conference
We pulled off another successful Western Mass Drupal Camp. We watched the weather with some angst and agonized over whether to exercise our snow date -- They had been predicting up to 6 inches of snow. But in the end, it looked like the snow would mostly happen while the camp was going on and be finished in time to have the roads clear by the time people left, so we decided to push ahead with the camp on schedule. We ended up only getting around 3 inches and, although it probably depressed attendance a bit, we still had a substantial turnout and the camp felt very successful.
Last year, as we got close to the camp, there was angst over the organization (or lack of organization). I think many of the organizers had worried that they would get sucked into becoming responsible for everything, so we had all circumscribed our participation to particular things: I just did the venue and tried to put on blinkers with respect to everything else. But, amazingly, it all came together and just worked. This year, we had the same experience without the angst. We learned a lot from last year and the organization of this year's camp showed it: it was almost seamless and quite low stress. Still, we had all been very busy over the past few days getting all the details nailed down.
I attended three sessions. Two were very practical ("CSS and Drupal" and "Drupal Multisites") while the last was more intangible ("Shaping Drupal"). The practical ones were well attended -- packed, even. They were great and I learned something in both of them. The last didn't draw a large crowd (although I thought it was among the most important of the sessions at the camp: benjamin melançon led a discussion asking how do we maintain the Drupal community to keep the project moving forward? Drupal has been wildly successful, but principally due to people leveraging what the community has already built. And although Drupal use has skyrocketed, the growth of the Drupal development community hasn't kept pace. He didn't offer answers -- he just asked the question, although he did point to a handful of projects where people are actively trying to build the development community and help people move from just using Drupal to supporting it. I'm glad to see the question being asked.
I spent a good bit of my time trying to foster and organize the informal side of the Camp. Last year, we had reserved the Computer Resource Center (CRC) as a "Birds of a Feather" space, but it went almost unused. This year, I tried to organize a "showcase bazaar" and "genius bar" and get people to sign up. The "showcase bazaar" didn't attract anyone, but the genius bar went much better. There were almost constantly two or three people coming in with questions and experienced developers helping them actually work on stuff. I helped someone fix and update their instance of Drush and got a nice comment on twitter. (Note: I'm really not a drush wizard -- It was just old-time unix hacking: she had an alias in her .bash_profile that was invoking a different version of drush than the one on her $PATH, but it puzzled me for a few minutes until I figured that out.) It was really fun to watch over the shoulders of people fixing other problems as well. I learned as much or more doing that than I did in the formal sessions. We still need to find more ways to make the informal sessions work more effectively.
One challenge is where the CRC is located. I was involved in the design of the ISB and I advocated for having the CRC located adjacent to the cafe space on the atrium: it was the single thing I wanted most in the design of the building. My goal was for there to be a seamless flow from a completely informal space (the cafe), to the more formal CRC, to the most formal attached computer classrooms. This would enable people to hang out in the cafe and, when they thought of something they wanted to work on, to move into the CRC. Instead (probably due to my low status), they stuck the CRC off in a corner of the building on the third floor: you practically can't get any farther from the cafe space than that. This means that people hanging out in the cafe, decide to just work there, since it's too far to get to the CRC. Every time I visit the ISB, I have a little pang, because I'm reminded of all of the things we wanted, advocated for, and worked on (like the problem-solving auditorium, the team-based classrooms, ubiquitous wired networking etc) that didn't make it into the final design of the building or were otherwise thwarted. It doesn't help that everyone always talks about how wonderful the building is. It is a wonderful building -- one of the nicest on campus, but it still reminds me most of my failure in leadership.
At the end of the day, I walked around and locked up all the rooms, I pulled down our signs and erased the blackboards. We got the tables put away and cleaned up the trash (mostly). And then I went home. I decided to skip the after-party -- I was exhausted. I sat with Tom in the car for a long time talking about what a strange place the University is and how, in spite of its flaws, it's a wonderful place to be doing Drupal.
Western Mass Drupal Camp will return to the Integrated Science Building at UMass Amherst on January, 21st 2012 (with Jan 28 reserved in case of snow). Anyone interested in learning more about Drupal should plan to attend. Registration and attendance is free to the public. There will be presentations and sessions throughout the day appropriate for people at every level of expertise, from beginners to experts. Mark your calendar!
Interested participants may now register to announce their intention to attend, to propose sessions they could present, and/or to suggest sessions that they would like to attend. We are also seeking sponsorships for bringing an outstanding keynote speaker and to provide refreshments and other amenities.
Details are still emerging about the schedule of events. We hope to offer a keynote presentation in the ISB auditorium (ISB135). A welcome-center and exhibition is planned for the atrium. We hope to offer tracks of presentations for beginners, themers and site designers, developers and site-builders, and goal-oriented drupal users. Two innovative environments will be a "Showcase Bazaar" where people can demonstrate tricks and innovatations and a "Code-Sprint Bazaar" where developers can show work-in-progress and encourage participants to get involved. A "Genius Bar" will also be available for people with problems and questions to get expert assistance.
Drupal is the world's leading content-management platform, selected by UMass Amherst to for web-development on campus, that powers millions of websites and applications worldwide. It's free software built, used, and supported by an active and diverse community of people around the world. Visit http://drupal.org/ for more information about Drupal.
When I heard about ContactCon, I signed up almost immediately. The issues being raised have been of interest to me since I started using the Internet: how to make sure the net can be used for empowerment rather than oppression. The net is clearly useful for both, but the trend has been shifting in the wrong direction for years.
A corporation would have never made something like the Internet in the first place. When I was a kid, we still had The old AT&T and Bell Telephone network. You weren't allowed to own a telephone: you were required to rent one from the phone company. And everything was monetized. Now, I suspect that the most expensive thing about current cell-phone operations is the overhead necessary for administration, metering, and billing. And that's the direction we've been going: give users a dumbed-down box that only enables what the monetizers want you to be able to do.
There were a lot of interesting people at ContactCon most of whom I'd never met before. The demographic was mostly white, largely male, and somewhat younger than me. There were some folks my age or older, but we were the exception. Many were young entrepreneurs and freelancers looking to network to support their project. It reminded me of the luxury of my current circumstances: I have a steady job and don't need to spend half my time trying to market myself or bill people. I don't have to work on spec or limit what I do to what people are willing to pay for. I get to spend most of my time actually just working and being creative. I lament for this generation that is so circumscribed and limited in their choices -- and will probably end up permanently stunted by the economic conditions that have been imposed on us by the 1%. Or, if you prefer, that through my generation's lack of engagement, we have allowed ourselves to be disempowered.
I wore my "Official Red Hat" red hat and took my ubuntu netbook to demonstrate my free software street cred. I actually met the guy who'd ordered the stock of red hats when he worked at Red Hat in that time period. I had completely borked my install of Ubuntu a few days ago (or maybe the update from Easy Peasy never really worked right). In the event, I completely wiped the netbook the night before and re-installed everything. I've started using Dropbox to maintain the rough drafts of my writing, so it was easy to get my data back. I could have just taken my macbook, but it wouldn't have been as fun. In point of fact, I hardly used it, but it was nice to know it was there.
I met dozens of people, learned about many new projects, and also touched base with projects I've known about but haven't had time to explore. I've been interested in the Freedom Box since I first heard about it: it's consistent with my vision for people having their own server. And it's also the only way to have any assurance of privacy: you can't trust third parties not to reveal all of your private information to the government or corporations.
I organized a discussion about education and unschooling. It was a very receptive audience to the ideas and there were a number of people working on interesting things. The most interesting was probably Be You, but there were many, many others. ContactCon reminded me of what John Jungck used to say about the goals of BioQUEST: to begin conversations worth continuing. I suspect I will continue to interact with some of these people going forward.
At the last Western Mass Drupal Group meeting, there was discussion about organizing a "Drupal Camp" -- a kind of regional conference where people can get together and share experience with using Drupal, but with a particular focus on helping people get started. A group of us at UMass Amherst were interested in trying to hold the camp on campus in the new Integrated Sciences Building and today the Dean expressed support. So now I need to mobilize the troops. It should be fun.
I got up early this morning and was on the road by 6:30 to go to Worcester. I stopped for gas, which used up all my money, so I stopped along the masspike to get money in case I needed to buy lunch or pay for parking. As it turned out, no unanticpated expenditures were required.
I checked in, found my room, and set up with plenty of time. A representative of MEES introduced himself and said that he would introduce the session for me. I had enough time to create a quick automatic slideshow of the images from the class for while people came in. I picked "Habitat, habitat" by Roger Tincnell to have some music. The song runs two minutes and I must have heard it 5 or 10 times while waiting for time to start -- I don't think I'll need to listen to it again any time soon.
My talk started just a few minutes late. The audience was enthusiastic and asked good questions. I spoke for a few minutes, did the activity with the Eristalis larvae, ran through the rest of the talk, and did the Google Earth activity. I ended up 5 minutes over. The last 10 minutes were just a bit rushed, but I felt like things wrapped up nicely.
For the Google Earth activity, I had selected 10 places around the world and printed out a screen capture -- all at the same scale. I gave each pair of people one place to look at with rules and a transparent overlay to measure area. I tried to pick areas that were relatively comparable: some housing and some surrounding land -- most with some agricultural land. It really amazing how striking the differences are between the giant agribusinesses in the Midwest and the tiny fields in China and Haiti. In Quebec, there are very long fields that reach way back away from rivers -- so that every land-owner had their own frontage once upon a time, I suppose. In some places you can see the radial design of early cities, with paths or small roads between villages, in some the old design with a newer grid superimposed, in others nothing but grid itself. The little slice of Japan was particularly interesting with intensive bands of agricultural land interrupted with satoyamas. I let each group report out and then highlighted any patterns I had observed that they hadn't mentioned and talked a bit about how I would use the activity if we had computers or had more time to actually collect measurements.
After the Google Earth activity, I presented my acknowledgments and then had a black slide. I put that up and then said, "So. Do you want to know where those places are?" There was an enthusiastic roar of approval. But I pointed out that from a teaching perspective, its really something to consider. Once you tell people "the answer", they often quit trying and my goal as an instructor is to keep them motivated to figure things out for themselves. But I had prepared an extra "secret" slide at the end with where each of the places was from. It worked well as a rhetorical trick and if I hadn't told people, I might not have made it out of the room alive.
After my presentation, I visited the exhibits and hung out for a while to decompress. After lunch, I decided to just head home. There was a presentation about invasive species that had sounded interesting, but it had been canceled. And I was feeling tired and a bit out of sorts.
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