Looking Way Ahead
Dries' keynote yesterday was great, as usual. I'm impressed with him, with his unassuming, quiet manner. He's not the sort of guy who you expect to be leading such a large organization.
I remember a question I overheard at a previous Drupalcon -- what happens when something better than PHP for coding comes along? Would that really mean the beginning of the end for Drupal?
But being here at Drupalcon you can see why that question isn't being asked anymore -- Drupal isn't about the code, and it isn't about the website. It's about the community, the people, and the philosophy of open source sharing that powers the whole thing. If the next best language or environment comes along, the php-based drupal code will go away, but the community will move on, evolve, and develop in the new environment.
And once you see that, it's easy to see that a community like ours NEEDS a person like Dries at the head. The high-power CEO persona couldn't and wouldn't create the sort of community we have.
One other thought. I saw this tweet go by yesterday:
@eaton said: Downside: it feels like his @drupalcon keynotes go more and more enterprise every year. 9-5 desk devs won't grow the ecosystem.
The attention Drupal is getting on the enterprise level is exciting in a lot of ways, but Jeff's concern is worth looking at.
I don't think for a minute he's wrong about desk devs. In the end, I'm probably more 9-5 desk dev than not. Drupal is built by passionate people, people who don't stop building at 5pm. But in his keynote, Dries pointed out that a small group of developers -- 30 -- wrote half of the code that went into Drupal 7 Core. The other half was written by a long tail of 970 users, many of whom only submitted 1-2 things. That's going to be the shape of the community -- and most simliar communities. An elite, dedicated, passionate core does an impressive portion of the work. And the long tail does the rest.
I think it's too easy to dismiss the potential of the 9-5 desk devs, though. Drupal needs to be looking for the passionate folks -- to grow the ranks of that elite 30. There's no reason one or two of them wouldn't be Desk Devs right now -- they have a different set of experiences and needs from what a hobbyist might have, but are they really any less likely to catch the passion? If you look at the odds that any given drupal user is one of those 30 giants of the community, given the hundreds of thousands of users, it seems to me that reaching out to desk devs as well as hobbyists would at least increase the odds that a new user is a potential giant. Maybe it isn't as good -- maybe what makes the hbbyist is that passion is already in place. I don't know.
