to say, that is a lot of evangelizing! And although it may not be visible, I believe this evangelizing to be very effective in promoting Drupal and creating local communities around the globe.

Three of the places I visited that I'm most excited about were Brazil, India, and Singapore. There is a large and growing Drupal following in these places with a lot of opportunity for Drupal.

Today, Drupal 7 is a roaring success. Drupal 7 is being adopted at least twice as fast as Drupal 6 has. Expect to see Drupal's adoption to grow throughout 2012 thanks to Drupal 7.

Drupal 8

Drupal also turned 10 years old in 2011, and we had a big birthday bash at DrupalCon Chicago, where we also kicked off development of Drupal 8, and started work on major core initiatives, to help ensure that Drupal stays relevant in the ever-changing web. At DrupalCon London, I presented the results of a community-wide survey with over 3,000 participants, which both reinforced the strategic importance of the existing initiatives, plus added a few more, which I hope to announce in 2012.

These initiatives are being led by Greg Dunlap (Configuration Management), Larry Garfield (Web Services), Gábor Hojtsy (Multilingual), Jacine Luisi (HTML5), Jeff Burnz (Design), and John Albin (Mobile), and are happening in conjunction with other great community initiatives for Drupal 8. A huge thanks to everyone who's been working hard on improving Drupal 8!

In addition to celebrating our future, we also tried to learn from our past. We held a development process retrospective discussion on Drupal 7's 3-year release cycle and the lessons learned: what went well, what didn't, and what we should hook_process_alter() in Drupal 8. As a result, we implemented numerous core development process tweaks (a hard cap on the number of critical and major issues, worked with the various Drupal core team leads to develop "gates" that document how to review patches for accessibility, performance, usability, testing, and documentation). We also made a number of improvements to the collaboration tools on Drupal.org (e.g. issue summaries, image uploads, and subscriptions).

Due to our community's initial focus during the release cycle on stabilization and bug fixes, Drupal 8 development really only recently came into bloom, around the time of DrupalCon London. However, since then, a number of exciting improvements have gone in, including patches to convert Drupal 8 to HTML5 and clean up Drupal's multilingual system, a new object-oriented entity API and cache system, and numerous documentation and API clean-ups. Additionally, there is some promising prototyping going on for the web services and configuration management initiatives.

Drupal Association

Another aspect of Drupal that took a front seat for me in 2011 was the "rebooting" of the Drupal Association: moving to a US-based 501c3 organization, changing the structure of the organization to one of a policy-making board with supporting committees, and electing a new board of directors.

Understanding the importance of these changes requires some familiarity with the Drupal Association's history, as well as the background of the changes. But the key goals are:

Move the board away from essentially unpaid "staff" positions (infrastructure manager, event manager, etc.) to a policy-making board. This allows the Drupal Association's activities to scale with the exponential growth of the community and not be hamstrung by what 7-9 individuals are capable of doing.
Increase the diversity and effectiveness of the board through targeted outreach of new members via a dedicated Nominating Committee.
Increase direct community representation in board decisions through the inclusion of community-elected, "at-large" board members.
Empower the community to get directly involved with the Drupal Association's activities through participation in focused committees, such as an Infrastructure Committee and Events Committee.
Move operations to the US, where most of our income comes from (which can now be tax-deductible donations), and where most of our staff is located, in order to help increase the efficiency of running the organization.

While these changes took a lot of time to implement, and a few are still ongoing, I believe they will set a very strong foundation for the future of the organization.

In fact, the Drupal Association 2012 planning has already kicked off. Our primary goals for 2012 are to make Drupal.org awesome, and to help address Drupal's talent shortage issue.

Despite the growth and opportunity, finding Drupal talent still remains really, really hard. It continues to be Drupal's most important challenge in my opinion. I'm really glad we decided to focus on it with the Drupal Association.

Community

It certainly hasn't all been rosy, though; 2011 was also a year with challenges, particularly within the core development team. We've certainly struggled with morale issues following nearly two years without a development phase in Drupal core, misunderstandings about the relationship between "official" initiatives and community initiatives, concerns about the balance between adding new features and cleaning up existing technical debt, as well as even more existential questions like "Is Drupal a product or framework? Should Drupal be a page generator or a REST server?".

Much of the growing pains are normal. We're now one of the largest Open Source projects in terms of active contributors -- if not the largest. That growth requires us to evolve how we work. We've grown from a 100% volunteer driven model to a model where there is increasingly more corporate participation and influence. This model is not new to the world. There comes a time when a volunteer-based project needs to foster commercial involvement to help the project advance and compete. Linux is our best example. Without Red Hat, IBM and Dell, Linux would not be what it is today. One of our biggest challenges for 2012, is to figure out how we can get more commercial organizations to get involved with Drupal development in a bigger way while respecting the needs and desires of our community.

Although I also want to do a lot of evangelizing in 2012, I feel like the pendulum has to swing back. I want to re-balance how my time is spent and focus more on Drupal 8 and the Drupal community, in order to spend focused time and energy on overcoming these growing pains.

As a community, we shouldn't forget about the evangelizing though, and this is something a lot of people can help with. It sometimes frustrates me that we spent 3 years working on Drupal 7 with almost a thousand people, but don't properly tell the world about all the great things we've done. Especially because over the years, Drupal has built up a reputation of being hard to use compared to some alternatives. A lot of that is changed with Drupal 7, but it isn't necessarily reflected in how people think and talk about Drupal. To change that, we need to continue to educate people about all the great improvements we made to Drupal 7 and encourage those that gave up on Drupal previously, to give Drupal another try. Drupal 7 is a giant step forward compared to Drupal 6.

Overall, I'm confident that we can overcome these challenges. I really believe in the people that make up our community and the core development team, and our ability to collaborate together to get through tough problems. Drupal will be much better in the end, as a result. We'll have different challenges at the end of 2012.

More predictions for 2012

Here are some more prediction in addition to the predictions and plans above:

As Drupal gains in popularity, the number of developers/shops getting involved will increase, and the Drupal ecosystem on the whole will expand greatly. However, there could be a danger that individual companies who don't invest in marketing may actually see fewer clients as a result. Marketing will be a much larger focus of the business community in 2012.
I hope 2012 will be the year of the Drupal entrepreneur. Drupal companies who specialize in one particular aspect, such as Pantheon, Drupal Commerce, and Tag1 Consulting have seen a lot of success or promise in 2011 (specialization is a form of marketing, after all), but there are many more niches to fill, and many niches that have plenty of room for multiple companies -- something we sometimes seem to forget. I'd love to see more entrepreneurial spirit within the Drupal community.
Another thing I'd love to see is more young people engaging with Drupal in 2012, and have this be a measure of Drupal's success. Some of us old farts are busy raising kids these days. ;-) New, vibrant energy in the community from young people is a hallmark of a great community.
I predict more distributions will be created than ever before. We still haven't fully cracked the code on business models for distributions though. That is important because they are expensive to build and maintain. We're seeing early traction with the support business model around distributions, but in 2012, I think we'll see people experiment with more of a client/server model. That is, people will use distributions as a way to sell different kinds of hosted services.
Usability is still the number one reason people choose competing solutions to Drupal. Not because the existing features are hard to use — usability of Drupal was vastly improved in Drupal 7 — but because of lack of out-of-the-box features, such as content workflow and content staging tools, accurate content previews, WYSIWYG, media handling, and scheduling. However, I predict that very little significant work will happen on many of these fronts without multiple companies investing a lot of resources into it. In any case, we will need to make Drupal core bigger, as we try and make it smaller.
We're going from a pure web world, to a world where there are increasingly more mobile applications. A more diverse world with web sites and web applications. Current website developers will be forced to adapt. Fortunately, Drupal will be well-poised to handle this, both in contrib in Drupal 7 and in core in Drupal 8. I also predict that a number of Drupal shops will re-position themselves to be strong players in the mobile-Drupal world.
Someone will fly a Druplicon shaped hot air balloon.

To finish things off, I want to end with a sincere, heart-felt "Thank you!" to the many members of our community who work so hard and passionately to make Drupal the great success and fun project that it is. So, let me just say from me to you, for making Drupal what it is today, and for working with me to make it better day by day, you ROCK! Here's to 2012!

3 Min Video of the Mozilla Story

2012-01-05T00:32:28+00:00

Mozilla is so much more than Firefox. Mozilla is an idea, a mission, implemented through products, the market and people. This video does a nice job of explaining how all this fits together.

Mozilla Public License Version 2.0 Released

2012-01-03T18:04:34+00:00

We’re starting off 2012 by releasing MPL 2.0, the updated version of the Mozilla Public License. Here are the details about MPL 2.0. The MPL was created as part of the launch of the Mozilla project in 1998, and was updated once in 1999. The MPL is used by the Mozilla project for much of its code, including Firefox and Thunderbird. It is also used by other organizations and individuals.

Version 2.0 is similar in spirit to the previous versions, but shorter, better, and more compatible with other Free Software and Open Source Licenses. We appreciate the help of the Free Software Foundation for GPL compatibility and the Open Source Initiative for assistance with compatibility and their ultimate certification of the MPL as meeting free software and open source standards.

The MPL 1.1 versions had one expert who had been involved in every word and every decision. Even today, more than a decade later, I can still bring to mind particular phrases or section references along with the rationale behind them. The MPL 2.0 is a vast improvement here as well. It has 5 peers now, instead of just one.

I also want to call out the stellar work of Luis Villa, supported by Heather Meeker. Luis started the MPL 2.0 revision process as a new lawyer just out of law school, but with a long and deep background in free/open source software. Harvey and I believed that his software experience and his motivation would make up for his status as a young lawyer. We have been more than vindicated — Luis began with project management, and has come to own much of the content over time.

The MPL 2.0 will be adopted by the Mozilla project; this decision was proposed, reviewed and decided as part of the beta and Release Candidate process over the fall of 2011. The actual update process with be managed by Gervase Markham, who managed the update from the MPL only to the MPL tri-license many years ago.

Many thanks to everyone who contributed to the process. It’s an honor to work with so many great people.

2011 in Photography

2011-12-30T02:54:17+00:00

I’ve been dreading writing the photography roundup post this year, because I haven’t taken a lot of photographs. I’ve only a few months worth of photographs on Flickr, which makes a month by month roundup pretty tough to do. We’ve had an enormous amount of stuff going on schedule wise this year, and between all of that activity, and me getting fussier about my pictures, 2011 saw a precipitous decline in the average number of pictures that I made during a given month.

I’m still doing some dance performance work,

and on the right occasions, I am going to interesting places that yield interesting pictures

The highlight of the year for me photographically was a project that I did with one of the seniors at my daughters’ dance studio

I think that the other notable thing for me and photography in 2011 is a move away from Flickr and towards Google+, Facebook, and 500px. This is definitely a bittersweet thing for me. Flickr is pretty much responsible for getting me back into photography and putting me on a good track of growth. At the same time, I see Flickr weakening in various ways. I do a limited amount of portrait/dance shooting in my local area. For this kind of work, Facebook is pretty much the place where people might see my work. When Google+ burst onto the scene earlier this year, it was clear that it was really pretty decent for photography, and a lot of professional and advanced amateur photographers have taken to the service. In particular, Google+’s hangouts feature is great for photography growth. There are amazing photographs and photographers on Flickr, but if you look at 500px, the level of photography being displayed there is pretty amazing. I’m going to keep using Flickr, I think, but I’m going to be shifting more of my energy to Google+ and 500px in 2012.

One of the big happenings in 2011 was that we did a remodel of the empty bonus room that’s over our garage. One of the use cases for the design of that remodel was as a photo studio. Due to time, I haven’t really been able to get up there much, but I hope to spend some time working there come the new year, so perhaps next year’s roundup won’t be so lean.

Mozilla in the New Era: Long-ish Video Description From MozCamp Asia

2011-12-29T19:35:35+00:00

November was MozCamp month for Mozilla. We held MozCamp Europe, including the Mid-East and Africa, and MozCamp Asia. For each MozCamp I gave an opening talk that touches on:

what mozilla is, our key goals
a bit of history about what we’ve done so far to meet our goals
what we’re working on today
what we should be doing in the future to meet our goals.

I’ve embedded the opening talk from MozCamp below. It’s a video, but the audio is the important part. It’s about 40 minutes long, so it’s not a set of sound-bites and it may seem slow-paced. It is however, a pretty good summary of my view of the world and Mozilla’s place in it.

I also have a set of slides that reflect this talk. I’ll get them posted shortly as well.

Here’s the MozCamp Asia opening talk:

Mozilla in the New Era

2011-12-28T21:34:46+00:00

Over the summer and fall I wrote a set of posts about how Mozilla’s mission is leading us to develop new offerings and new ways of bring user sovereignty and freedom to online life.

My colleague David Ascher has written a piece which I find to be a nice summary of these goals. I’m planning to write a summary next year, after some discussion of user data, so I was very pleased to see that David has done so now. It’s a week or 10 days old, but if you haven’t seen it already it’s a nice, personal voice thinking about Mozilla in the new era.

Encryption and User Data

2011-12-23T06:24:26+00:00

We’re all creating large amounts of online data about ourselves. How should that data be treated? One key element is encryption, and the ability to store data in a format which is not easily read by people who aren’t authorized to do so. “Encryption” gets complicated pretty quickly, and the cryptography which underlie can also be complex. As a result, it’s easy to think of “encryption” as the answer, thinking that my data is safe if it’s encrypted.

My colleague Ben Adida has written a very helpful post about the value of encryption. He describes why is part of the solution for protecting data, but isn’t a complete solution. It’s a great post because it respects those of us who aren’t cryptographers and provides a thoughtful, understandable outline of the problem space.

Figuring out better ways to handle user data will be on our minds a great deal in the future. I was happy to see this post because it helps me think about the issues in a smarter way.

Anouk - Lost

2011-12-21T11:01:52+00:00

I just love this song.

Drupal fireside chat #1: core development process

2011-12-12T22:38:56+00:00

It's no secret that I travel around the world, evangelizing Drupal to new audiences and connecting with local communities, as well as contributors, from all over the world. In 2011 alone, I traveled more than 400,000 km (250,000 miles) and talked to thousands of Drupal people. Every day, I answer questions that many in the larger community would benefit from knowing as well.

To help facilitate holding these discussions on more of an international scale, I’d like to experiment with doing monthly, informal chats. In terms of format, I’d like to choose a general topic of discussion, then hold an hour-long phone call that all could dial into (with IRC for back-channel discussions and questions) where I can give an update on major Drupal happenings and allow plenty of time for Q&A from the community on the topic for the month. A moderator will help with voicing/unvoicing people during the Q&A section, and the chats would be recorded and put up for download for those who couldn’t make it.

If this idea sounds interesting to you, please join me for the first Drupal Fireside Chat on Friday, December 16 at 10 am Eastern US time (registration recommended so click 'register'). The topic I’d like to focus on for the first session is the Drupal Core Development Process, including sub-topics like a general status update on what is happening with Drupal 8, what role Drupal 8 initiatives and initiative owners have in the development of Drupal 8, and what process changes have been put in place to help improve Drupal 8's development process over Drupal 7's.

Feel free to post additional questions/topic ideas here, and hope to see you on Friday!

Connecting Apache httpd to Tomcat with mod_jk: The bare minimum

2011-12-09T20:55:53+00:00

Earlier this week, I wrote:

I hate docs that tell you what to do, but not why. As soon as a package name or path changes, you’re dust. This is maybe the 4th time I’ve been configuring Apache to delegate stuff to Tomcat using mod_jk, and every time is just like the first.

For those who don’t know, mod_jk is a module inplementing the wire protocol AJP/13, which allows a normal HTTP web server to forward on certain requests to a second server. In this case, we want to forward requests for JSP pages and servlets to Tomcat 6. This allows you to do neat things like serve static content with Apache and only forward on the dynamic Java stuff to Tomcat. The user sees a convenient URL (no port :8080 on the hostname) and the administrator gets to serve multiple web scripting languages on the same server, or load balance requests for Java server resources across several hosts.

I have spent enough time on it at this point, I think, that I understand all of the steps in the process, and have stripped it down to the bare minimum that one would need to do in terms of configuration to get things working. And so I’m putting my money where my mouth is, and this is my attempt to write a nice explanation of how mod_jk does its thing, and how to avoid some of the common mistakes I had.

First, a remark: Apache is one of those pieces of software that has gotten harder, rather than easier, to configure as time has gone on. Distributions each package it differently, with different “helpful” mechanisms that make common tasks like enabling a module easier, and to enable convenient packaging of modules like PHP, independent of the core package. But the overall effect is that a lot of magic done by distributions makes it much harder to follow the upstream documentation. Config files are called different names, or stored in different places. Different distributions handle the inclusion of config file snippets differently. And so on.

This is not to say that Apache, Tomcat and mod_jk don’t have some nice docs – they do, but often the docs don’t correspond to the distros, or haven’t been updated in a while, and often they don’t explain why you have to do something, putting emphasis instead on what you need to do. After all my reading, I finally found the Holy Grail I was looking for – the simple document of how to configure mod_jk – but even this has its shortcomings. The article doesn’t mention Tomcat, for example, which left me digging around for information on the configuration I needed to do to Tomcat, which led me to this, which led me to over-write the sample workers.properties file in the simple set-up document.

But if you understand the First Principles, you can figure out what’s going on with any organisation of configuration. That’s what I’m hoping to get across here.

How does mod_jk do its thing?

The first issue I had trouble getting my head around was how, exactly, all this was supposed to work. In particular, I didn’t quite understand how the configuration worked on the Tomcat size of things.

As I understand it, here’s what happens:

A GET request comes in to httpd for http://localhost/examples/jsp/num/numguess.jsp
Apache processes the request, and find a matching pattern for the URL among JkMount directives
Apache then reads the file specified by the JkWorkersFile option to figure out what to do with the request. Let’s say that config file says to forward to localhost:8009 using the protocol ajp13
Tomcat has a Connector listening on port 8009, with the protocol AJP/13, which handles the request and replies on the wire. Apache httpd sends the reply back to the client

Apache httpd configuration

There are two steps to configuring Apache:

Enabling the module
Configuring mod_jk

Apache provides a handy utility called “a2enmod” which will enable a module for you, once it’s installed. What happens behind the scenes for modules depends on the distribution. On Ubuntu, module load instructions are put in a file called /etc/apache2/mods-available/<module>.load optionally alongside a sample configuration file /etc/apache2/mods-available/<module>.conf. To enable the module, you create a symlink to the .load file in /etc/apache2/mods-enabled.

On my Ubuntu laptop, my jk.load contains:

LoadModule jk_module /usr/lib/apache2/modules/mod_jk.so

On OpenSuse, on the other hand, a line similar to this is explicitly added to the file /etc/apache2/sysconfig.d/loadmodule by sysconfig, based on the contents of a field in the configuration file /etc/sysconfig/apache2 – remember how I said that distro packaging makes things harder? If you added the line directly to the loadmodule file, the change would be lost the next time Apache restarts.

In both cases, these files (on Ubuntu, the mods-available/*.load files, and on OpenSuse the sysconfig.d/* files) are loaded by the main Apache config file (httpd.conf) at start-up.

Configuring mod_jk

The minimum configuration that mod_jk needs is a pointer to a Workers definition config file (JkWorkersFile). Other useful configuration options are a path to a log file (JkLogFile – which should be writable by the user ID which owns the httpd process) and a desired log level – I set JkLogLevel to “debug” while getting things set up. On OpenSuse, I also needed to set JkShmFile, since for the default file location (/srv/www/logs/jk-runtime-status) the directory didn’t exist and wasn’t writable by wwwrun, the user that owns the httpd process.

This configuration, and the configuration of paths below, is usually in a separate config file – in both Ubuntu and OpenSuse, it’s jk.conf in /etc/apache2/conf.d (files ending in .conf in this directory are automatically parsed at start-up). To avoid errors in the case where mod_jk is not present or loaded, you can surround all Jk directives with an “<IfModule mod_jk.c>…</IfModule>” check if you’d like.

The JkMount directive configures what will get handled by which worker (more on workers later). It takes two arguments: a path, and the name of the worker to handle requests matching the path. Unix wildcards (globs) are accepted, so

JkMount /examples/*.jsp ajp13_worker

will match all files under /examples ending in .jsp and will pass them off to the ajp13_worker worker.

If you want Apache to serve any static content under your webapps, you’ll also need either a Directory or Alias entry to handle them. Putting together with the previous section, the following (from Ubuntu) was the jk.conf file I used to pass the handling of JSPs and servlets off to Tomcat, and serves static stuff through Apache:

<IfModule mod_jk.c>

JkWorkersFile   /etc/libapache2-mod-jk/workers.properties
JkLogFile       /var/log/apache2/mod_jk.log
JkLogLevel      debug
Alias /examples /usr/share/tomcat6-examples/examples
JkMount /examples/*.jsp ajp13_worker
JkMount /examples/servlets/* ajp13_worker

</IfModule>

I should use Directory to prevent Apache from serving anything it shouldn’t, like Tomcat config files under WEB-INF – I could also just use “JkMount /examples/* ajp13_worker” to have everything handled by Tomcat.

Now that Apache’s config is done, we need to configure mod_jk itself, via the workers.properties file we set in the JkWorkersFile parameter.

workers.properties

Sample workers.properties files contain a lot of stuff you probably don’t need. The basic, unavoidable parameters you will need are the name of a worker (which you’ve already used as the 2nd argument for JkMount above), and a hostname and port to send requests to, and a protocol type (there are several options for worker type besides AJP/1.3 – “lb” for “load balancer” is the most important to read up on). For the above jk.conf, the simplest possible workers.properties file is:

worker.list=ajp13_worker
worker.ajp13_worker.port=8009
worker.ajp13_worker.host=localhost
worker.ajp13_worker.type=ajp13

And that’s it! The last step is to set up Tomcat to handle AJP 1.3 requests on port 8009.

Configuring Tomcat

In principle, Tomcat doesn’t need to know anything about mod_jk.It just needs to know that requests are coming in on a given port, with a given protocol.

Typically, an AJP 1.3 connector is already defined in te default server.xml (in /usr/tomcat6 on both Ubuntu and OpenSuse) when you install Tomcat. The format of the connector configuration is:

<Connector port=”8009″ protocol=”AJP/1.3″ redirectPort=”8443″ />

I am pretty sure that this will work without the redirectPort option, but I haven’t tried it. It basically allows requests received with security constraints specifying encryption to be handled over SSL, rather than unencrypted.

In addition to this, Tomcat does provide a facility to auto-create the appropriate mod_jk configuration on the fly. To do so, you need to specify an ApacheConfig in the Tomcat connector, and point it at the workers.properties file. This facility looks pretty straightforward, but I know I found it confusing in the past when I lost edits to the jk.conf file – I prefer manual configuration myself.

Gotchas

I have had quite a few gotchas while figuring all this out – I may as well share for the benefit of future people having the same problems.

All the documentation for mod_jk installedd with the packages refers to Tomcat5 paths – for example, on OpenSuse, in the readme, I was asked to copy workers.config into /etc/tomcat5/base – a directory which doesn’t exist (even when you change the 5 to a 6)
If your apache web server uses virtual hosts (and, on Ubuntu, it does by default) then JkMounts are not picked up from the global configuration file! You need to either add “JkMountCopy true” to the VirtualHost section, or have JkMounts per VirtualHost. If you used Alias as I did above, and you try to run a servlet, the error message is just a 404. If you try to load a JSP, you will see the source.
If you make a mistake in your workers.property file (I had a typo “workers.list=ajp13_worker” for several hours) and your worker name is not found in a “worker.list” entry, you will see no error message at all with warnings set to error or info. With the warning level set to debug, you will see the error message “jk_translate::mod_jk.c (3542): no match for /examples/ found” The chances are you have a typo in either your jk.conf file (check that the name of the worker corresponds to the name you use in workers.properties), or you have a typo somewhere in your workers.properties file (is it really work.list? Does the worker name match? Is it the same as the worker name in the .host, .port and .type configuration?
Make sure you get Tomcat working correctly first and working perfectly on port 8080 – or you won’t know whether errors you’re seeing are Tomcat errors, Apache errors or mod_jk errors.

I’m sure I’ve made mistakes and forgotten important stuff – I’m happy to get feedback in the comments.

Simplicity

2011-12-08T05:38:59+00:00

Six months ago or so I found myself inspired by reading Edward Tufte, as a result of which I simplified my blog. But it’s still too busy. It needs to be much simpler — like inessential.com by Brent Simmons, which is just gorgeous to me and looks fantastic on mobile devices. Brent uses custom (but unreleased) software, so I might need to develop my own approach as well (something even simpler than the old system I ditched back in 2007). Simplify, simplify, simplify.

The Slow Arrow of Beauty

2011-12-08T05:21:18+00:00

From Nietzsche’s Human, All Too Human, Section 149 (translated by R.J. Hollingdale):

The noblest kind of beauty is not that which suddenly transports us, which makes a violent and intoxicating assault upon us (such beauty can easily excite disgust), but that which slowly infiltrates us, which we bear away with us almost without noticing and encounter again in dreams, but which finally, after having for long lain modestly in our heart, takes total possession of us, filling our eyes with tears and our heart with longing.

Community Software Development training course

2011-12-07T16:33:38+00:00

For the past few months, I have been offering a new service – a training course tailored to helping a team be effective working with community projects – whether that is engaging an existing community, or growing a community around new code. Details of the topics I cover are up on my site. Developing software in community is as much a social activity as it is a technical activity – and engaging an existing community, like moving into a new neighbourhood or starting at a new school, can be very daunting indeed. This course covers not just the technical issues of community development, but also the social, management and strategic issues involved. Some of the questions that I try to help answer are:

What are the tools and communication norms?
How can I get answers to my questions?
Is there a trick to writing patches that get reviewed quickly?
How do I figure out who’s in charge?
How much will it cost me to open source some code/to work with an existing project?
How does managing volunteers work?
Is there anything I can do to help my developers be more vocal upstream?
What legal issues should my developers be aware of?

All of these things, in my experience, are challenges that organisations have to overcome when they start engaging with community projects like Apache, GNOME or the Linux kernel.

If you’re having trouble with these issues, or some subset of them, and are interested in a training seminar, please contact me, and we’ll talk.

Louvre using Drupal

2011-12-01T11:50:12+00:00

Big news! The world's most visited art museum in the world is now using Drupal for its website: http://louvre.fr. Très cool!

Political Flatland

2011-11-26T03:48:47+00:00

Ever notice how American political discourse is becoming more and more two-dimensional? Left vs. Right. Liberals vs. Conservatives. Progressives vs. Capitalists. Tea Partiers vs. Occupiers. Et cetera.

Yet the real problems don’t get solved, and those individuals who constitute government continue to abuse the power they hold for their own benefit and the benefit of their friends (a.k.a. cronyism). It doesn’t particularly matter who gets elected, because the policies (and we have policies for everything nowadays!) don’t change in their fundamentals.

Why is that?

I’ve come to the conclusion that things don’t change because that’s how the politicians and their cronies and media supporters like it. Sure, they make a lot of noise about how divided Americans are. But that’s because theirs is a strategy of divide and conquer. The more we normal folks think in terms of left vs. right, the less we’ll think in terms of up vs. down — which is the true divide in America today.

It’s like Flatland: most Americans are bamboozled into believing the two-dimensional worldview of left vs. right so that they won’t dare to look up at the elites who are in control.

And yes, I am, more than ever, politically homeless…

Jeudi du Libre: “How to use Git to look good”

2011-11-21T16:56:26+00:00

I will be giving a short training session on Thursday December 1st 2011 at 19h30 in the Maison pour Tous, la Salles de Rancy, on the subject “Présentation et initiation à l’utilisation de Git pour la gestion d’un projet communautaire (ou comment donner l’impression qu’on est un super codeur ?)”(roughly translated: “A presentation of Git usage in community software projects (or: how to make people think you’re a super coder)”. The basic idea is to show people how to use git to (a) save their work regularly and (b) reorganise patches using

git rebase --interactive

to make themselves look smarter than they are.

For those interested but unable to attend, I will be borrowing heavily from Federico Mena Quintero’s 2008 blog post Why I want to have the children of git rebase –interactive

This is a short session, but I plan to plough through a lot of content, like this:

10 minutes: What is version control, how does Git (and other DVCS) differ from svn
20 minutes: Git basics (initialising a repository, allowing others to pull from it, how clone, status, add, commit, update, pull, push, branch works)
20 minutes: Branching, merging – good policy for maintaining a common trunk, submitting patches for review with git format-patch and send-email
20 minutes: git rebase, with –interactive using pick, edit and squash; A word of warning on squashing or editing commits when others are cloning your code
20 minutes: Questions

Are there things I absolutely should talk about which aren’t listed? I’m assuming that most of the attendees will be somewhat familiar with some version control and potentially even git already, and don’t need a full one hour on the virtues of version control, so I’m assuming I can fly through the basics pretty quickly.

Book Review: Head First HTML5 Programming

2011-11-21T04:54:54+00:00

You can’t read about modern web development without hearing something about HTML5. It is a term that covers not only the next version of the HTML markup language, but a broad array of facilities exposed as JavaScript API’s. Eric Freeman and Elisabeth Robson’s new book Head First HTML5 Programming approaches HTML5 from this point of view, and uses the friendly, pictorial style of their highly successful Head First Design Patterns.

You’ll need an understanding of HTML and CSS before you dive in. This book assumes that you have those technologies under your belt, and starts right in with JavaScript. The first four chapters of the book are a good introduction to JavaScript, the web browser Document Object Model (DOM), event handling and objects. This ensures that you’ll have the level of JavaScript knowledge necessary for the chapters to come. And you will need it. In the remaining six chapters, the book covers the use of Geolocation, AJAX with JSON, including JSONP, the Canvas tag, the video tag, the various Web Storage API’s, and Web Workers. Each chapter teaches you about its subject material by building a decent size application in JavaScript. I think that seeing how an application will use a feature is the best way to really learn about it.

If you’ve been wondering about the new features in HTML5, this book is a good introduction. The authors have stuck to the parts of HTML5 that are pretty well defined, and stayed away from those parts of the standard that are still changing. The Head First style presents you with the material from many different angles, which helps to make sure that your brain holds onto it.

One of my daughters is interested in web programming. She needs just a little more CSS learning and then she’ll be ready to step up to dynamic HTML / HTML5. When she is, I’ll be handing her a copy of this book.

Disclosure: Both the authors of Head First HTML5 are friends, and Eric Freeman used to be my boss at Disney.

Zynga using Drupal

2011-11-18T21:17:36+00:00

Drupal isn't only for work: it's also for play, as "FarmVille" creator Zynga proves. While their games usually appear as apps on social networks such as Facebook, its main site is on Drupal. It's a terrific example of how Drupal is used in the entertainment industry. After all, Zynga's annual revenue in 2010 was almost a billion US dollars, and is aiming for an initial public offering that values the company at $15-20 billion.

Young beggar

2011-11-18T15:29:23+00:00

Encouraging empathy

2011-11-18T12:03:38+00:00

A couple of days ago, I tweeted this: “Insight of the day: All “community norms” documents come down to one word: Empathy. Think how others will feel before you act.” I think that’s worth developing on.

As I was growing up, empathy meant "Deanna Troi" to me

Here are a few examples:

GNOME Code of Conduct: “If someone asks for help it is because they need it. Do politely suggest specific documentation or more appropriate venues where appropriate, but avoid aggressive or vague responses such as “RTFM”.” – think how it feels to need help, and to take the step of asking for it. I want to know that someone *understands* what I’m going through, feels my frustration, and is looking for a way to help relieve it. Recently, when confronted with a technical issue that prevented me from using my scanner, the advice I received on an IRC channel was to upgrade or change my Linux distribution! How un-empathic can you get!
Koha patch rules (along with every other development project in the world): “The patch must apply to the current HEAD of the master branch of the code”: Put yourself in the place of a project maintainer who receives a patch proposal. He tries to apply it to his source tree, but the merge fails. Why? Because the patch was created against a year-old release of the project, and he’s since reworked internals to solve a different, unrelated issue. The maintainer is faced with a number of unsavory choices now: Spend time reading the patch, understanding what it does, and “forward-porting” it to master; check out the old branch, apply the patch, review, and test it there, and not commit to master; or drop the patch. What would you do in that situation? Someone is giving you a gift, which is going to make work for you. Is it worth an hour or two of your time to work on it to get it to just apply to your work? You still need to review the patch after that – which you would have to do anyway. In that situation, most people will ask the original patch proposer to do the initial grunt work and get the patch working on the tip of master.
Now flip things around. You found a bug in software you use – the bug was really annoying. You took the time to get the source code, identify, qualify and fix the buig, open a bug report, which was confirmed, and attach a patch which you have checked fixes the problem. And what answer do you get? “Not good enough – work on it more”. How would that make you feel? That depends on how it is communicated. If it’s a stock answer, like a sheet of paper handed over a tax office counter, with a list of prerequisites, then I bet that would make me angry, resentful and frustrated. I poured time and effort into that patch, and this is how you treat it? If the criticism is of the core of the patch – it doesn’t fix the problem, or should do so differently, then the criticism might be easier to take. But if it’s issues which potentially add many hours of effort on top of time already spent, with no benefit to the proposer (check out the latest code, upgrade half a dozen dependencies without breaking my old version, compile it, and then forward-port the patch), chances are he won’t do it. An empathic response might be to make someone aware of the guidelines and their reason for being, but help him with the forward-porting on IRC by asking him to explain the patch, what it does and why.

All of those guidelines on indentation and whitespace, commenting code, including test cases, updating documentation, and ensuring code compiles at the tip of the master branch are designed to help patch proposers make patches which are easy for maintainers to apply. And in this context, an empathic patch proposer can understand them much better. Miguel de Icaza did a great job of framing this right.

When I was in college, I went to the Netherlands one Summer for a working holiday. At one point, I had a job offer for short-term work, but needed to be registered for tax to start, and I needed a bank account to get paid. So I went to the tax office, and the lady behind the counter very resignedly handed me a piece of paper with prerequisites, and told me to come back when I had fulfilled them. Then she looked over my shoulder and said “Next!” One of the prerequisites was a permanent address – I explained that I was living in a camp-site for the summer, and would that address do? Of course not! No proposed solution, no consideration of the situation I was in, no empathy.

Then I went to the bank, where I was told that I needed a permanent address to open an account. Same sense that the person I was dealing with didn’t care about me. So with my friend Barry, we looked into short term accommodation options. Landlords required (among other things) an employment agreement and a bank account before they would rent us accommodation – even if only by the week! In the end, we had to pass up that job, and work “on the black” for less than minimum wage to survive the Summer – but what choice did we have?

How frustrating! Just imagine how we felt. That’s empathy.

Again and again in community guidelines, whether it’s guidelines for people who are approaching a community to report a bug or propose a patch or feature, or guidelines for community members dealing with each other and people outside the community, this idea “think how this would make you feel if the roles were reversed” is pervasive, but unwritten. I think that it should be.

It reminds me of a social experiment I heard about recently:

Rats are placed in a box with a lever. When you pull the lever, a food pellet is distributed. The rats quickly learn to pull the lever. After a while, you change the configuration of the cage. Now, when the lever is pulled, the food pellet is distributed, but a cold shower drenches all the rats in the box. After a while, the rats learn not to pull the level, and start to punish rats who do as a group.

The second generation starts when a new rat is introduced into the box. as he approaches the leverl, the older rats all jump on top of him, to prevent him from touching it. In effect, they are teaching him the rule “don’t touch the lever”, without explaining why the rule exists. As time goes on, new rats are added, and old rats removed from the box.

The third generation happens when there are none of the oiriginal rats left in the box. None of the rats have experienced the cold shower after the lever was pressed. At that point, you can turn off the cold shower function – you will be sure that no rat will ever touch the level, because the community rules forbid it. Ask any of the rats why, though, and they will not be able to give you a better answer than “because that’s the way it is”. If rats could talk, of course.

Community guidelines which are purely written documents, but which neglect the empathic side of the equation, and don’t explain how not following the guidelines affect other people, can be similar. It’s important to include the reasons for guidelines,so that we don’t forget how breaking the rules makes others feel. It’s also important to have sufficient flexibility and adaptability in dealing with new community members – like the rat experiment, circumstances change all the time. Back when everyone was using CVS, performing merges was a complicated and time-consuming process. Nowadays, rebasing and merging with Git, Bazaar or Mercurial is so easy that some of the coding guidelines we used to have may no longer have the same impact. Likewise, email technology has moved on, and with cheap and copious bandwidth, email norms have evolved – netiquette community norms move on with them.

In general, as Bill & Ted famously said, “Be excellent to each other”. Think about how your actions & statements will be received. Be empathic.

Drupal + India = opportunity

2011-11-16T03:07:14+00:00

Given that there live one billion people in India, many of which great engineers, one can only imagine what would happen if Drupal gained serious traction in India. To that extend, I decided to make a trip to India, and spent last week in India with Jacob Singh and Ron Pruett from Acquia. The purpose of the trip was to increase awareness of Drupal in India that in 3 ways:

by organizing DrupalCamps to help create a grassroots community of volunteer developers, freelancers and small to medium-sized Drupal shops (bottom-up strategy),
by talking to the large system integrators that will employ hundreds of Drupal developers (top-down strategy),
by doing traditional PR with the media and press.

Together with Acquia's partners, we organized 3 DrupalCamps: nearly 300 people showed up in Delhi, 200 people showed up in Mumbai and 350 people showed up in Hyderabad. In addition, I gave a fourth keynote at ISB, India's premier business school, where about 150 people attended. At each of these events, more people showed up than originally expected. More importantly, this implies that there must be thousands of Drupal developers in India alone, especially since we didn't visit many other big cities like Bangalore, Pune, Chennai, etc.

Furthermore, we met various large system integrators in India: Accenture, Capgemini, Wipro, Virtusa, Cognizant, and more. Each of these are multi-billion IT sevices companies that employ thousands of engineers in India. Most of them have 1,000+ employees in their content management practices alone. Many are using Vignette, Liferay, Adobe CQ5, OpenText and Alfresco. Joomla! and WordPress seemed non-existent with the large system integrators, but all of them were eagerly starting to build a Drupal practice. The size of their Drupal teams ranged from 30 to 120 Drupal people, with all of them trying to hire 5 to 15 new people a month. All of them were rather bullish about Drupal and were hearing about it directly from their clients across the globe.

In general, I'd say that the Drupal community is about 3 or 4 years behind with the Drupal community in North America and Europe. However, they are catching up fast and it won't take long before many of the world's biggest Drupal projects are delivered from India.

Our ears perked when we learned time after time that well-known Drupal sites that we assumed were developed in the US or Europe were primarily delivered from India. And it didn't stop there; we learned that the Indian teams are also instrumental in the sales and pre-sales process. They are often responsible for making the CMS platform decisions for all of their clients regardless of country or industry. In other words, a lot of decisions are made in India and it is of strategic importance that the large system integrators have a good understanding of Drupal. They recognize this is important to their success, and all want to invest in training to build more capacity and to increase the expertise of their existing teams.

Interestingly, the Indian culture is big on software training and professional certification, more so than anywhere else in the world. All Drupal companies -- small or large -- asked about training and professional certification.

Another highlight is that at DrupalCamp New Delhi, about 15 Drupal companies from Delhi met for the first time. Later the same day, we helped organize the first CXO event for Drupal executives. In many ways, these were formative meetings that reminded me of early DrupalCon meetings. For the first time, they got to know each other, explored how to work together, started sharing best practices and toyed with the idea of specialization. I've seen this movie before, and I know what happens when a community of passionate developers start working together. Exciting times are ahead.

Last but not least, I gave about 15 press interviews, many of which resulted in an article in an Indian newspaper or IT magazine.

After 5 days of intensive travel and back to back meetings in three cities, I left India feeling excited about the size of the opportunity for Drupal. I had never been to India but I'm told that the India of today is quite different than the India of five years ago. All the more reason to pay close attention about how the local Drupal community will evolve. I like to believe my trip helped accelerate Drupal's growth in India.

This trip wouldn't be possible without the help of Acquia's partners. Special thanks to Azri Solutions, Blisstering and Srijan who helped make the journey more than successful.

Clojure Conj 2011

2011-11-15T23:51:07+00:00

Last week I was in Raleigh, attending the second Clojure/Conj. The last time that I attended a Lisp conference was the 1986 ACM Conference on Lisp and Functional Programming. I am a Lisp guy. I took the famed “Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs” course from Sussman and Abelson. I spent some time doing undergraduate research on Symbolics Lisp Machines. When Apple invested some energy into Dylan, I hoped that I’d be able to use a Lisp on a personal computer. Java pretty much ruined that. Over the years, I pretty much gave up on the idea of being able to use Lisp for my day to day work. So much so, that when I first heard Rich Hickey talk about Clojure, my reaction going in was unenthusiastic. By the end of Rich’s talk, he had my attention. Clojure has been doing some growing up since then, and I really wanted to attend last year’s Clojure/Conj, but wasn’t able to.

Almost all of my conversations at the conference involved the questions, “Why are you at Clojure/Conj” and “How did you get interested in Clojure”. I’ve answered the second question in the previous paragraph. The question of “why” boils down to three themes: Clojure itself, Data, and Clojurescript. I’m going to use these threes theme to report on the conference talks.

Clojure itself
Clojure is a Lisp dialect that runs on the JVM and has great interoperability with existing Java code. It has great support for functional programming, as well as several innovative features for dealing with concurrency.

Stuart Sierra started off with a talk that pointed out areas where people could learn beyond the books and online exercises that are available. In each of those areas, he also proposed projects that people could work on. One of the things that stood out for me was his use of the Clojure reader to deal with Java Resources. I always found Resources to be annoying, and the use of the Reader is a clever way to make them more palatable and useful.

Clojail is a system for executing Clojure code in a sandbox. The system is quite flexible and the applications aren’t just limited to security. I can imagine using clojail to implement something like the Sponsors described in the original Actor model. Anthony Grimes, one of the committers for clojail gave the presentation. He is 17 years old.

One thing that made me happy was to see the bridge building between the Scala and Clojure communities. Phil Bagwell, who pioneered many of the persistent data structures in Clojure is now at Typesafe, the Scala company. He came and gave a nice talk about Scala’s parallel collection classes. Perhaps these classes will one day find their way into Clojure Daniel Spiewak gave a very solid presentation on the computer science behind the persistent data structures in Clojure.

At many conferences a talk like Clojure on Android would be at the higher end. The technical level of the talks at the Conj was high enough to make the task of getting Clojure on Android seem mundane. This is to take nothing away from the very impressive work that has been done. There are some issues remaining like footprint and startup time, but it looks like some effort is going to happen at the Clojure core team level to make some of this possible. The thought of talking to a REPL running on a phone, or tablet is a tasty one.

Rich Hickey’s keynote reminded me very much of a Guido keynote at PyCon: a discussion of language issues that he was looking at, and a solicitation for discussion. Rich was very careful to say that the stuff he was discussing was not a roadmap, so I’ll repeat that disclaimer. Here are some of the items that stood out to me. Plans to allow multiple builds of Clojure – a regular version, a leaner deployment version, a really lean Android version, a super deluxe development/debugging version and so on. There is discussion about allowing the reader to be extensible, in order to allow new data types to be round tripped. I didn’t follow the history of ClojureScript, so it was useful to see that Rich is pretty committed to this idea, and that bits of technology might even be flowing “backward” from the ClojureScript compiler into Clojure on the JVM. I was also very interested on Rich’s view that the use of a logic system like that in core.logic would be a far better tool than a traditional type system. More on the logic system below.

The last talk of the conference was Sam Aaron’s talk on Overtone, which is a computer music system written in Clojure. The major point was that he used Clojure to define a language for describing computer music, much in the sam way that sheet music describes regular music. There was lots of cool music along the way, including a pretty good simulation of the sound portion of the THX commercial that often plays before movies. The description of that commercial fit in a single projected screen of code.

Data

One thing that I’ve been looking at recently is exploratory environments for working with “federated” data. I’ve grown to dislike the term Big Data, because it’s come to mean almost nothing, however, the ship has already sailed on that one. Most people would be familiar with the idea of sitting down in front of their relational database SQL command prompts, and issuing ad-hoc queries. As the use of varied kinds of storage systems grows, we are losing that kind of interactive relationship with data. Some of the people in the Clojure community have built some interesting data systems, and Clojure is itself amenable to exploratory work with data, between it’s orientation around functional programming, and a development style oriented around a REPL.

David McNeil talked about Revelytix’s federated (among RDBMS and RDF triple store) SPARQL query engine. Their system uses s-expressions to represents the nodes in a graph of stream processing nodes. These expressions are then compiled down to a form that can be executed in parallel using the Java Fork/Join framework. The operators in the s-expessions are mirrors of built in Clojure sequence functions, and can use and be used in Clojure expressions. It’s not hard to imagine extending the set of federatable storage systems.

Heroku’s Mark McGranaghan talked about viewing logs data. What he really meant was viewing log data as akin to a native data type on Clojure and being able to use Clojure’s built in functions on log data in a natural way. Heroku has built a system call Pulse which takes this view. I particularly liked the small functions that he defined for expressing the intervals for recomputing statistics. It’s the cleanest formulation of that kind of thing that I’ve seen, and it’s enabled by his thesis view and Clojure.

Nathan Marz has been doing some great work at BackType and now Twitter. At StrangeLoop he open sourced Storm, a set of general primitives for doing realtime computation. At the Conj, he was talking about Cascalog, which is a Clojure DSL for Hadoop. Both Cascalog and Storm are in use at Twitter. Cascalog is inspired by Datalog and targets the same space as Pig. Cascalog has the full power of Clojure available to it, as well as the power of Datalog. It’s a little unclear to me exactly how much of Datalog is supported, but this is a powerful idea. Imagine combining the best of Cascalog and the Revelytix system. The source code to Marz’s examples is on Github.

Clojure has a logic programming library, core.logic which is based on the miniKanren system developed at Indiana University by Daniel Friedman, William Byrd, and Oleg Kiselyov. Ambrose Bonnaire-Sergeant presented an excellent tutorial on logic programming in general, and miniKanren in particular. David Nolen talked about predicate dispatching, a much more general way of doing method dispatch, and talked about his plans to tie that together with core.logic. The surprise highlight in this area was that Dan Friedman and William Byrd came to the conference and did a BOF on miniKanren and their constraint extensions to miniKanren. The BOF was surprisingly well attended (over 60 people), due in part to Ambrose’s excellent talk earlier that day. A key philosophical point about miniKanren is that there is a straight forward mechanical conversion from a functional program to logical/relational (miniKanren) program. This looks very promising, and it has me thinking about mashups of miniKanren (core.logic) and Datalog (cascalog). Professor Friedman and his students have done some very important work in the Scheme area over the years, and it was a great experience to meet him and spend some time over dinner. After dinner, we were sitting in the hotel lobby, and David Nolen was walking Friedman and Byrd through the implementation of core.logic, which was ported from the Scheme version of miniKanren, and then optimized for Clojure. There was a free flow of ideas back and forth, and it was a great example of a collaboration between academia and practice (it’s hard to say industry because Nolen and company are doing this in their free time). This is one of the things that I’ve always hoped for around open source, and it was nice to see such a concrete example. MiniKanren is described in Byrd’s PhD dissertation, and in the book “The Reasoned Schemer“.

ClojureScript

ClojureScript is a Clojure compiler which emits Javascript, which is then run though Google’s Closure compiler. I’ve been doing some prototyping work using Node.js and HTML/Javascript, so ClojureScript looks kind of interesting, particularly because it is good at some the data intensive stuff that Javascript is so laborious at. There were three ClojureScript sessions. Chris Houser took us on a deep dive of the compiler, Kevin Lynagh show us some basic applications of ClojureScript in the browser, and David Nolen did a BOF where he showed off the browser connected REPL for Javascript. ClojureScript is still in its infancy, but it’s interesting nonetheless. Once David gets the constraint version of core.logic working in ClojureScript, it should get a lot more interesting.

Community

The thing that stood out to me about the Clojure community was the presence of the “young Jedi”, Anthony Grimes, and Ambrose Bonnaire-Sergeant. Both of them were able to attend their first Clojure/Conj (Anthony’s was last year) due to fundraising campaign initiated by Chas Emerick. Anthony is 17, and Ambrose has not yet graduated from college. Both of them are lead developers on highly technical projects within the Clojure community, and both did a great job of speaking in front of 300+ people who were mostly older than them. When I worked at OSAF, I worked with Stuart Parmenter, who started working in open source when he was 14. It’s great to work with these young, very gifted people, and I love seeing the community welcome and make a space for them.

The flip side of this is that like many open source, programming language oriented conferences, there were very few women in attendance. Perhaps the Clojure community could take a page from the very successful work that my friend Sarah Allen has done on RailsBridge.

Learning More

O’Reilly has finally recanted and is doing a Lisp book. Clojure Programming should be done soon, and Manning has Clojure in Action and The Joy of Clojure. If you are looking for an interactive way of learning Clojure, there is Try Clojure. Those looking to sharpen their Clojure skills can look at the Clojure Koans and 4Clojure .

The speaker slides from the Clojure/Conj 2011 are available on GitHub.

Update: corrected the name of Indiana University – thanks to Lindsey Kuper

Update: linked to a more up to date Overtone repository – thanks to Sam Aaron

Greg Knaddison and Drupal security

2011-11-15T01:28:08+00:00

The Drupal Security Team was originally created in 2005. Though we handled security issues before that, we didn't have a team with proper infrastructure until then. At that time, Károly Négyesi (chx) was the team leader. In July 2006 chx changed his role in the team and I promoted Heine Deelstra to be the security team lead. Heine recently stepped down as the security team lead, and I'm pleased to announce that Greg Knaddison (greggles) will be filling this role.

Greg has been a consistent member of the security team and both Heine Deelstra, the security team members, and myself unanimously agreed that Greg is the logical person to head the Drupal Security Team.

For those who don't know Greg, Greg helped write our free handbooks on security and wrote a book about Drupal Security. He has also talked about security and Drupal at many DrupalCons. Greg believes in my idea to automate where possible and empower project maintainers. In the coming weeks he will write blog posts to detail some changes made in the last year toward that vision and some tasks that still remain.

As the Drupal Security Team lead, Greg will be the point person for the team. He'll be responsible for coordinating the security team's activities and for making decisions when consensus doesn't arise.

Greg and I agreed on a target of 2 years for him to be in this role. If appropriate, he may continue in this role longer or be replaced before then, but this target helps to set an expectation about the time period. Setting this expectation should help Greg maintain enthusiasm for this role and increase the likelihood that our community will have continuity when that time is up. Greg works at Acquia and will be given 20% of his time to dedicate to the security team (in addition to using his own spare time).

Please join me in thanking Heine for all the great work he did, and in welcoming Greg.

7 Years of Firefox

2011-11-09T17:57:35+00:00

We build Firefox to build freedom and excellence into the web. We build Firefox to make sure that each person can be sovereign over the technology he or she uses to interact with the web. We build Firefox to combine user sovereignty and freedom with a great product experience that enriches web life.

We launched Firefox 7 years ago to make these goals real. We started with the browser because it was the single greatest point of leverage. At that time the existing browser provided neither user sovereignty nor high quality product. We do both. Mozilla is astonishingly successful at the browser layer. We proved that the conventional wisdom of the time was wrong. Browsers do matter. People will notice. The dominant commercial player need not be in control forever. Something better is possible.

Firefox remains different from other browsers. Everything about Firefox is designed to make sure that Firefox never has more control over your life than you do. We design Firefox to provide a great experience, and many of the features look similar to that of other browsers. Look deep into the product though, and you’ll find the utter commitment to the individual being more important than us, more important than our control or our convenience. You’ll find an utter commitment to the good of the web as a whole. We’re organized as a non-profit precisely to allow us to focus on these commitments.

There is more to do. There are new Internet experiences such as mobile, identity, sharing and data control. Each of these areas needs a product that combines user sovereignty and a great product experience. Each needs a product build to ensure that the product never has more control over your life than you do.

This is a big challenge. It’s our future. It’s as important as ever.

Acquia U

2011-11-07T17:51:55+00:00

Due to Drupal's remarkable growth, the demand for Drupal talent continues to exceed the supply. Every Drupal company I talk to -- and I talk to many of them all around the world -- has a difficult time attracting enough qualified Drupal talent. The same is true for Acquia.

To help address that problem we are launching Acquia U, a program to employ and train recent and upcoming college graduates in Drupal. We will enroll these candidates in an intensive 6 month paid training program.

Selected candidates will start the training with six weeks of hands-on, classroom-style training in Drupal. After this initial training, they will rotate through Acquia's support, engineering and professional services teams, through select Acquia partner projects, and continue to receive on-the-job instruction and training. Candidates will spend 6 weeks in each team. Combined, this program will give candidates 6 months of real-world experience, and give participants insight into available work in Drupal.

At the end of the program, candidates will become part of one of the teams at Acquia. We believe that this effort, and similar ones undertaken by our partners and customers, will create some of the key Drupal contributors of the future.

We're very excited about this program so let us know if you are interested!

Movember 2011

2011-11-07T01:57:36+00:00

It is that time of the year again: Movember!

During November each year, Movember is responsible for the sprouting of moustaches on thousands of men’s faces around the world. With their Mo’s, these men raise vital funds and awareness for men’s health, specifically prostate cancer and other cancers that affect men. One in two men will be diagnosed with cancer in his lifetime, and one out of six with prostate cancer.

Like last year, Acquia's "Mo Drupal" team wants your support as we put our faces to work for this great cause. The Acquia team mo'ed its facial hair on November 1st and for about a week now we have practiced the virtues of fine moustachery, immaculate grooming and growing a moustache for Movember.

For the entire duration of Movember, no hair shall be allowed to grow in the goatee zone - being any facial area below the bottom lip. The complete moustache region, including the entire upper lip and the handlebar zones, will also remain completely shaved. Rest assured, photos will follow!

By growing a moustache, we become walking, talking billboards for the 30 days of November. We raise awareness by prompting private and public conversations about cancer. In addition, we raise funds by seeking out sponsorship.

If you'd like, you can join Acquia's "Mo Drupal" team or you can support me in this cause.

It’s hard to get men to talk about prostate and testicular cancer, yet many of us will be diagnosed with it in our lifetime. The brilliance of Movember lies in its appeal to some basic masculine qualities, such as playing on a team, and competing with others. As a man, it’s easier to show your support for such an important cause if you’re doing so with a group of other men, all wearing a silly moustache. Give these guys a break and make their efforts worthwhile by supporting us! Thanks!

Sitecore FUD

2011-11-01T01:17:22+00:00

Recently Sitecore, a vendor of a proprietary CMS, published a white paper called "The Siren Song of Open Source CMS". It has some good old Open Source FUD.

"In Greek mythology, the Sirens were seductresses who lured nearby sailors with their enchanting music and voices, only to shipwreck on the rocky coast of their island. In the world of enterprise software, Open Source applications have an appeal that many companies find hard to resist, but if heeded, can lead to similarly disastrous results: runaway development costs, unpredictable delays, frustratingly slow responses to urgent support issues, and exponential growth in downstream upgrade and enhancement costs."

In this case they enrolled the CEO of a digital agency to say all the FUD, as if that would either lend additional credibility to the FUD, or behind which they could hide their own feelings:

"As it happened, after several successful experiences using WordPress (an open blogging platform) and Drupal (an Open Source CMS application) in small-scale deployments, agencyQ experimented with using Drupal for larger, enterprise-caliber sites. … We quickly discovered that Drupal's capabilities were a mile wide and an inch deep."

Attempting a complex implementation with any platform with only limited experience in simple sites really just reveals the inexperience of the implementer rather than the limits of Drupal. The whitehouse.gov site shows all by itself that Drupal can scale to high-profile, high-function, high-volume websites.

"Lack of support has a ripple effect across an Open Source CMS project", Breen says. "Because you are starting with a blank slate, in terms of your system's functionality, anything can happen. And when issues arise, the absence of responsive support means that deadlines slip. As a service-driven agency, that is simply not good for business. … It all comes down to accountability, about which Breen jokes, "In high tech there is an old saying that salespeople invoke when they want to be your sole-source provider: 'You want one throat to choke.' While that's pretty graphic, it gets to the point: When something's not working with software, I need one number to call, one person to speak to who's going to help me."

I take offense to the notion that there is no good support for an Open Source CMS. With Drupal, enterprises can look to Acquia for the "one throat to choke", or can tap into a community of 600,000 developers if they want breadth.

"After making a concerted effort to work with an Open Source CMS, non-existent support was the last straw with what Breen found to be Open Source's extremely expensive total cost of ownership (TCO). In website development projects, CMS software costs typically comprise 5% of the total implementation costs. "But by saving 5% in software costs by choosing an Open Source CMS, you drive up the 95% of the 'other' costs significantly. That's not a good value equation, by any measure", he says."

The numbers in their own white paper don't add up. They suggest that Sitecore licenses only represent 5% of the project's total implementation cost. We know from analyst firm Real Story Group that the Sitecore license component of a deal is $100,000 on average. That means that the average Sitecore project costs $2 million? That is much more than the average Drupal project.

Where have you seen this kind of FUD before? From any proprietary software vendor that is starting to feel competitive blows from an Open Source alternative. I see this white paper as a victory for Open Source and Drupal as they are being forced to call us out. Drupal is hurting them. Sitecore has reasons to be afraid.

Maybe the Siren that Sitecore is hearing is from the ambulance they've called for help? ;-)

Drupal Association Board election results for 2011

2011-10-31T15:02:36+00:00

Earlier this year the Drupal Association began a process to elect and build a new board. In July a call for nominations was made and the community responded with over 50 submissions. The nomination committee spent many weeks reviewing the nominations, following up with potential candidates, until finally submitting a slate of nominees, which was confirmed by the board. I'm happy to announce the new Board of Directors:

Jeff Walpole (until 2014)
Vesa Palmu (until 2014)
Tiffany Farriss (until 2014)
Cary Gordon (until 2013)
Danese Cooper (until 2013)
Mike Woster (until 2013)
Angela Byron (until 2012)
Mitchell Toomy (2012)
Unknown - one open seat, to be filled

The Board also approved Dries Buytaert (me) to fill the "founder role" in this year's Board of Directors.

The Board's term will begin on November 1, 2011. The first meeting of the new Board of Directors will be on November 16, 2011. This will be followed by the Drupal Association Board Retreat in Chicago, December 9 - 11, 2011.

Selection process

A nomination committee consisting of over eight community members considered over 100 candidates before settling on the great groups of individuals that we're proud to welcome to the Drupal Association. We believe this Board brings a lot of expertise to the Drupal Association, as well as more diversity in terms of industry representation, agency size, skill sets, gender, and geographic location. As the Association has grown so has the extent of financial and community responsibility and this board represents a shift to better address those needs in order to build a strong Association to support our community.

At-large / Community board seats

To ensure solid community representation we will also begin the process of electing two "At-large Board Members". At large board members are nominated and selected by the community at-large with no prerequisites for nomination. We are currently looking at the best method to get community involvement and will begin the process very soon.

Advisory Board

The Board of Directors is a guiding force for the Association and helps to set strategic direction. However, we recognize that the board members do not have all of the answers. To advise the board we have sought out talented individuals with a wide breadth of experience and expertise to serve as the Association's advisers. Our advisory board is designed to grow and expand with the needs of the organization and the community. One of the many ways the Association is working to stay strongly connected to the community is by seeking out community leaders, influencers, and talented individuals that can lend insight into the direction of the Drupal to be advisers to the Association.

The Association's advisers currently include:

Kristof Van Tomme
David Strauss
Larry Garfield
Kieran Lal
George DeMet
Bevan Rudge
Greg Knaddison
Laura Scott
Khalid Bahey
Fernando Paredes García
Moshe Weitzman

We're growing

One year ago the Drupal Association hired its first employees to strengthen our conference and our volunteer community. In that year Drupal.org surpassed a million nodes and hosts over 12,000 developer accounts. DrupalCon welcomed nearly 5,000 attendees and over 1,000 people have been trained at the past four conferences. Membership in the Association has also doubled in the past year and we are still growing. We are on target to have 2,000 individual members and over 750 organization members by the end of this year. This is an exciting time to be involved with the Drupal project and the Drupal Association, and I believe the new Board of Directors will help the Drupal Association get to the next level. So please join me in welcoming all the Board of Directors for the Drupal Association.

Here are bios of each Board Member and a short introduction as to why each member was selected:

Angela Byron

The Drupal Association needs to make sure it doesn't lose connection with the developer community that made Drupal into what it is today. Angie with her self-made success and long time contributor is someone who personalizes the values of our community. Angie also provides continuity in the Drupal Association board.

Danese Cooper

Danese has a very strong track record in open source governance: the experience she gained beating the drums of Open Source at Sun, Intel, Wikimedia foundation and now the Gates Foundation makes her a strong Board Member.

Tiffany Farriss

Having served not only on the Drupal Association board but on the governance committee, Tiffany provides important continuity in the Drupal Association board. She brings experience in a mid-sized Drupal business active in the Drupal community, events (DrupalCon production), and financial skills, having served as the Drupal Association treasurer.

Cary Gordon

Cary played an important role in the professionalization process of DrupalCon and was member of the governance committee. Cary is the owner of a small Drupal business and as such is representing smaller Drupal shops. As a member of the previous Drupal Association board, Cary is also important for continuity.

Vesa Palmu

As a serial entrepreneur and owner of Mearra, Vesa represents the European Drupal business ecosystem. His company, a medium sized Drupal shop in Finland that is expanding outside of it's borders, is similar to many Drupal shops in the European market. Vesa has been one of the organizers in the Finnish Drupal community and he's the informal national representative for Finland on the Drupal Association's European community dinners. Next to his professional experience Vesa brings affinity with the world of NGO's through his involvement in several smaller not for profits and the Finnish Red Cross.

Mitchell Toomey

We chose Mitchell because as a senior employee of the UNDP he brings insights in Drupal's role at big Drupal customers and at international governmental organizations more specifically. Mitchell leads an international team using the Teamworks Drupal-based intranet application and active in six regional hubs throughout the developing world with a current focus on Africa. He has an MBA in Organizational Behavior and Information Technology.

Jeff Walpole

Jeff was selected because on top of his business experience, he brings key insights on the use of Drupal in government and the Drupal distributions/products ecosystem. As the CEO and co-founder of Phase2 Technology, Jeff is a business leader in the Drupal community. He knows what it takes to build a multi-million dollar services company, and to invest in and market Drupal products.

Mike Woster

Drawing from his experience as the COO of the Linux Foundation and holder of an MBA, Mike has strong experience in running a tech non-profit. His knowledge of the tech non-profit world should give the Drupal Association insight into what financial and organizational models the Drupal Association might consider and how those would impact the community. His MBA from Kellogg School at Northwestern University has been put to immediate use in his role at the Linux Foundation interacting with lawyers, reading financial reports, and managing a distributed staff. His undergraduate degree in Computer Science from Texas A&M University and industry experience as a developer ensures he understands the “tech” side of a tech non-profit.

Dries Buytaert

Dries Buytaert is the original creator and project lead for Drupal. Dries also co-founded the Drupal Association and served as president of the Drupal Association since its start. He is also co-founder and chief technology officer of Acquia, a venture-backed Drupal company with 160 employees. Dries is also a co-founder of Mollom, a small web start-up that helps you stop website spam. Dries holds a PhD in computer science and engineering. In 2008, Buytaert was elected Young Entrepreneurs of Tech by BusinessWeek as well as MIT TR 35 Young Innovator. Dries brings community experience, business experience and continuity to the Drupal Association. As a native of Belgium that moved to the US, and that travels extensively, Dries is able to represent the international ecosystem.

Open Source rock at Latinoware

2011-10-26T10:46:55+00:00

Web 2.0 Summit

2011-10-26T05:13:36+00:00

Last week I attended the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. The theme this years was “The Data Frame”, an attempt to look at the “Points of Control Theme” from last year through the lens of data.

Data Frame talks

Most of the good data frame stuff was in the short “High Order Bit” and “Pivot” talks. The interviews with big company CEO’s are generally of little value, because CEO’s at large companies have been heavily media trained, and it is rare to get them to say anything really interesting.

Genevieve Bell from Intel posed the question “Who is data and if it were a person what would it be like?” Her answers included:

Data keeps it real – it will resist being digitized
Data loves a good relationships – what happens when data is intermediated
Data has a country (context is important)
Data is feral (privacy security,etc )
Data has responsibilities
Data wants to look good
Data doesn’t last forever (and shouldn’t in some cases)

One Kings Lane was one of the startups described by Kleiner Perkins’ Aileen Lee. The interesting thing about their presentation was their realtime dashboard of purchasing activity during one of their flash sales events. You can see the demo at 6:03 in the video from the session.

Mary Meeker has moved from Morgan Stanley to Kleiner Perkins, but her Internet Trends presentation is still a tour de force of statistics and trends. It’s interesting to watch how her list of trends is changing over time.

Alyssa Henry from Amazon talked about AWS from the perspective of S3, and her talk was mostly statistics and customer experiences. One of her closing sentences stuck in my mind: “What would you do if every developer in your organization had access to a supercomputer”. Hilary Mason has talked about how people in sitting at home in their pajamas now have access to big data crunching capability. Alyssa’s remark pushes that idea – pushing the thought that access to supercomputing resources is at the same level as access to a personal computer.

TrialPay is a startup in the online payment space. Their interesting twist is that they will provide payment services free of charge, without a transaction fee. They are willing to do this because they collect the data about the payment, and can then use / sell information about payment behaviors and so on (apparently Visa and Mastercard plan to do something similar).

I am not a fan of talks that are product launches or feature launches on existing products, so I was all set to ignore Susan Wojcicki’s talk on Google Analytics. But then I saw this picture in her slides:

Edward Tufte has made this diagram famous, calling it “probably the best statistical graphic ever drawn”. I remember seeing this graphic in one of his seminars and wondering how to bring this type of visualization to a computer. I appreciated the graphic, but I wasn’t sure how many times one would need to graph death marches. The Google Analytics team found a way to apply this visualization to conversion and visitor falloffs. Sure enough, those visualizations are now in my Google Analytics account. Wojcicki also demonstrated that analytics are now being updated in “real time”. Clearly, there’s no need to view instant feedback from analytics as a future item.

Last year there was a panel on education reform. This year, Salman Khan, the creator of the Khan academy spoke. Philosophically I’m in agreement with what Khan is trying to do – provide a way for every student to attain mastery of a topic before moving on. What was more interesting was that he came with some actual data from a whole school pilot of Khan Academy materials. Their data shows that it is possible for children assigned to a remedial math class to jump to the same level as students in an advanced math class. They have a very nice set of analytic tools that work with their videos, which should lead to a more data based discussion of how to help more kids succeed in learning what they need to learn to be successful in life.

Anne Wojcicki (yes, she and Susan are sisters) talked about the work they are doing at 23andMe. She gave an example of a rare form of Parkinson’s disease, where they were able to assemble a sizable number of people with the genetic predisposition, and present that group to medical researchers who are working on treatments for Parkinsons. It was interesting story of online support groups, gene sequencing, and preventative medicine.

It seems worth pointing out that almost all the talks that I listed in this section were by women.

Inspirational Talks

There were some talks which didn’t fit the data frame theme that well, but I found them interesting or inspirational anyway.

Flipboard CEO Mike McCue made an impassioned plea that we learn when to ignore the data, and build products that have emotion in them. He contrasted the Jaguar XJSS and the Honda Insight as products built with emotion and built on data, respectively. He went on to say that tablets are important because the content becomes the interface. He believes that the future of the web is to be more like print, putting content first, because the content has a soul. Great content is about art, art creates emotion, and emotion defies the data. It was a great, thoughtful talk.

Alison Lewis from Coca Cola talked about their new, high tech, internet connected Freestyle soda machine. A number of futuristic internet scenarios seem to involve soda machines, so it was interesting to hear what actual soda companies are doing in this space. The geek in me thinks that the machine is cool, although I rarely drink soft drinks. I went to the Facebook page for the machine to see what was up, and discovered that the only places in Seattle that had them were places where I would never go to eat.

IBM’s David Barnes talked about IBM’s smart cities initiative, which involves instrumenting the living daylights out of city. Power, water, transportation grid, everything. His main points were:

Cities will have a healthier immune systems. The health web
City buildings will sense and respond like living organisms – water, power, etc systems
Car and city buses will run on empty..
Smarter systems will quench cities thirst and save energy
Cities will respond to a crisis – even before receiving an emergency call

He left us with a challenge to “Look at the organism that is the city. What can we do to improve and create a smarter city?”. I have questions about how long it would take to actually build a smart city or worse, retrofit an existing city, but this is a challenge type of long term project. I’m glad to see that there are companies out there that are still willing to take that big long view.

Final Thoughts

I really liked the short talk formats that were used this year. It forced many of the speakers to really be crisp and interesting, or at least crisp, and I really liked the volume of what got presented. One thing seems true, that from the engineering audience of Strata to the executive audience at Web 2.0, data and data related topics are at the top of everyone’s mind.

And there in addition to ponies and unicorns, be dragons.

Mobile for Drupal 8

2011-10-24T19:29:12+00:00

In my State of Drupal keynote in Chicago I said: "If I were to start Drupal from scratch today, I'd build it for mobile experiences first, and desktop experience second.". I believe in that more than ever.

We already have a number of initiatives under way that will make Drupal a great platform for building native mobile applications (e.g. the Web services initiative) as well for building mobile web experiences (e.g. the HTML5 initiative and the Design initiative).

However, there is more that needs to be done to make Drupal a go to platform in a mobile world. For example, a couple of weeks ago I talked to a number of big media companies, each employing hundreds of editorial staff. They all believed that in less than two years, most of their editors that report from the field will be using tablets instead of laptops. Applied to Drupal, this means we need to make the Drupal administration back-end and the editorial experience mobile-friendly, something that isn't covered by the existing Drupal 8 initiatives. Another example would be responsive web design.

The mobile internet is coming at us fast and furious. We need to move fast and we might only get one shot at this. I want to make mobile the big theme for Drupal 8. That is why I decided to launch another initiative related to mobile.

I've asked John Albin Wilkins to be the Initiative Owner for the Drupal 8 Mobile Initiative, and to work with the existing initiatives to fill the remaining gaps. To learn what that means, please consult John's announcement blog post, which includes an overview of the initiatives' goals. Like with any of these initiatives, they don't actually materialize unless people decide to help. To get involved, please join the discussions in the Mobile group on groups.drupal.org and help work on Mobile issues on drupal.org.

Iguacu Falls in Brazil

2011-10-22T14:49:07+00:00

I got pretty wet taking these pictures. Nothing comes for free.

World Economic Forum Global Event Councils 2011

2011-10-18T15:51:44+00:00

Last week I spent a few days at the World Economic Forum’s annual brain-storming event, the gathering of its “Global Agenda Councils.” One of my fellow-council members (Julia Hobsbawm — an extremely focused and efficient communicator) has already published her description of this year’s event. Rather than duplicate her work, I’ll simply thank her and add a bit about my experience.

The WEF asked me to facilitate a discussion during one of the break-out sessions. The overall session was Digital Governance, and probably 100 or 125 of the attendees choose this topic. Within this session there were 5 discussion groups, each with a particular question for discussion, and people chose which questions they wanted to address.

The discussion I was asked to facilitate was “The Rights of the One vs the Needs of the Many — How does the digital world affect the way we think about this question?” I wasn’t sure how the discussion would go, but it was great. We covered very practical aspects such as “What is ‘the many,’ in a world where groups from across boundaries and may shift freely?” “What about jurisdictional issues?”

We also delved into some very theoretical topics such as the nature of pluralism, and does one need a “center that holds” to turn a bunch of groups into a pluralistic society? One upon a time I was well versed in political theory and facile with its use as an analytic tool, but it has been a while. I had to listen carefully and think hard to engage with the theoretical thinkers in the group. It was exhilarating.

The people who are invited to the Global Agenda Councils have already become known through their work. As a result, the group tends to be older, more “successful,” more male, more Western than general demographics. I found this version of the event to make some progress in these issues. Maybe it’s because my Council had good geographic distribution, as Julia chronicles. The Councils still don’t reflect the giant part of the world’s population that is under 25, and sometimes I feel this acutely. On the other hand, I don’t think I had the experience of being the only woman in any of the groups I came across, which happens to me regularly in Silicon Valley.

The work product of the few days together is a bit abstract, since the task was to figure out new models for approaching the world’s big problems. I agree with Julia that there’s a great deal of benefit in “mash-ups” of people with different areas of expertise. I always think carefully about attending, because it takes close to a week and there are some drawbacks. But I’m always drawn by the amazing assortment of people, and leave feeling the event is unique and worthwhile.

Questions for my BADCamp keynote interview?

2011-10-17T11:26:37+00:00

Did you know there is a DrupalCamp that is bigger than most past DrupalCons? It's the Bay Area Drupal Camp, or BADCamp which is expected to draw over 1,400 people this year for three days of trainings, summits, sprints, sessions, BOFs and parties all across Berkeley this weekend.

Instead of giving a morning keynote, I will be interviewed by Josh Koenig after we've been both been drinking for a while. I'm very excited about the interview format and having it in the evening. The traditional keynote presentation format works well for making statements, but DrupalCamps inspire often a different mood. I expect the interview format will fit this ambiance by being more probing and personal than a straightforward keynote could be.

We still haven't decided on the questions... and that is where you come in. If you were in Josh's positions, what would you ask me? What topics should we discuss together? Just suggest your questions in the comments of this post. Josh will pick both the most popular and the most interesting ones and see where they go.

I look forward to seeing many of you at BADCamp next week!

PayPal developer community using Drupal

2011-10-12T20:53:38+00:00

Drupal continues to rack up successes among large developer communities, with x.commerce joining Twitter, which made the move last month. X.commerce is a new division of PayPal that serves as an open, central meeting place for over 700,000 developers for eBay, PayPal, Magento, and other eBay properties.

These communities join those of Brightcove, Symantec, DivX -- and, of course, Drupal. All told, that's millions of developers relying on Drupal-run sites for coding tips, product info, and idea exchange.

x.commerce's communities were formerly run on Jive, a proprietary package. Through Acquia, eBay engaged VML to create the site, with additional consulting by Cyrve (now part of Acquia) to migrate data. Acquia provided a Technical Account Manager (TAM), who helped coordinate resources to put the site into production and will be on call as it grows.

Like many developer sites, x.commerce centers around its documentation and its communities. The latter are a model of social networking at its best, in the service of a question-and-answer format. Developers help each other by responding directly to questions, either publicly or through private email; vote on questions (and answers) to highlight those of importance; promote conversations through other social sites such as Facebook; and bookmark discussions to form personal collections. The results are evident in the enormous level of activity within the forums (which, by the way, are built on Organic Groups).

This project is an excellent example of how open-source software drives innovation. Under Jive, eBay wasn't able to develop features that it needed. If eBay needed to do something that wasn't in Jive's roadmap, that was just too bad. Drupal, of course, allows them to create whatever they need, or developers outside the company to do it. That jibes well with x.commerce's ethos of open development, as is demonstrated by the extensive APIs it provides for eBay and PayPal, and the freedom the company allows its developers. I believe that their openness is a key factor to their success -- there are over 4,500 apps on Magento alone -- and that their move to Drupal will allow them to grow at the speed of their community.

On Happiness

2011-10-12T03:11:34+00:00

Now that I’ve completed my Epicurus translations, I’m working on a short book that will enable modern readers to more easily understand both Epicurean theory and practice. The working title is “Epicurus on Happiness”, and I plan to complete it by the end of the year.

After that, I’m thinking about writing a series of such books: brief explorations of thoughts on the good life from Aristotle and Nietzsche for sure, and perhaps also Thoreau, Emerson, Spinoza, the Stoics, and a few others (my book The Tao of Roark can be considered the first book in the series). This extended project would provide a good reason to delve deeply into alternative approaches to the love and practice of wisdom. After all, what is more important than eudaimonia?

State of Mozilla and 2010 Financial Statements

2011-10-10T15:06:19+00:00

Today I am pleased to share with you this year’s annual State of Mozilla report. It details our opportunities, our community and our expanding set of initiatives. Included in this post is the full text of the video from the “Ahead” section of the site. I invite you to learn more about the Mozilla Project and join us in our ongoing efforts to build a better Internet.

Mozilla’s mission is to ensure that the Internet remains open, interoperable and respects user sovereignty. We do this by building software that puts people in control of their digital lives, like Firefox. We do this by empowering a global community of people who volunteer to champion these efforts.

Internet life is changing. We are connecting through more devices. We are living in apps as well as browsers. We are interacting with friends and followers and acquaintances. We can experience the Web through a highly personal, highly customized lens.

The challenges ahead of us are very real. Mobile platforms are more closed and more centralized than we have seen in decades. As individuals, we are losing the ability to act on the Web without permission from large, centralized gatekeepers. We are all being tracked, logged, cataloged, monetized and turned into products to be sold. We’re seeing the universal platform of the Web fragmenting back into multiple different worlds.

As the Internet experience is changing, Mozilla, too, is changing. The products and tools that we use to advance our mission are expanding and evolving. A browser is necessary but not sufficient. Equally important is expanding the number of people who understand our values and identify as Mozillians. Mozilla has both the challenge and the opportunity to expand our reach dramatically. We have the ability to bring our values to life in new ways. Embracing these opportunities means embracing change, embracing hope and embracing determination. This is how we will continue to give people ultimate authority over their digital lives.

Young romance

2011-10-10T00:30:55+00:00

Brothers

2011-10-09T21:16:00+00:00

What community?

2011-10-06T20:00:34+00:00

With the announcement of Tizen (pronounced, I learned, tie-zen, not tea-zen or tizz-en) recently, I headed over to the website to find out who the project was aimed at. I read this on the “Community” page:

The Tizen community is made up of all of the people who collectively work on or with Tizen:

Product contributors: kernel/distribution developers, release managers, quality assurance, localization, etc.

Application developers: people who write applications to run on top of Tizen

Users: people who run Tizen on their device and provide feedback

Vendors: companies who create products based on Tizen

Other contributors: promotion, documentation, and much more

Anyone can contribute by:

Submitting patches

Filing bugs

Developing applications

Helping with wiki documentation

Participating in other community efforts and programs

Wow! That’s a diverse target audience, and a very wide ranging list of ways you can help out. But is it really helpful to scope the project so wide, and try to cater to such a wide range of use-cases from the start? And is the project at a stage where it even makes sense to advertise itself to some of these different types of users?

I have talked about the different meanings of “maintainer” before, depending on whether you’re maintaining a code project or are a package maintainer for a distribution. I have also talked about the different types of community that build up around a project, and how each of them needs their own identity – particularly in the context of the MeeGo trademark. I particularly like Simon Phipps’s analysis of the four community types as a way to clarify what you’re talking about.

For Tizen, I see between three and five different types of community, each with different needs, and each of which can form at different stages in the life-cycle of the project. Trying to “sell” the project to one type of community before the project is ready for them will result in disappointment and frustration all round – managing the expectations of people approaching Tizen will be vital to its long-term success, even if it opens you up to short-term criticism. Unless each of these communities is targeted individually and separately, and at the right time, I am sceptical about the results.

“Upstream” software developers

The first and most identifiably “Open Source” family of communities will be the software developers working on components and applications which will end up in the core of Tizen. For the most part, these communities exist already, and Samsung and Intel engineers are working with them. These are the projects we commonly call “upstreams” – projects you don’t control, but from whom code flows into your product.

In other cases, code will originate from Intel and/or Samsung. In the same way that Buteo, oFono and the various applications which were developed for the MeeGo Netbook UX were very closely associated with MeeGo, there will be similar projects (sometimes the same projects) which will have a close association with Tizen. Each of these projects will have their own personality, their own maintainers, roadmaps, specs – and each of them should have their own identity, and space to collaborate and communicate.

Communities form around programming projects not because of the code, but because of a shared vision and values. Each project will attract different people – the people who are interested in metadata and search are not the same as the people who will be passionate about system-wide contact integration. Each project needs its own web space, maintainers, bug tracker, mailing list, and wiki space. Of course, many projects can share the same infrastructure, and a lot of the same community processes (for things like code governance), and for projects closely related to Tizen, we can provide common space to help create a Tizen developer community in the same way there’s a GNOME developer community. But each community around each component will have its own personality and will need its own space.

At the level of Tizen, we could start with an architecture diagram, perhaps – and for each component on the architecture diagram, link to the project’s home page – many of the links will point to places like kernel.org, gnome.org, freedesktop.org and so on. For Tizen-specific projects, there could be a link to the project home page, with a list of stuff that needs to be done before the component is “ready”.

Core platform packagers, testers, integrators

Once we have a set of components which are working well together, we get to the heart of what I think will be Tizen’s early activity – bringing those components together into a cohesive whole. Tizen will be, basically, a set of distributions aimed at different form factors. And the deliverable in a distribution is not code or a Git tag, it’s a complete, integrated stack.

The engineering skills, resources and processes required to integrate a distribution are different to those of a code project. Making a great integrated Linux platform is obviously difficult – otherwise Red Hat would not be making money, and Ubuntu would not have had the opportunity to capture so much mind-share. Both Red Hat and Canonical do something right which others failed at before them.

Distributions attract a different type of contributor than code projects, and need a different set of tools and infrastructure to allow people to collaborate.At the distribution level, it is more likely you will be debating whether or not to integrate a particular package or its competitor than it is to debate whether to implement a feature in a specific package. Of course, it is possible to influence upstream projects to get specific features implemented, not least by providing developer resources, and there will be a need for some ambassadors to bridge the gap to upstream projects. And it is possible for a distribution to carry patches to upstream packages if that community disagrees. But in general, not much code gets written in distributions.

What the distro community needs and expects is infrastructure for continuous integration, bug tracking software, a way to submit and build software packages, good release engineering, an easy way to find out what packages need a maintainer (see Debian’s WNPP list or Ubuntu’s “need-packaging” list for examples) and a way to influence what packages or features are included in future releases (see Fedora or Ubuntu for examples). They also want tools to allow packaging, testing and deploying the integrated distribution – for an embedded distro, that might mean an emulator and an image creator, perhaps.

Vendors and carriers

Communities of companies are worth a special mention. Companies have very different ways of working together and agreeing on things than communities of individuals. I was tempted to just roll vendors into the “Platform integrators” community type, but they are sufficiently different to be considered another type of community. Vendors have different constraints and motivations than individual contributors to the platform, and we should be aware of those.

Vendors like to have a business relationship – some written agreement that shows where everyone stands. They have a direct relationship with people who buy their hardware, and have an interest (potentially in conflict with other communities) in owning the user relationship – through branded application stores, UI and support forums, for example. And since vendors are typically working on hardware development in parallel with software development, they care a lot about a reliable release schedule and quality level from the stack. Something that companies care about which individuals usually don’t are legal concerns around working with the process – do they have patent rights to the code they ship? Are they giving up any of their own potential patent claims?

3rd party application developers

Application developers don’t care, in general, whether the platform is open source or closed, or developed collaboratively or by one party (witness the popularity of Android and iOS with application developers). What they do care about are developer tools, documentation, and the ability to share their work with device users and other application developers. Some application developers will want to develop their applications as free software, and it is possible to enable that, but I think the most important thing for application developers is that it’s easy to do things with your platform, that there are good tools for developing, testing and deploying your application, that your platforms APIs are enabling the developer to do what he wants, and that you are providing a channel for those developers to get their apps to users of your platform.

An application developer doesn’t want to have to ship his software to 5 different app stores on every release – in contrast to vendors, he would like a single channel to his market. Other things he cares about are being able to form a relationship with his users – so app stores need to be social, allow user ratings and comments, and allow the author to interact with his users. Clear terms of engagement are vital here too – especially for commercial application developers. And application developers are also another type of community – they will want to share tips and tricks, code, and their thoughts on the project leaders in some kind of app developer knowledge base.

Device users

There is another potential community which I should mention, and that is users of your platform – typically, these will be users of devices running your platform. It should be possible for engaged users to share information, opinions, tips & tricks, and interesting hacks among each other. It should also be possible to rate and recommend applications easily – this is in the interests of both your user community and your application developer ecosystem.

OK, so what?

Each of these community types is different, and they don’t mix well. They mature at different rates. There is no point in trying to build a user platform until there are devices running your platform on the market, for example

So each type of community needs a separate space to work. There is no point in catering to a 3rd party application developer until you have developer tools and a platform for him to develop against. Vendors will commit to products when they see a viable integrated platform. And so on.

What is vital is to be very clear, for each type of community, what the rules of engagement are. As an example, one company can control the integration of a platform and the development of many of its components (as is the case for Android) and everyone is relatively happy, because they know where they stand and what they’re getting into. But if you advertise as an open and transparent project, and a small group of people announce the decisions of what components are included or excluded from the stack (as was the case in MeeGo), then in spite of being vastly more open, people who have engaged with the project will end up unhappy, because of a mismatch between the message and the practice in the project.

So what about Tizen? I think it is a mistake to announce the projects as a place to “submit patches, report bugs and develop applications” when there is no identifiable code base, no platform to try, and no published SDK to develop against. By announcing that Tizen is an Open Source platform, Intel and Samsung have set an expectation for people – and these are people who have gone through the move to MeeGo under two years ago, and who have seen Nokia drop the project earlier this year. If they are disappointed by the project’s beginnings because the expectations around the project have been set wrong from the offset, it could take a long time to recover.

Personally, I would start low-key by announcing an architecture diagram and concentrating on code and features that need writing, then ramp up the integrator community with some alpha images and tools to allow people to roll their own; finally, when the platform stabilises roll out the developer SDK and app store and start building up an application developer community. But by aiming too big with the messaging, Tizen runs the risk of scaring some people away early. Time will tell.

I'm going to India

2011-10-06T19:37:40+00:00

As you know, I'm no stranger to travel — I flew over 100,000 km in 2010 and over 300,000 km in 2011. But India is one place I haven't visited yet, even though I feel that Drupal's success there is crucial to its worldwide adoption.

Besides having a strong Drupal community, India is one of the world's fastest-growing economies, with great promise to continue its rise for several years. Where a country's economy grows, so grows its need for online solutions. So the opportunities for Drupal there are obvious.

So I'm excited to be visiting this coming month. My schedule is:

7-8 November in Delhi
9-10 November in Mumbai
11 November in Hyderabad

My time will be split between events with the Drupal community, press meetings and private meetings with Acquia partners and customers. I'm grateful for volunteers who have been making plans in the Drupal India group. If you're local and would like to meet, be sure to check in there. Even if we can't meet, I'd especially appreciate Indians' comments of what you hope I know about Drupal in India when my trip is done.

Surge 2011

2011-10-04T05:52:09+00:00

Last week I was in Baltimore attending OmniTI’s Surge Conference. I can’t remember exactly when I first met OmniTI CEO Theo Schlossnagle, but it was at an ApacheCon after he had delivered one of his 3 hour tutorials on Scalable Internet Architectures, back in the early 2000′s. Theo’s been at this scalability business for a long time, and I was sad to have missed the first Surge, which was held last year.

Talks

Ben Fried, Google’s CIO started the conference (and one of the major themes) with a “disaster porn” talk. He described a system that he built in a previous life, for a major wall street company. The system had to be very scalable to accommodate the needs of traders. One day, the system started failing, and ended up costing his employer a significant amount of money. In the ensuing effort to get the system working again, he ended up with all the people from the various specializations (development, operations, networking, etc) all stuck in a very large room with a lot of whiteboards. It turned out that no one really understood how the entire system worked, and that issues at the boundaries of the specialties were causing many of the problems. The way that they had scaled up their organization was to specialize, but that specialization caused them to lose an end to end view of the system. Their organization of their people had led to some of the problems they were experiencing, and was impeding their ability to solve the problems. The quote that I most remember was “specialization is an industrial age notion and needs to be discounted in spaces where we operate at the boundary of the known versus unknown”. The lessons that Fried learned on that project have influenced the way that Google works (Site Reliability Engineers as an example), and are similar to the ideas being espoused by the “DevOps” movement. His description of the solution was to “reward and recognize generalist skill and end to end knowledge”. There was a pretty lively Q&A around this notion of generalists.

Mark Imbriaco’s talk was titled “Anatomy of a Failure” in the program, but he actually presented a very detailed account of how Heroku responds to incidents. My background isn’t in operations, so I found this to be pretty interesting and useful. I particularly liked the idea of playbooks to be followed when incidents occur, and that alert messages actually contain links to the necessary playbooks. The best quote from Mark’s talk was probably “Automation is also a great way to distribute failure across an entire system”.

Raymond Blum presented the third of three Google talks that were shoe horned into a single session. He described the kind of problems involved in doing backups at Google scale. Backup is one of those problems that needs to be solved, but is mostly unglamourous. Unless you are Google, that is. Blum talked about how they actually read their backup tapes to be sure that they work, their strategy of backing up to data centers in different geographies, and clever usage of map reduce to parallelize the backup and restore process. He cited the Gmail outage earlier this year as a way of grasping the scale of the problem of backing up a service like GMail, much less all of Google. One way to know if a talk succeeds is if it provokes thoughts. Based on my conversations with other attendees, this one succeeded.

David Pacheco and Bryan Cantrill talked about “Realtime Cloud Analytics with Node.js”. This work is an analog of the work that they did on the analytics for the “Fishworks”/Sun Storage 7000 products, except instead of measuring a storage appliance, they are doing analytics for Joyent’s cloud offering. This is basically a system which talks to DTrace on every machine, and then reports the requested metrics to an analytics service once a second. The most interesting part of the talk was listening to two guys who are hard core C programmers / kernel developers walk us through their decision to write the system in Javascript on Node.js instead of using C. They also discussed the areas where they expected there to be performance problems, and were surprised when those problems never appeared. When it came time for the demo, it was quite funny to see one of the inventors of DTrace being publicly nervous about running DTrace on every machine in the Joyent public cloud. ”Automation is also a great way to distribute failure across an entire system”. But everything was fine, and people were impressed with the analytics.

Fellow ASF member Geir Magnusson’s talk was named “When Business Models Attack”. The title alludes to the two systems that Geir described, both of which are designed specifically to handle extreme numbers of users. Geir was the VP of Platform and Architecture at Gilt Groupe, and one description of their model is that every day at Noon is Black Friday. So the Gilt system has to count on handling peak numbers of users every day at a particular time. Geir’s new employer, Function(x), also has a business model that depends on large numbers of users. The challenge is to design systems that will handle big usage spikes as a matter of course, not as a rarity. One of architectures that Geir described involved writing data into a Riak cluster in order to absorb the write traffic, and then using a Node.js based process to do a “write-behind” of that data into a relational database.

Takeaways

There were several technology themes that I encountered during the course of the 2 days:

Many of the talks that I attended involved the use of some kind of messaging system (most frequently RabbitMQ). Messaging is an important component in connecting systems that are operating a different rates, which is frequently the case in systems operating at high scale.
Many people are using Amazon EC2, and liking it, but there were a lot of jokes about the reliability of EC2.
I was surprised by how many people appear to be using Node.js. This is not a Javascript or dynamic language oriented community. There’s an inclination towards C, systems programming, and systems administration. Hardly an audience where you’d expect to see lots of Node usage, but I think that it’s notable that Node is finding some uptake.

One thing that I especially liked about Surge was the focus on learning from failure, otherwise known as a “fascination with disaster porn”. Most of the time you only hear about things that worked, but hearing about what didn’t work is at least as instructive, and in some case more instructive. This is something that (thus far) is unique to Surge.

Rapid Release Follow-Up

2011-10-03T21:39:40+00:00

Rapid Release

My recent post on the rapid release cycle generated a lot of response, some very thoughtful and some also very frustrated. Many of the comments focus on a few key issues listed below. We’ve been working on how to address these issues; I’ll outline our progress and plans here.

large deployments that certify software before permitting use can’t manage a 6 week cycle
add-on compability issues
update notices and fatigue
frustration that we didn’t get these things addressed better before making the change.

1. Large Deployments. We’ve made a proposal for extended support for large deployments.This proposal is under discussion now in the relevant newsgroup and in our Enterprise Working Group. We are incorporating feedback and expect to come to closure on this proposal shortly.

2. Add-On Compatibility. There are a couple of related issues that have made add-on compatibility difficult. First, we have historically assumed that add-ons are incompatible until proven to be compatible. This is a very conservative assumption which creates work for all add-on developers and notifications to all add-on users. We’ve corrected this for the add-ons hosted by Mozilla. Work is underway to correct this for the remaining add-ons. Here is a more detailed explanation of the topic; feature planning details are also available.

3. Update Fatigue. In the past we have been very careful to make sure people know something is changing with their web browser before it changes. We did this to make sure people are aware and in control of what’s happening to their environment. Our position was to err on the side of user notification. Today people are telling us — loudly — that the notifications are irritating and that a silent update process is important. This work is underway. The first set of improvements should appear in the next Firefox release, with more improvements appearing in the next few months. Also, one main reason people are notified of updates is due to incompatible add-ons which will be addressed by the work on add-on compatibility. More details can be found in this blog post: http://www.brianbondy.com/blog/id/125/mozilla-firefox-and-silent-updates

4. Frustration. The comments also registered frustration that we didn’t get these issues better addressed before making the shift. The change was abrupt and we should do better in the future. We focused very effectively on making sure we could make the core engineering aspects of a rapid release process work. We focused well on being able to deliver user and developer benefits on a much faster pace — we’ve already brought major memory improvements to make browsing faster, Do Not Track to Firefox for Android, developer tools and HTML5 support. But we didn’t focus so effectively on making sure all aspects of the product and ecosystem were ready. We believe we have plans in place to alleviate the issues that resulted, with improvements rolling out in in the coming weeks.

Butterfly

2011-10-02T02:39:02+00:00

Took a picture of a butterfly today.

History of Mozilla – A Starting Point

2011-09-30T16:33:24+00:00

At a recent gathering of Mozilla folks I gave an informal talk on the early history of Mozilla. It’s unpolished, it’s low production value (one mike in a big room) and it’s clearly a talk to a live audience that was filmed. Ideally we’d do some editing, add some text for the questions that can’t be heard and maybe try to improve the oddly abrupt ending. But it’s the early part of Mozilla history that isn’t written down and people enjoyed it. So rather than wait I’ll point to what’s available now. It’s about 40 minutes long.

Paris by night

2011-09-30T05:14:48+00:00

Nat "catch" Catchpole

2011-09-27T09:22:10+00:00

I'm pleased to share that Nat "catch" Catchpole has accepted my invitation to become my Drupal 8 co-maintainer. For the duration of one release cycle, he will help me co-ordinate Drupal 8 development.

Nat has been working with Drupal for almost 6 years and is one of the top two contributors to Drupal 7 core. In addition to being is known in the community as an incredibly talented engineer with a passion for software design, Nat is also a driving force on performance and scalability efforts. Additionally, he pays careful attention to core development processes and how they can be improved. I firmly believe he is what Drupal core development needs right now.

One of the things that I like best about Nat, is that he doesn't like unnecessary complexity. I believe he will be a great help in driving architectural decisions, helping to improve the framework aspects of Drupal core, and saying no to cruft.

Nat is working out of Japan for Tag1 Consulting. Note that Nat will be traveling between 4th-22nd October, but will get set up as co-maintainer this week.

I'm extremely excited to work alongside Nat to set the direction for the next version of Drupal! Please make him feel welcome.

W3C Web and TV Workshop

2011-09-26T21:36:03+00:00

Last week I attended the Third W3C Web and TV Workshop (disclosure: I was a member of the program committee). This was the third in a series of three workshops that the W3C has organized around the intersection of web technologies and television. The purpose of the workshops is to bring these two communities together and help them understand and work with each other. The W3C has formed an interest group for member companies who are interested in working on issues related to the web and television.

Some of the topics discussed at the workshop included multi-screen experiences (there were 2.5 sessions on this topic, including some demonstrations), synchronized metadata, codecs (particularly around adaptive bit rate streaming over HTTP), and (inevitably) content protection/DRM.

Given the advent of the iPad and other tablets, it should be no surprise that multi-screen experiences were a big topic. Apple has done some interesting work with AirPlay, but the general technology infrastructure for enabling multi-screen experiences is a mess. There are issues ranging from the “bottom”, related to the discovery of the various devices, through the negotiation of which devices have which roles, up to the mechanism for synchronizing content and metadata amongst these devices. There’s a lot of work to be done here, and some of that will be done in conjunction with other industry groups like DLNA and so forth. I’m most interested in the upper levels, which should be helping with synchronizing the experience and facilitating inter device/application communication.

There was also significant discussion around synchronized metadata, which is highly relevant to multi-screen experiences, although there was more discussion/demonstration of end experiences as opposed to technologies that could be standardized to facilitate those experiences. Sylvia Pfeiffer gave an interesting demo of WebVTT using the Captionator polyfill. One of the best things about this discussion was that one of my colleagues from ESPN later explained to me the details of how captioning is done in their broadcast and internet workflows.

It’s impossible to talk about television without talking about video, and the two largest topics around video and the web are codecs and content protection. Most of the discussion around codecs revolved around the work at MPEG on Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH). There are at least three solutions in the market for streaming video via HTTP, all mutually incompatible for dumb reasons. DASH is an attempt to standardize that mechanism, while remaining silent on the question of which codec is used to produce the video file being streamed.

On the content protection front, there was the usual disconnect between the web world and the tv world. For me, the discussion here really centers around the ability to use the HTML5 video tag to deliver “premium” content. Today that content is delivered via the object tag and associated browser plugins. The problem is that each plugin works differently, so your web application code has to deal with all the possibilities that it might encounter. There appears to be some interest in standardizing a small and narrow set of API’s that web applications could use to interact with a content protection mechanism. Unsurprisingly, there was very little interest in standardizing a content protection mechanism for HTML5, especially since there isn’t agreement on a standard video codec.

Recently the W3C has been working very hard at getting consumer/content side companies to participate in its activities. Because the workshop was open to anyone, not just W3C member companies, there were a lot of attendees who were not from the traditional W3C constituencies. Personally, I think that this is a good thing, and not just in the Web and TV space. It will be interesting to see how much progress can be made – the Apple and Google native application models, are this generation’s Flash and Silverlight. I hope that we can find a way to build the next generation of television experiences atop the Open Web technology stack.

Logan airport at dawn

2011-09-22T16:29:19+00:00

Humanitarian Software – Using technology to help humanity

2011-09-22T14:37:25+00:00

Tomorrow, Friday September 23rd, the Humanitarian FOSS track at the Open World Forum will bring together leaders from some of the most important humanitarian software projects and case studies of the impact these projects are having on people’s lives around the world. I’m happy to have been allowed to chair the track, and I am humbled by the quality of the presenters and the impact that their work is having.

In addition to the Humanitarian track, we are also honoured to have Laura Walker Hudson from FrontlineSMS give a keynote presentation on the overarching theme of “Humanitarian FOSS – serving humanity” in the main auditorium at 17:15. Laura will give an overview of the myriad ways that free and open source software is saving and helping people’s lives.

The Humanitarian track will have two core themes:

Crisis Management– how Free and Open Source Software plays a role in extreme events
- The Sahana project, born in Sri Lanka after the 2004 tsunami in the Indian Ocean, helps NGOs and citizens caught in a crisis by crowd-sourcing missing persons reports, co-ordinate different NGOs working in the same place, and track incident reports and volunteer co-ordination.
- Tashiro Shuichi from Japan will present the ways that Open Source software helped during the tsunami disaster in Japan.
- Syrine Tlili from the Tunisian Ministry of Communication Technologies will tell us how Open Source was used by citizens during the Arab Spring revolutions
- Sigmah is a project that enables project management for NGOs
Sustainable Development– once the crisis is over, what are the projects that help with systemic problems like education, health-care, sanitation, and documenting human rights violations?
- SMS is the killer app for communication in the developing world. Most villages in Africa, Asia and South America have cellphone connectivity, but unreliable power grid, Internet and no phone lines. FrontlineSMS enables you to send and receive SMS messages from any computer, using a cheap phone or GSM modem. It is at the heart of every prominent humanitarian software project.
- Sugar is an operating system which was designed from the ground up to meet the needs of educators in developing countries, as part of the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) project to revolutionize the use of technology in education. Sean Daly from the Sugar project will show us a deployment of Sugar and OLPC in a secondary school in a small town in Madagascar.
- Martus, a project created by Benetech, allows the secure recording and storage of testimony relating to human rights violations. Testimony collected with Martus has been used to successfully prosecute police officers for murder in Guatemala.
- Mifos, which was developed by Grameen Bank, the pre-cursor of micro-financing, provides a micro-financing platform for financial institutions.
- Akvo help connect doers and donors to transform communities in some of the poorest parts of the world, funding water, sanitation, and health-care projects around the world.
- The Open Bank Project promotes financial transparency and provides tools to allow people to fight corruption in banking.

Coders for Social Good

There are dozens of amazing Free/Open Source Software projects working to improve the lives of people around the world. For example, Literacy Bridge provides talking books to communities in Africa, and OpenMRS enables the gathering of medical information from regional clinics to reduce child mortality by improving resource allocation.

Many Open Source developers are developing software in communities because they want to make the world a better place. Working on a humanitarian project provides a unique opportunity to combine the social good of Open Source community projects and the public good of helping people in need. Social Coding 4 Good is a new initiative from Benetech which puts willing volunteers in contact with humanitarian projects in need of resources.

The schedule for the track is available on the Open World Forum website. For any press or interview requests, please contact me by email dave@neary-consulting.com or my cellphone +33 6 77 01 92 13.