In the talk that Dries (pronounced Dris) Buytaert gave at the Drupal Business meeting last Tuesday, November 29 in cold Chicago, he gave the attendees an account of how he got into the task of developing a internal communication system for students at the University of Antwerp, Belgium, as part of their degree project, and how that development eventually took different forms and with that possibilities for publishing content that, with its maturation, became what it is today. It's Drupal.
It seems simple, like everything in retrospect. Google in 1998: two classmates interested in indexing relevant and easy-to-find information; Apple in 1975: Steve Jobs assembling gadgets in a garage; Microsoft, Dell and almost all the big names in the technology business have similar beginnings: ideas that turned out to be innovative and that became interesting products that attracted millions of people, who built brands with their use. Add to this the capacity for work and the charisma of their founders to attract people as partners and employees to shape the companies and project them towards what they have become.
Regarding this ability to attract people around an idea, I was struck by the way Dries is still surprised by the evolution that his CMS has had, both at the user level, and the call that DrupalCon has achieved; 50 attendees in Amsterdam in 2005, 150 in Brussels in 2006, 475 in Barcelona in 2007, and so on until the more than 3,000 attendees from all over the world who met in San Francisco in 2010.
The interesting thing is that the attendees at these events are not employees of Drupal Inc. Because such an entity simply does not exist. They are fans, members of the Drupal community who contribute tiny, voluntary annual fees, lines of code and contributed modules that make Drupal increasingly robust. I find it exemplary that Dries, in addition to becoming one of the 5 most influential men in “Open Source” in the world - which makes him almost a celebrity - has managed to turn his development into a much more versatile, reliable, solid and affordable web platform than any other developed by any corporation, since he has 350,000 PHP experts behind him helping to improve it, every day.
At the Chicago meeting, we brought together companies that develop and use the platform. Some very interesting business cases were presented, such as Cartoon Network, the White House, and Washington University – St. Louis, but one that really caught my attention was that of the Hospital of Florida. Rick Mann, engineer and IT Director of that entity, spoke to us about the process of choosing and transitioning to Drupal; they went from a paid CMS on which they had 150 internal pages of information about the Hospital departments and more than 35 websites open to the public that did not work, crashed, and also had a horrible design, to an intranet that works perfectly and in which all users have seen a fundamental change in the hospital's web presence.
What struck me most about Rick was his frankness in admitting the number of paradigms and prejudices he himself had to break when tackling an “open source” project with a platform he didn’t know very well. The result? A digital marketing and content communication tool that would have cost them about 5 times more in effort and money if they had done it in a paid environment. The Hospital is on track to migrate all sites to Drupal.
We want to share all these experiences with our clients and be able to help them make technology become an ally of marketing. There is no need to be afraid of digital, open source, or platform change processes.
At Seed we are fully focused on getting to know the development possibilities of the platform better and being able to transmit this to the Drupal community in Colombia and Latin America. There is a lot to do, but now that we are Acquia Training Partners we are going to start planning public courses at different levels: from beginner to expert to expand knowledge in Drupal.
PS. I have been using WAZE for about 3 months and I used it for the first time outside of Colombia, in Chicago. When I rented a car, they offered me a GPS for $16 a day, but I took the risk of using WAZE from my Blackberry and it was really great; I didn't even waste 5 minutes looking for directions. I'll tell you later how I got on with my Internet Roaming bill. You can download the application at www.waze.com