For those of you whose first language is English rather than binary: Drupal is a software product called a Content Management System (CMS for short). It’s used to power dynamic web sites with features such as blogging, media integration and community participation. Digital Eskimo has been using Drupal for several years, and we’re proud to support Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) and its largely volunteer community. In terms of ethics and philosophy, Drupal is closely aligned with Digital Eskimo. We’ve launched several successful Drupal sites recently, including our “experiment full of experiments” live local.

Quick wrap of my favourite presentations this weekend:

• Liz Henry: Abandonment Issues. First talk of the conference, and in my opinion the best. Liz came out here all the way from the USA, to discuss with us the cold hard fact that Drupal sites need to be maintained, often for a very long time, and that developers often don’t stick around for terribly long at all to do so.
• Angie Byron (webchick): Drupal 7. D7’s mega-enthusiastic lead developer (especially visiting from Canada) gave us a terrific demo of the highlights of the upcoming new version, which is currently in alpha. Angie also invited us all round to her place last night for a hackfest, where I learned how to write about 2% of a core SimpleTest.
• Chris Burgess: doesn’t play nicely. Just when I thought there was nothing new to hear about Drupal module development gotchas, this talk (which rapidly expanded into a facilitated discussion) clearly summarised some issues that Drupal coders experience far too much, and talk about far too little.
• Giuseppe Maxia: Blaming the unknown. Database guru Giuseppe’s talk was more of a general coding talk than a Drupal-specific talk. His basic message hit home to everyone: “it’s always your fault”. We always blame first what we least understand. Honest, upfront, and very informative.

I also gave a quick lightning talk, in which I gave a demo of the Migrate module, which (of late) I’ve been working with extensively here at Digital Eskimo. I’ll be blogging in geekier detail about the conference on GreenAsh — I’ll post the link in the comments (below) when it’s written.

Related posts:

1. DrupalCon DC: reporting back

Tomorrow I’ll be joining a range of social innovators and technological cats at the 2009 Making Links conference to discuss the challenges of the global financial crisis and environmental sustainability through practical workshops, panels, oral presentations and networking opportunities.

It’s a fantastic opportunity to connect with like-minded individuals in an interactive space to both learn new skills and focus on how we can work together to minimise the risks of climate change. There will be a number of really interesting presentations over the course of the event, including a workshop by Enda Murray from Virus Media, who’ll be talking about the politics and sustainability of participatory media with young people.

I’ll be facilitating a workshop on ‘building communities around Community and encouraging local citizenship to increase sustainability’, specifically highlighting the thinking behind the live local project and it’s effectiveness in reaching an audience and promoting sustainability without an overt call to arms. I’ll also talk about some of the methods that Digital Eskimo have employed in the social media space to connect with and support this emerging community. My workshop forms part of the Community Building and Social Media stream, which will feature various case-studies on how organisations are using web 2.0 to engage, connect and empower their clients and communities.

As the event is based in Melbourne, I decided to instigate our new ‘no-flight’ company policy and catch the overnight express train from Sydney last Friday. Travelling by rail was a much more eco-friendly option and also remarkably comfortable! For a play-by-play account of my journey, be sure to check out my website. I’ll be writing this up as an experiment in slow/low carbon travel soon after I return.

Related posts:

1. Making Links …