Apr
21
DrupalCon 2010, San Francisco
The most remarkable thing about Tim O’Reilly’s keynote at drupalcon wasn’t the content of his speech (although that was remarkable). No, it was the fact that anyone listened despite his abject failure to contribute a single line of code to the project’s core.
By way of contrast, the mantra of the previous day’s keynote, “talk is silver, code is gold,” belied the geek-centric do-ocracy at drupal’s (sociological) core… in other words: “don’t bitch about it, fix it, or go play with WordPress”. Such sentiment’s all well and good, so long as you’re talking to an audience of back end developers with disposable time i.e. those people who have the capacity to make fixes (which, in all fairness, he largely was). The problem is thus: the vast majority of professionals whose job it is to make the web happen are not back-end developers. They’re designers, information architects, project managers, account managers, front-end developers, DBAs, writers, videographers, SysAdmins, visionaries, producers, analysts, translators, business strategists, consumers at all levels of technological proficiency and non-technical budget holders with grand ambitions. None of these people will ever contribute a line to core and consequently none of them will have much influence over its direction, which leaves a huge pool of untapped experience, knowledge and insight – not to mention a vast number of potential drupal evangelists and key technological influencers all the way up to CIO and CTOs – out in the cold.
Consider this: contributing to drupal – just like attendance at drupalcon – is a privilege, not a responsibility. You can do it because you had the opportunity to study, you chose to specialize in a particular field of human endeavour and you either have a public-spirited and system-invested employer who sanctions time on their dime back to the collective pool, or you have free time of your own to dedicate to the project. Congratulations – you’re part of an elite. Granted, a benign, well-intentioned elite. Not like the Bilderberg Group.
In one session I attended, the speaker attacked The Onion (clearly one the world’s more sinister organizations) for their (once upon a time) large-scale deployment of drupal without contributing anything back to the community. Oh the shame of it! You know what, I expect they were using Linux, php, MySQL and Apache too, without contributing anything back to those projects either. And you know what else, I expect the same is true of 95% plus of drupal’s developers. And yet I’ve never heard a MySQL engineer bitch on drupal (well, not on these grounds anyway…).
So, without wishing to spoil the geek-love-fest that is drupalcon (and it is a love-fest, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that – the world needs more of them), it’s worth taking a look around to see who wasn’t invited to the party. The massive under-representation of women and ethnic minorities at the conference is shocking even by the standards of contemporary university computer science programmes, let alone when compared to the industry as a whole or (the low-end use-case rival CMS convention) WordCamp.
Drupalcon as imagined by the general populace
In my experience, when non-developers attend WordPress gigs, they feel the love; with drupal they’re made to feel like freeloading code vampires, sucking all the blue goodness out of the collective spirit. At its worst, the convention is little more than a bizarre code-pissing contest where you get to compare the length of your issue queues and the dispersion of your contrib patches. My project managers are no more likely to sign up for drupalcon than they are a Star Trek convention – which to them sounds like very much the same thing.
Meanwhile, the self-styled “drupalchix” meet in private, purposely distancing themselves from the wider, umm, fraternity in the manner of the second-wave bleed-ins my mum used to attend in the 1970s. This is alarming, because it underscores an institutional sexism within the development community that became deeply uncool across Western society over twenty years ago. And of course it’s to the detriment of drupal, as most everyone who’s ever worked with female developers knows that they are, on the average, vastly superior to men, if only because they tend to have a greater capacity to listen and to multitask.
Fortunately, there is a solution to all of the above, and far brighter minds than mine have already been working on it for some time: managed distributions with paid support packages. Acquia were first to market, but from the rumblings at drupalcon, this is soon to be a far broader and more competitive space. Niche, solution-optimized products; rather than a bizarre boys-own framework.
I think there are some out there that still regard the productization of drupal as something on an anathema; something somehow antidemocratic. The truth is actually the reverse: the ability to pay for drupal provides me with an avenue to contribute to its growth and betterment without having to contribute directly to the framework. It also gives me a voice as a customer invested in the technology that I cannot possibly attain within the community through contribution of time and skills which I do not possess.
In all honesty, it’d be worth it to (have my company) pay x thousand dollars a year simply as an anti-guilt tax, to have a seat at the drupal table sans code contributions, and to not be regarded as a second class-citizen because I can’t implement hook_alter_geek(). Friendly professional support and a stable codebase would, of course, be the icing on the cake.
So, I say, long live Acquia and all its bastard siblings, for the ability to contribute financially to the ongoing development of drupal is vastly democratizing. Yes, I know, money is distributed unevenly also; but far less so than those little blue-brownie points and the ability to earn them.
