The conference that was supposed to bring together heavyweights within the open source world to Scotland has been cancelled. KevinJohn Gallagher listed a number of reasons as to the cancellation of the conference with one of them being the unfortunate circumstance of a number of people requesting refunds for their tickets after Kevin published an article explaining why his company would no longer be using WordPress. He promises to refund everyone’s tickets in full but you’ll have to give him some time as it involves multiple parties. ∞
Drupal And WordPress Founders Share The Same Stage
Here is something you don’t get to see all the time. WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg and Drupal founder Dries Buytaert shared the same stage at an event called Schipulcon. While catering to the web marketing crowd, the event also has a short but concise mission statement:
To grow community champions that make the world a better place through extraordinary thinking, smart technology and cross-industry creativity.
Schipulcon took place in Houston, Texas which is the hometown of Matt Mullenweg. While some expected the two founders to duke it out, according to some in the audience, it looked more like a bromance.
Dries Buytaert and Matt Mullenweg at SchipulCon 2011 by Ed Schipul
Video for this session if not currently available but the folks who ran the event have said that the video will be published soon. However, there were a couple of notable quotes that were shared over twitter. Here is just a sampling.
kamichat
Wordpress founder @photomatt says the next gen for Wordpess is more social and mobile. #schipulcon – via
Beccamus
Cool! Some of the best tech & creative opportunities developed in #Houston like wordpress by @photomatt #schipulcon – via
Janerri
Though biased, I’m enjoying the contrast & comparison of @Drupal @WordPress It’s friendly now, how long will that last? #schipulcon – via
AshleyRSmall
Our architecture is our greatest advantage over WordPress – @dries #schipulcon – via
thisisnotapril
“If WordPress wins; Drupal wins. Because it means open source wins.” -@Dries #schipulcon – via
qcait
Wordpress @photomatt’s Drupal developer profile is #5665, created 8 yrs ago. Profile lists “simplicity” as an interest. #schipulcon – via
I for one am seriously looking forward to watching the video of this session once it’s released.
Additional photos of Matt Mullenweg and Dries Buytaert can be found within this photoset.
Phil Simon And The New Small
Phil Simon who is an accomplished book author with two books already under his belt, Why New Systems Fail and The Next Wave of Technologies is currently in the process of receiving enough funds from the public to write and publish his new book, The New Small: How a New Breed Of Small Businesses is Harnessing the Power of Emerging Technologies. While Phil was originally going to write a book chronicling the life of WordPress from the past to the present, that idea has switched into discussing how companies are creating some cool jobs thanks to emerging technologies. Phil will be profiling twelve different companies from different industries. When I asked Phil what this book has to do with WordPress or Automattic for that matter, this is what he told me:
There’s a whole section on FOSS such as Drupal, WP, Joombla, and other free products. The book is about how small businesses can act big and save oodles of cash.
So far, Phil has managed to raise $3,085.00 out of the $4,000 needed. There are special perks being offered to those who back the book with a certain amount of money such as your name in the acknowledgments section or an acknowledgment plus a copy of the book. Good luck Phil and I hope you reach your amount by November 2nd. I also hope to have Phil on the WordPress Weekly podcast to talk about his book once it’s been published.
Movie Night At The Tavern – Poisonous People
I just finished watching a great video presentation by Brian Fitzpatrick and Ben Collins-Sussman that discusses open source projects and poisonous people. I have seen this video and idea referred to numerous times but when it was referenced today in the WordPress Hackers Mailing list, I finally decided to sit down and devote an hour to watching the entire presentation.
While listening to the presentation, there were a number of instances in which I could relate certain things that have happened in the WordPress community to poisonous behaviour. I also had a better idea as to who some of these poisonous people are in the community or have been at some point. My verdict is that everyone who participates in the WordPress community or any online community for that matter should watch this video and then do a self review. I know there have been a few times especially with certain topics on the Tavern forum where I’ve harbored poisonous behavior but that is the not the goal of this website. I’ve stated this before and it’s worth saying again, WPTavern.com does not exist to poison the project or to inject conspiracies, hatred, or disgust into the project. It exists out of my enthusiastic views and uses of the software and the community surrounding it. I think a lot of people could do better to analyze how they discuss ideas or how they apply criticism without insults or taking it to a personal level. I also think there are a couple of people that could learn how to not respond to everything time and time again as if it’s their way or the high way.
Ultimately what this video showed me is that I have a lot to learn when it comes to the human element of open source software and managing a community.
Nominate WordPress In The OpenSource CMS Awards
I learned about this through WP Engineer where the CMS Awards for 2009 are now open for nominations. The total prize purse is $24,000 with each winner of their respective category taking a share of that money. The categories are as follows:
- Best Overall Open Source CMS
- Most Promising Open Source CMS
- Best PHP Open Source CMS
- Best Other Open Source CMS
- Open Source MVPs
During the nomination stage, they are giving away three 8GB iPod Nanos to three individuals at the nominations stage, and three 8GB iPod Touch’s to three individuals at the voting stage, all selected at random. The entire contest of sorts is being put on by Packt Publishing which is home to quite a few WordPress centric books. The last time WordPress appeared in the winners circle was back in 2007 where WordPress took the crown for Best Open Source Social Networking Content Management System. Drupal however seems to be near the top in each year while taking the crown in 2008.
I’ve nominated WordPress in the categories I see fit. Visit the nomination page here.
Hasty Mistake With WP2.8 Header Design Challenge
Jeremy Visser published what I believe to be a great post regarding the recent WordPress 2.8 header design challenge which took place this past weekend. In his post, Jeremy discusses the fact that the challenge requires entrants to work from a .PSD file which is a proprietary format tied to Adobe Photoshop, a program which costs hundreds of dollars and is not readily available to use by everyone within the WordPress community.
So because I choose to use free software for my day-to-day tasks which is morally better and technically superior (SVG is much better for such mockups), I and hundreds of other WordPress contributors would be unable to submit my designs for the competition because of the simple fact that they choose to be locked into a proprietary format.
In response to Jeremy’s post, Matt Thomas who created the mockup design in the first place responded to the criticism in a comment left on the post. Granted the challenge was created virtually without notice. If there had been more time, I think Matt Thomas and company would have opened up the challenge to more formats just as long as they preserved the layers and could be edited in Photoshop which is what they plan on doing in the future.
I think Jeremy did a great job with his post raising this issue as it flew right by me after reading the initial challenge announcement. I’m also enlightened to see folks such as Jeremy keeping a watchful eye on everything the WordPress project/Automattic does to see if it falls out of line with the open-source mantra. In the end, I think this was all just a hasty mistake. What do you think?
Jeremy said something in his post that I think could be turned into one of those motivational posters you see in corporate offices regarding open-source projects.
Do not alienate the community that gives you your very existence.