Empowerment.tv Podcast 2: Drupal Camp LA 2007 Report

"I would love to change the world, but they won't give me the source code."

Click Here To Download Empowerment.TV Podcast Episode 2 in iTunes M4A 3.9MB 16min

Pinging all hands in the concrete trenches of the dystopian front: come out of the cold! We have common ground to build and there's monster truck loads of code to be written.

I'm Alex Peake, founding executive director of The Empowerment, and this is the second edition of empowerment.tv, your backstage pass to changing the world one line of code at a time. This is a developer podcast for developers, roadies and groupies only. If you aren't interested in Empowerment development and you still find this podcast interesting, you may be weird. Might want to have that checked out. You might be coming down with a case of aspiring developeritis.

Drupal Camp LA

I just returned from Drupal Camp LA 2007. That it was a smashing success comes as no surprise to anyone familiar with organizer extrordinaire Crystal Williams. Crystal's barcamps span the globe from Los Angeles to Shanghai, which she organized without speaking Shanghainese, no mean feat.

Check out flickr pictures from the event! This one is of our Community Building panel in which Kirk, Markus and I led a discussion about our communities and the best ways to create social spaces using Drupal. That's me with long hair (for now) on the left. I controlled the projector, so I made sure Empowerment got a lot of screen time!

If you're not jealous yet... Did I mention we had cupcakes?

I went in with two goals: Collaboration and learning. I wanted to find Drupal allies for Empowerment and to develop my own Drupal module development skills.

Collaboration happened in a rocket-assisted fashoin. I met many brilliant folks there to collaborate with, to name a few:

• Markus of OurMedia and several others who live around Santa Barbara. We're planning a regular Drupal Santa Barbara meetup to get the creative juices flowing.
• Scoobesteve from Achieve Internet is interested in collaborating on extending Organic Groups to allow complex relationships like we need for Empowerment's profiling
• Raffy who works extensively on Quiz module which we're eyeing as part of our empowered learning system
• The WorkHabit team who had a lot to say about large-scale deployments and a common interest in developing e-learning systems around Quiz
• Jacob of userpoints maintainer fame got us up to speed on the new features and roadmap for Userpoints and uploaded a parting patch before absconding until further notice to China with his wife.
• I met some folks into game development too.
  
  • Marty of MartysMind and socialsage.com spent years at Sony working on their online games and he's got a lot of good ideas about social economies and fun game design.
  • Ken Caple of Achieve is also an avid gamer and liked the idea of the Empowerment game.
  • Mike suggested we check out Gaia Online.
  • Aaron Stewart described how he came up with a dynamic reusable story engine when younger before doing things like Wayback Machine and turning into a mighty enterprise developer.
• I shared a panel with Markus introduced by Kirk Eisele of CommutyBuildrs where we talked about a lot of ways to make sites social and viral
• I set up a twitter account for empowerthyself.com that will eventually allow us to keep people posted on site updates and things. Anyone feel like assembling a guide to the twittering medium?

Learning happened too.

• I made the most progress by sitting down face-to-face with Jacob as he helped me through the pitfalls of creating my first module which you can see at work already on empowerthyself.com, the icons module.
• I'm now developing the administrative interface for icons.module and this will serve as a stepping stone towards all the other module development we have to do.

Right now we're in a very interesting phase. I am getting as many collaborators and as much hands-on knowledge as I can to assist in the critical development planning for the empowerthyself.com project. Thanks to influxes spurred by Sean Kennedy's Army of Flying Monkeys and Agent, we now have talented folks like TDH and Nihi ready to work on the project. We now also have a huge contingent of professional Drupal experts who want to collaborate on some of our key module developments.

The onus is on me to get the plan hammered out and begin actually doing my job as a project manager so that our development is purposeful and effective. I relish this challenge and I will be getting my first module online and the development plan hammered out in short order.

To everyone who inspires and assists and supports Empowerment, I salute you!

Coming soon: The first empowerment.tv video podcast episode featuring an interview from Burning Man with Fireseed, the founder of Topians. We'll take an in-depth look at his Topians vision and explore how Empowerment can best realize our common goals.

Until next time, empower yourself.

NOTE: Actual podcast audio will be recorded later!