While we were all off having a good time at DrupalCON, there was a Knight Digital Media Center conference going on at the University of Southern California.

The initial topic of the day — setting the stage for the rest — was covered by Amy Gahran at Poynter. Michael Williams of the University of Maryland introduced some Zogby polling data about the trend towards digital news consumption — and its adverse effect on the traditional media industry. Go read Amy’s notes, I won’t rehash them here. But I will pull this quote from the Zogby report:

“Americans recognize the value of journalism for their communities, and they are unsatisfied with what they see. While the U.S. news industry sheds expenses and frets about its future, Americans are dismayed by its present. Meanwhile, we see clearly the generational shift of digital natives from traditional to online news - so the challenge for traditional news companies is complex. They need to invest in new products and services - and they have. But they’ve also got to invest in quality, influence and impact. They need to invest in journalism that makes a difference in people’s lives. That’s a moral and leadership challenge - and a business opportunity for whoever can meet it.” – Andrew Nachison, co-founder of iFOCOS

The Knight Foundation announcement at DrupalCON was about this: getting more people involved in re-creating the business of journalism, so that communities can be made stronger.

One of the challenges to Drupal, by the way, is to determine where (or if?) we fit into the larger ecosystem of digital news innovation.

Well, that week just flew by. This is the most time I’ve spent in front of my computer all week.

Aside from the three panels I participated in, I spent most of the week out in the hallway, trying to connect people. I spent most of the week asking WWBMD — What Would Boris Mann Do? Boris would introduce people to each other; so I did.

I also went to a hockey game on Thursday night — absolute disaster, that, Toronto 8, Bruins 2. After the game, I went up to one of the Drupalers and apologized. Andre said, “What do mean? I’m from Toronto; that was a great game!”

The sessions all went very well, especially the Knight Foundation Q&A and the following BoF discussion. There is some more work to do here, and I’ll talk about that in a separate post.

Big thanks to the following folks for hospitality, logistics, and generally making it a great week: Kieran Lal, Jeff Whatcott, Robert Douglas and Jay Batson from Acquia; Gary, Jose, Al, and Robertson from the Knight Foundation; Leslie Hawthorne — the source of all good Summer of Code things; Moshe, Jamie and the rest of the local volunteers; Matt Cheney and Neil Drumm; Tobby, Jonathan and Nik (MDW); Morten, the King of Denmark; D Mak; Christefano and Lee; Cary and the rest of the hockey posse; the Lucky’s Lounge mob; Mike Meyers; Eric Gunderson, Alex Barth and the absent Bonnie Bogle from Development Seed; Pierre from the World Bank (I don’t hate the bank); Lisa Williams and Ben Melançon; and, of course, the all-powerful Sooz.

There are many more names that should be on this list. Including Bob, for approving the whole trip.

So the session is over, and I think it went well. Neil Drumm and Matt Cheney showed me that I’m a little behind, actually. They’ve been doing more active work on data import. Kieran was smart to put us all together, and the panel was stronger than an individual presentation.

There is video — link to come — of the session. And I am posting the slides that I used. These slides are, as usual, just talking points. You should really take a look at the sample modules in the API.

Download the presentation [2.4 MB pdf].

[Update: the corrupted PDF file should be working now.]

We had a very successful BoF on Wednesday. The goal was to discusss how the Drupal community would manage our relationship with the Knight Foundation.

For those who were not at DrupalCON, here are the basics:

– The Knight Foundation (KF) provides funding for open-source development, products and innovations that are in line with their core goal: improving communities through the free exchange of news and information.
– KF needs help from the community to review proposals that are specific to Drupal.
– The program will be ongoing, with the deadlines and length of projects to vary on a case-by-case basis.
– KF handles all the project management and grant management issues for accepted proposals.
– The Drupal community will try a two-step process for applications.

1) Submit an idea for community consideration.
2) Ideas that get community support will become project issues in a special project queue. These proposals will get serious review from the community in preparation for passing to the KF for final evaluation.

Let me stress that this is not a contest; it is an ongoing program that is an extension of work that KF is already doing. They are looking to the community to help, since we agree that Drupal and KF share some common goals, particularly about the purpose of open-source software and the desire to enable open communications.

There will be some additional detail forthcoming over on g.d.o in the KF group. For now, you can see the meeting minutes from the BoF.

In summary, here is where we stand on the process:

– Moshe and Josh are working on some CCK and voting widgets for use in submitting proposals via g.d.o.
– Gary Kebbel and his team are working on some language so that we all know exactly what types of projects they wish to fund.
– I will be creating a project page on drupal.org.

We are going to have a check-in on or about March 21st, to make sure that we are on track with the work to be done. At that checkpoint, we will create the next round of tasks — which will be focused on three aspects:

– Defining and communicating the goals of the program.
– Marketing the program to the community.
– Lining up volunteers to help manage the process.

I have to say that I am very excited about the potential here. And I think that the members of the KF who participated in the BoF were equally excited to see how the community responded and began to self-organize.

As a final note, let me stress that this will be an open process. We are striving for complete transparency regarding the proposals and the process for recommending them to the KF. If you were not at DrupalCON and want to participate, come on over and join the KF group. Everyone is welcome.

Alright. It’s DrupalCON time.

At each of the last two DrupalCONs, I gave a short talk about methods for using Drupal with external data. Specifically, I focus on using external APIs, secondary databases, and “lazy instantiation” to import large data sets into Drupal. I think it’s a good talk, and an important subject for understanding the power of Drupal as a platform. (In fact, the original title was “XML, Mashups, and Drupal-as-platform” back in Sunnyvale last year.)

This year, with a nod towards the spirit of collaboration across the Drupal community, the talk has mutated into a 90-minute session, covering a wider range of topics, and featuring some people smarter than me in a panel discussion.

Neil Drumm of Advomatic, a longtime Drupal contributor, will be discussing batch import scheduling, command-line import processing, and a host of automation techniques that he’s developed for dealing with legacy data.

Matt Cheney of Chapter Three will be discussing data scraping, parsing, and auditing; plus enhancing data by using job queues to process batch data.

We’re all excited to be presenting, and expect the session to introduce attendees to new ideas for dealing with legacy and external data sets.

For more information, see the official conference page.

Thursday March 6th, 7:00 | Boston Bruins v. Toronto Maple Leafs

Come on out to the game with the folks from Morris DigitalWorks, and the King of Denmark!

I reached out to the Boston Bruins ticket office. They have set aside seats for us to buy (individually) at the following quantities. (And the B’s are fighting for the playoffs, so this should be a great game.)

We have reserved the right to purchase tickets together. The ticket office has reserved the following price tiers for us. You should order by February 29th, but can probably get tickets through Tuesday.

• 25 seats @ $80 per person
• 90 seats @ $40 per person
• 45 seats @ $28 per person

$28 is the lowest price for game seats. I personally bought 5 $40 seats to reserve the tickets.

We are not obligated to buy anything else. You may buy single or multiple tickets.

To attend, call Charlie Karoly* at the Bruins ticket office.

+1 617-624-1808

More information available in the flyer Charlie made for us. You can see the seating map online.

* Yes, chx, he’s Hungarian-American. I asked.

As previously announced, there will be a News Industry meetup on the first night of DrupalCON. I’m pretty excited, as it is a great chance to meet some folks working on projects similar to ours.

Well, Jeff Anderson of HamptonRoads and PilotOnline reminded me that I never announced any of the details of the meetup. So, without delay, here’s what you need to know.

LOCATION

The News Industry event will be held at Lucky’s Lounge at 7:45 pm, Monday, March 3rd. Working with the folks from Development Seed, we’ve reserved the lounge for the night.*

355 Congress Street
(between A St & Pittsburgh St)
Boston, MA 02210
(617) 357-5825
Google Map

View Larger Map

Looking for people who use Drupal the way that you do? If you’re in the news business, come meet up with industry professionals, thought leaders, and Drupal experts. We’ll have representatives from some of the leading sites on the Drupal platform, including:

* The Knight Foundation
* NowPublic.com
* SavannahNOW.com
* Page6.com
* BlufftonToday.com
* Newspapers on Drupal
* Hampton Roads / Pilot Online
* Vineyard Voice
* The Island Packet (Hilton Head, SC)

And many, many more.

* Note that other industry networking events will occur at Lucky’s before 7:45, so plan to arrive between 7:45 and 8:00.

Special thanks to Bonnie at Development Seed for doing the heavy lifting on the venue!

Well, it’s now official. We are ready to announce the Site Building track of DrupalCON Boston.

First, a big hat tip to Addison Berry (add1sun) and Victor Kane for helping get all this organized. And a note to the submitters: We reviewed 54 strong proposals for only 16 conference slots. Decisions were made carefully, along the following criteria:

• Some panelists were invited by the committee to address specific topics. These account for half of our sessions.
• Sessions featuring panelists discussing broad issues were generally favored over sessions featuring single modules or ideas.
• We wanted to have some true hands-on sessions to help people solve specific problems.
• With one exception, presenters could only get one session selected.

So, with that out of the way, here’s the list. We are very excited, and hope you will be as well.

• Performance tuning and optimization of high traffic Drupal sites by Khalid Baheyeldin + *
• Drupalcon Tutorial: Best practices in development environments, staging, build management, and production environments by Neil Giarrantana + *
• Drupal Multimedia by Aaron Winborn + *
• Using Drupal with External Data Sources by Ken Rickard + *
• Mail, Notifications, and Messaging by Jose Reyero +
• Selling with Drupal: Ecommerce and Ubercart by Greg Bear +
• Drupal Security - Best Practices and Process Discussion by Greg Knaddison + *
• Druplash and Druplex: Content-Managed Flash and Flex sites powered by Drupal by Brian McMurray +
• Training Drupal Developers by Karl Scheirer
• Drupal as a GIS/Mapping Platform by Jim Craner +
• Themeing with the Theme Developer module by Moshe Wietzman
• Mapping business requirements to Drupal modules: a gap-fit process by Boris Mann *
• Building a groups site - explore the backend of groups.drupal.org by Moshe Weitzman
• Site Recipe: Tracking Event Results With CCK and Views by Karen Stevenson *
• Panels 2 and Nodequeue by Earl Miles *
• Drupal and the Knight Foundation by Gary Kebbel +

+ Indicates a multi-presenter session.
* Indicates an invited presenter.

We tried very hard to hit the themes we laid out during session planning. Our thinking was that we wanted to cover some topics that affect the day-to-day operations of Drupal-powered web sites. We also wanted to emphasize some of the cooler aspects of Drupal — particularly how it can be used by non-technical people to accomplish amazing things. Our target topics were to help people :

• Create a foundation for development and deployment of Drupal sites
• Rapidly create a site with a Drupal specific workflow
• Build sites without coding
• Use Drupal as a platform

I think we came pretty close to hitting these goals. We also had to combine several topics into larger sessions. At least three of the panel discussions started life as solo presentations, a tribute to the spirit of collaboration in the Drupal comminity.

Well, lastly, I want to apologize to those of you who are learning that we did not select your panel through this format. We simply did not have the resources to send individual notes to all of the people who proposed sessions.

And if you’re coming to Boston, give Charlie a call for some hockey tickets….

So, just after I answered a question about the future of the MySite module, I got more deeply involved in the discussion here: What are the future plans for integration of Panels and MySite modules?.

To quote myself:

For Drupal 6, it looks like Panels is the next step towards some unified data API tools that we need. Trying to compete with that momentum doesn’t really advance what I’m trying to accomplish.

So, I’m thinking that the best route for MySite in Drupal 6 is as follows:

— Replace the MySite API (the backend data structure) with Panels.
— Work on porting Panels — particularly in making richer data available.
— Work on Panels Profiles (if needed) — perhaps by integrating the MySite Icons module.
— If needed, create a MySite module that fills the gaps that other modules leave behind.
— Create an update process that lets MySite 5.x users seamlessly upgrade to the new version of whatever the tool is.

Now’s the time, MySite users. What do you think we should do for Drupal 6?

Note that discontinuing the module is not the goal. The goal is replacing it with a Panels-based alternative. An upgrade path would be provided.

Attached is a copy of the presentation that I gave to the New York Press Association back in September. The summary is “Using open-source software is a moral imperative for news organizations, because doing so help spread freedom of speech and encourages the open exchange of ideas.”

A slide showing the number of registered Drupal users from notable countries identified as repressive of free speech by Reporters Without Borders.

The presentation is a PDF. I generally use images and then talk, so this is a little short on words and may be hard to follow. Some notes:

– I gave this three days after DruopalCON Barcelona, so the first slide is about what we did in Barcelona.
– That is a picture of Correfoc, part of Barcelona’s annual festival La Merce.
– I removed a picture of a specific person because I have not asked his permission.

The talk was well-received, and I appreciate the NYPA allowing me to give it.

Get a copy of the presentation. [PDF file, 19.1 MB].