Mixel Kiemen

It has been more then a year since my last blog. I've not vanished, but have become father, now almost a year ago (11th of April). My last blog was about the educational experiment. I'm now busy with wrapping up my PhD, the defense is planed for this summer. I actually had expected to have my first versions now, the reason of the delay is illness, the cold weather and the incubation by kindergarden is not helping. The worst part was the pneumonia that got me out of play for almost two months.

I've been burning to tell you about an educational experiment. The challenge of the experiment was to deal with a problem of reduced support (teachers) and increase number of students (over 300). The solution: add some community spirit. I've been using my Drupal experience to guide this challenge and did some development along the way. We extended the issue queue to work with peer-evaluations and make learning part of the solution instead of the problem.

Some people have a day job and Drupal is a hobby. If your work simply gets deleted after weeks of activities ... during an active day ... without any possibility to appeal ... its enough to stop being an evangelist.

After a month running a "call for participation" on an open space for education (#DrupalEd) it is time for some evaluation. I've used some of the Google charts, but had to copy past all this. Considering that visibilitie is the biggest problem I'm posting this as a comment in groups and as a blog for Drupal planet.

Last Tuesday I gave a presentation about self-organizing innovation at ISPIM. This paper is an update of my earlier white paper, basically it tries to explain that Drupal is not a CMS community but an open innovation community on software development. Not just the software, but Drupal's community experience is the innovation here. Indeed it's all about the people.

We have just launched a Call for Participation on Drupal and Education Open Space to be held in London 22nd of August if there is enough responds. So go and let us know if you find training and educating youngling important.

During the drupalgovdays I took the liberty to give my vision on a future Open University concept inspired by my experience with a Drupal course I gave the past 5 years. The problem being adressed is also relevant for the Drupal community: how to educate vast amount of young people so that they would not just know Drupal, but are able to take leadership in it. This effect should be well know if you look at the participants of the Summer of Code (SoC). My target audience is a bit different, they are students in business schools and universities with no prior development knowledge, but with the right push they can make good development. If I have it my way (Open University concept), you will see students coming to Drupalcons or organizing Drupal camps. Let me give you the video first, but I would like to use this blog to discuss the need for an open space event on Education.

It seems that Drupalcons are getting a same structure: the day before the event there is training and min-conference, like CXO and after the conference a code sprint. This does look like a great formula. The min-conference makes me imagine Drupalcon as an event-incubator. Wouldn’t it be great to have what is emerging in the BoFs during the conference to become open spaces min-conference at next Drupalcon?

I’ve got a suggestion/question related to the core conversation on Drupal 8: Could we create “virtual sprints” on specific topics by using VoIP?

Robert Douglass created a presentation for the 2011 Drupal Developer Days in Brussels that has lead to people expressing their opinions about A Drupal app store in quite a few discussions. This post is an analysis of Robert's presentation and the various issues and opinions expressed across the various channels afterward. I The discussions focus on three main issues:

1. Value creation versus value capture
2. Fighting for the low-end market
3. Preserving Drupal's community roots

The first issue is a general dissonance between the strategies and philosophies of proprietary versus open source software. There is no doubt in my mind that open source is a better model overall, but it is clear that it does not always produce the best possible result for the individual contributor: As things are, they get paid by the hour (if at all), while creating products that have sustainable value.
The second issue, fighting for the low end market, is related to CMS competition. The quest to become the dominant CMS is actually about the affects the sustainability of the Drupal project in the longer term.
The third issue is that some people fear an app store model is in direct conflict with open source culture and that it would divorce Drupal from its roots and the Drupal community.