John Eckman, Jay Batson, Marc Amos, and Tom Herer. Photo (c) Trev Stair

Unfortunately Jake Goldman was ill and couldn’t make it, so Christine Greene agreed to step in and moderate in my place, while I represented WordPress in Jake’s. (See also Trev’s iPhone sketches of myself, Jay and Marc – he was unable to get Tom).

It was a fun night – I’m not sure I represented WordPress as well as I might have with a bit more prep. (On the security question in particular, see Brad Williams’ presentation from WordCamp Boston.)

Here’s the video, broken into three parts. (I’ll replace these links with embed codes once Blip finishes transcoding to Flash)

Part One (20:03)

Part Two (26:57)

Part Three (27:59)

The audio quality on the video isn’t great, and the video itself is a bit off from a color perspective (the room wasn’t well set up or lit for recording, so we’re in low-light mode) but I think it’s watchable. (Thanks to Julian Rex for getting what we could get).

The event will be hosted by North Shore Web Geeks and sponsored (as in some free beer) by The Atom Group.

North Shore Web Geeks

(I still think of myself as a North Shore Web Geeks member despite no longer living in Newburyport – Salem, MA is still the North Shore, isn’t it?)

We’ll talk a bit about some popular content management systems, including (but not limited to) Expression Engine, Drupal, Kentico, and WordPress. Representing each of those platforms will be:

• Marc Amos, who will be talking about Expression Engine (a proprietary PHP/MySQL CMS with quite cheap licensing for small businesses and free-of-cost licensing for non-commercial, non-profit use).
• Jay Batson, who will represent Drupal (a free and open source PHP / MySQL CMS and web application framework)
• Tom Herer, who will speak about Kentico (a proprietary ASP.NET based platform with what I’d call low-end-of-market pricing for small to medium sized businesses)
• (Fellow WordCamp Boston organizer) Jake Goldman, who will represent WordPress (another free and open source PHP based platform, traditionally more focused on blogging but also increasingly used as a broad CMS)

I’ll be moderating, though I can’t (and won’t) claim to be impartial.

In truth, all of the folks on the panel have worked with a number of different platforms – they’re representing one just for the sake of the panel.

I’m hopeful we’ll get beyond “what CMS is the best” and on to a more nuanced “how do I select a platform that meets my needs, risk profile, budget, and skillset?” or even “how do I figure out what my needs are?” which is where most folks who ask me which CMS to use should be starting.

If not, at least there’s networking and beer.

Thesis: Open Source and Design are fundamentally philosophically incompatible. Antithesis: Open Source and Design are profoundly similar in core beliefs and approaches. This talk works to articulate a meaningful synthesis between these two positions.

The talk, unfortunately, wasn’t accepted for presentation at the conference, but they suggested that instead I do a shorter, podcast or video podcast version for the Extended Content program.

I did, and that content now has gone live on the SXSW site:

In our first installment of the Extended Content series, John Eckman tells you everything you need to know about open source and design. The differences and similarities, how they benefit each other and why they have trouble getting along.

Extended Content at SXSW Interactive

(Unfortunately they don’t allow embedding, so you’ll have to go there to watch it – and at least on two browsers I tried it on, you’ll have to wait for the whole thing to preload before it starts playing – so go get a cup of coffee or whatever while it loads).

It’s just shy of 20 minutes, and having been created back in February 2009 feels (to me) a bit outdated in spots – mostly the continued evolution of the work Mark Boulton and Leisa Reichelt have been doing with the Drupal community (not just on Drupal.org but also on Drupal 7 itself), which I encourage you to check out if you’re interested in the subject.

Although I think it’s important to draw a distinction between simple, relatively cheap licensing (the Expression Engine model) and Free and Open Source software, I generally agree that

Now, we have really powerful comparatively easy to understand, open source content management systems

And that this shift- from needing a large scale custom development project or an expensive proprietary CMS to now being able to leverage open source platforms – represents a key point in the maturity of web development.

What this should tell you? That large companies at the forefront of enterprise social computing — like Intel, Dell, and others — routinely turn to multiple suppliers for different types of internal and external communities. This may have something to do with inter-departmental politics and silos, but I think it actually makes sense: different vendors in this marketplace target different scenarios and will therefore be better suited to different business objectives

While I certainly agree that different vendors target different scenarios, I’m not sure I’d so easily accept the notion that multiple internal and external platforms make sense. He continues:

For example, Telligent sees some internal implementations, but is known mostly for its external-facing community implementations, while Jive’s Clearspace can and does get implemented externally, but is mostly known for its behind-the-firewall implementations. You the buyer should not assume that one size fits all.

Of course there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to community building. But does that necessarily mean the answer is to license multiple competing proprietary platforms for a single enterprise?

How well integrated are an internal implementation of Java-based Clearspace and an external implementation of .NET-based Telligent ever going to be, given that both are proprietary?

• What happens when Intel’s business needs suggest sharing content from the internal Clearspace community with users in the external Telligent community? How difficult is it to migrate content from one to the other?
• What happens when the internal community realizes it might benefit from external input, or the external community starts to involve internal users?
• Do users who have a presence in both maintain separate usernames and passwords? How easily can both be pointed at a shared user repository?
• How efficient is it from an IT management point of view to have ongoing enterprise license agreements with two vendors? Do users joining both communities essentially increase the license fees for both vendors?

Of course, imposing one monolithic solution may not be possible either. I regularly deal with clients who have not just two core content management systems but as many as five or six: due to the “inter-departmental politics and silos” Tony mentioned above, or due to corporate acquisitions which bring their own legacy systems, or due to serial leadership changes and different IT strategies over time.

How do you enable the right balance of “fit-to-purpose” (which might identify different platforms for different social scenarios) against “fit-to-enterprise” (which would explore the impact of platform proliferation and silos)? What happens when the community you expected to be purely internal suddenly realizes that it would benefit from external input?

Leveraging mature open source platforms- and customizing them to fit the specific scenarios of the community being served- will better preserve long term business agility and ensure that those silos don’t become islands, but can share data and functionality with each other.

See also: CMIS, ECM Interoperability, and Services-Oriented Content Management

MediaCloud

In essence, Media Cloud monitors a set of sources, and then semantically processes the news items from those stories, creating a rich structured dataset which enables various queries and visualizations.

Media Cloud Summary (Image from MediaCloud.org)

The project also relies on a partnership with Calais to provide the term extraction and entity identification capability.

Currently, the visualizations are rather limited. You can create a comparative graphic across any three media sources in the system, of one the following types:

• Top 10 most mentioned terms
• Top 10 Term Pivot
• World Map

Unfortunately there’s no easy way to identify what sources are in the database, other than starting to type and seeing if the autocomplete finds what you’re hoping to use. There’s also no way to tell what “terms” are considered significant, though the error message notes:

The available terms that you can currently serach for are focused on prominent people, places, and events. This will broaden considerably in the future.

It’s the long term plans, not the current visualizations, that make Media Cloud worth watching. Ultimately the Media Cloud project describes itself becoming:

A platform for open, collaborative research by scholars around the world . . . [which] does the heavy lifting in the “cloud” and provides the results as a web service

It isn’t clear at this point what specifically is meant by “in the ‘cloud’” – except in the limited sense that all remote web services could be said to be in the cloud. (See my colleague Andrew Webb’s The Open Cloud for a good overview of the various things “cloud” might mean in today’s environment). Similarly, I believe the only current access to the “web service” is via the front end site at mediacloud.org – no programmatic APIs are exposed yet.

Assuming, however, that the project can reach its goal of an infinitely scalable, cloud-hosted web service which would semantically index a great portion of the relevant media stream, and could be accessed by researchers at low or no cost – that would be a very powerful tool for understanding how media operates online.

Media Cloud is also a free and open source software project, licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License and built in Perl using the Catalyst web framework and a PostgreSQL database. (Get code here).

Related:
Calais for Drupal

One of the favorite keynotes of any Drupalcon of course is the State of Drupal address. Here’s video of Dries from Szeged:

(I took the one supplied by archive.org and cut out the first 37 minutes, including Drupalcon logistics – 10% female attendance!- and a welcome from the vice-mayor of Szeged, Sandor Nagy, who revealed that Szeged is open source friendly but unfortunately uses Joomla! to manage their web pages).

I love Dries’ approach. Most of the talk is structured around this list of the five things preventing Drupal from achieving world domination:

1. Slow porting of contributed modules
2. Learning curve
3. Restricted access to Drupal talent
4. Drupal.org Experience
5. Lack of Features

He basically walks through each, commenting on what might be going on and how the Drupal community at large can address the issue.

Highlights:

• Seems clear that more features need to move into core. Some (more) aspects of pathauto, CCK, and Views into core, perhaps a WYSIWYG editor (though Dries said he isn’t quite ready to pick one here). Looking at what modules most people install helps determine where core should go.
• Multimedia handling and file handling generally – cleaning up the relationship between files and nodes.
• Usability improvements – here the focus is on Drupal.org as well as Drupal itself. The default install and administer experience is still too confusing. There’s an initial step for first time users that is still too high.
• RDF/Semantic Web – moving beyond the assumption that output = xhtml (This was also a theme at Drupalcon Boston)

When will Drupal 7 be frozen? When it is ready to be frozen. Not likely before January 2009, maybe not even then.

The panelists were:

• Bob Bickel, from Ringside Networks
• John Newton, from Alfresco
• Jeff Whatcott, from Acquia

Although the conference doesn’t audio tape or videotape the breakout sessions in the smaller rooms – only the keynote – they were nice enough to allow us to record the panel’s audio.

You can download the MP3 (43MB, 128 bit rate) or listen in the player below:

The panel was covered a few places:

• On Jeff’s blog: “Enterprise 2.0 Conference: A Drupal Perspective“
• By Kathleen Reidy on the 451 Group blog: “Open source at Enterprise 2.0“
• By Dennis Byron at ebizQ: “Open source, including open source Sharepoint tool, in/at Enterprise 2.0“

Let me know if I missed any.

Here’s his slides via slideshare:

| View | Upload your own

Most of Vander Wal’s focus was on relatively minor improvements which can be made to the user experience (interface and context) of such services which have dramatic impacts on leverage: both in the sense of increasing use and in the sense of making that usage more useful. (Maybe too many words with use at the root there, but I think you get the meaning).

For example, providing what he called “Easy Tagging” which simplifies the choices available to the user, increasingly the likelihood of action.

At slide 35, he begins to get into what I think is the best part – pointing out where the tools are “too simple” – where their feature set isn’t the one most likely to lead to effective use by the most users. Stemming, an awareness of the danger of single tags, recognition of co-occurrence of tags, inline help and context setting, as well as an awareness by the tagging application of the social environment in which the user operates, all can lead to a more effective tagging experience.

I’d love to see an open source implementation take the lead here on implementing Vander Wal’s recommendations. Time to revisit the idea of Scuttle as a Drupal module, ready for deployment in an intranet context, integrated with user info, profile, and taxonomy at some level? Anyone working on this already?

[Update 3/4/08: Audio from the State of Drupal as well as Jay Batson and Dries' "Presenting Acquia" talk are available on Shai's podcast]

[Updated again 3/6/08: Video from the State of Drupal at Internet Archive]

Not surprisingly, Dries’ state of Drupal presentation was well received by the crowd of assembled Drupalers.

The state of our union is strong, Dries began, citing the success of Drupal 6 in attracting even broader communities of interest. But as we prepare for the broader audiences that success brings, there are things we need to pay more attention to.

The focus of Drupal 7, as Dries recommended to the community, should be on interoperability and usability. This means improving internal and external APIs, enhancing data portability, and redesigning the home of Drupal, drupal.org, to better accomodate the next wave of users joining the community.

(Great to see a project lead of a major open source community paying so much attention to usability!)

The full presentation listed 11 key needs for Drupal 7, highlighting usability and APIs, as well as the more predictable “CCK Fields into core and “Views lite in Core” approach.

Dries also set expectations for the code freeze for Drupal 7 – May 15, 2008- but suggested that code freeze could be delayed as far as October 2008 if 100% test coverage existed for core.

The last section was all about the semantic web and RDF triples, arguing that better usage of structured data in RDF formats could enable Drupal powered sites to become part of the broader emerging data web.

“Google and others want to build a social graph which connects everyone – we have an opportunity to build a larger graph which connects everything.”

I will link to the presentaiton itself when posted – for now also check out http://twitter.com/benfinklea who was live tweeting it and keeping up far better than I could.

Drupalcon Boston 2008 takes place from March 3, 2008 to March 6, 2008 at the Boston Convention and Expo Center. There will also be a Drupal Code Sprint on March 7 at the Stata Center at MIT in Cambridge.

Drupalcon is the twice-yearly gathering of Drupalers to learn about, discuss & advance Drupal, and to network with other Drupal community members. With sessions targeted at everyone from novice to expert attendees, Drupalcon is where you go to advance your understanding and use of Drupal.

Note: Deadline is Today, Feb 11th, for submitting proposals.

AIIM Expo will be held at the same time and location, and Drupalcon attendees can visit the AIIM Expo Hall. For full access to AIIM Expo, separate registration is required.

Tracks & Sessions:

• Marketing and business
• Design and user experience
• Site building
• Community and core
• Showcase and case study contest

Review the conference program and submit your own session proposal.

Conference Events:

• Job fair
• Industry networking
• Conference Social at FELT

Cost & Registration:
The cost to attend Drupalcon Boston is $195. This covers four full days of intensive sessions and tutorials, networking and social events, lunch and a t-shirt.

To register for Drupalcon, sign-up at http://boston2008.drupalcon.org.

Sponsorship:
Affordable sponsorship packages are available for companies who would like to show their support of the Drupal Association and receive visibility in front of hundreds of Drupal developers and enthusiasts. To learn more about sponsorships visit http://boston2008.drupalcon.org.

WorkBook is apparently part of the WorkLight platform, and pricing starts at $10/user/month.

Some coverage:

• WorkLight secures Facebook for enterprises (Dan Farber on ZDNet blog – with a photo)
• WorkLight enters the Enterprise Facebook Market (Bill Ives at Fast Forward Blog)
• WorkBook: Getting Facebook Ready for Work (Andrew McAfee)
• WorkBook Brings Facebook Inside the Firewall (Web Worker Daily)

McAfee, who was able to see a demo, has the best details on the workings of the app:

In a quick demo, Lavenda opened up his standard public Facebook profile, then launched WorkBook (Worklight’s offering) just like he’d launch any other Facebook application. After he logged in, a separate section opened up within the profile. This section was devoted to the user’s employer— let’s call it Lavendaco. Inside this section were a number of standard Facebook features— friends, groups, Q&A, profiles, etc.—presented using the standard Facebook UI. But the data populating each of these were specific to Lavendaco, came from the Worklight server installed at Lavendaco, were encrypted as they travelled across the Internet, and did not pass through Facebook servers.

But I have to confess my own reaction is closer to Bill Ives, which is, wouldn’t this be pretty easy to build yourself, on top of Facebook APIs?

Maybe a good candidate for our next ONE (Optaros New Employee) training class, wherein the team does a quick project. Our Intranet is Drupal 6 based, and shouldn’t be too hard to pull that in to Facebook. I know there is already a Facebook Module for Drupal 5.x