After years of using and implementing open source software for clients I finally made it to an open source conference. All it had to do is come to where I live, Vancouver. This week a couple hundred open source developers, documenters and groupies (or "business people" as they we are better known) arrived with laptops and heads full of ideas for the 2006 OSCMS Summit. That's Open Source Content Management System Summit, for the non acronym compliant.
Dry erase markers skidded across boards and tear away sheets, pounds of coffee and liters of beer found their way into the plumbing, keyboards got tapped away at, business cards flew from pocket to pocket, ideas were debated and an unknown to date number of lines of code got written. This is the environment I found myself in this week.
I admit I showed up to the conference feeling like I didn't belong. I'm not a developer, so in a land where the currency is code what do I bring to the table? I work sales, marketing, consulting and training; if anything most of what I do makes me a capitalist, regardless of how progressive I may be. I know enough to about open source communities to know they are honey pots for people across the spectrum of progressive, socially conscious, anti-corporate, techno neo-hippies. I was afraid of being an outcast, a parasite, or the enemy. How naive those fears were. It turns out there are valuable things we can contribute back to the open source project that we use at Raincity Studios for almost all of our client websites, Drupal.
Until about a month ago, Raincity Studios was giving very little back to the open source content management system that we built our business model on. We were reporting bugs to our hosted service and technology partner Bryght, and making the best looking Drupal sites in the world, but it was pretty much a one way street: we made money and that's where it ended. We had our heads down in our work so much that we didn't realize until meeting so many developers this week who knew us and respected our work, that we were already starting to reach our goal of being the best Drupal design firm in the world.
Now we have our first Drupal developer, Steve McKenzie, working hard on lots of Drupal code and contributing 100% of it back to the project for others to benefit. I'm trying to book some manageable chunks of time to help out with needed documentation and abstracting my training materials for end users. We're trying to get our designers collaborating with other folks in the Drupal project to create a single consistent theme base that all Drupal designers can use to create new themes faster. We're looking to hire more Drupal developers, train more talented designers how to make Drupal themes, find a usability expert and give Drupal thorough and ongoing usability review, create Bryght install profiles for easy provisioning of Drupal sites for specific needs and even sock away a little money for every client project using Drupal for the day when a Drupal Foundation starts. I'm hoping that by the end of 2006 we can be one of the organizations contributing the most back to the Drupal project.
So thanks to all the Drupal developers and Bryght in particular for being patient for the year we spent giving back only bug reports and feature requests. We're a little more grown up now, a little more mature, and ready to pitch in our share.