Drupal, The Name, Our Support and Our Pride

Hello Everyone,

We have a problem, but let me start on a good note:

A couple of days ago I wrote about Drupal the community. It's the people we work with in that regard, but it is also the code base we co-develop and together that forms the Drupal open source project. It's a free as in freedom project and when communities build such things together to such great success, there's a huge sense of pride and ubuntu, bordering on loving care for each other.

On the fringes of open source, you may find more practical participants that contribute for more business-concrete reasons, like better security and really good software, but at the core, you always find these group-personal relationships and people driven to better the community maintaining the software. As out South African community grows, so very fast now, we see more of this. People working through the night, I see you guys, to get the Johannesburg DrupalCamp in order, people attending the meet-ups sharing and helping each other far outside of the scope of just the meet-up evenings.

I absolutely love open source and free software! It calls to me on a very deep level.

It is a very sorry state of affairs then that the community of Drupal doesn't have the most obvious internet space available to have built itself on in South Africa. The domains drupal.co.za and drupal.org.za were commercially bought several years ago by a Drupal company here and after several meetings, urges and a lunches, the company cannot be convinced to give them up to Dries (the trade mark owner of Drupal) from where they may more likely be put to good use. We've used dasa.org.za to great effect and it's about to receive a notable update too. After immense social pressure we were at least able to pressure for changes in the site hosted on drupal.co.za to where it is now where it's presentation to users may look a lot better, but it's old, not obviously linked content from 2009 still drives SEO traffic and page rank to one company, that of the owner of the domain over other sites.

That whole paragraph serves as a preamble to capture the time-frames involved here. This is an e-mail I write personally, but there are (very) long term processes in place to try to address the domains issue.

Unfortunately, last year, I felt obliged to also post about some disruptive behaviour at the Johannesburg Drupal user group. I thought that would be such a huge ting, being posted in the open like that, that we'll never have that sort of problem here again. Our latest Drupal meet-up dashed those hopes but also revealed some level of resilience in our community. With massive disruption that I can only describe as appearing drunk enough to nearly fall over, someone once again disrupted the meet-up severely. We persevered and the meet-up turned out great and I thanked and have to thank everyone for that again. But with prestigious names such as our hosts for the meet-up, and our upcoming hosts for the Johannesburg DrupalCamp attached, with our companies serving bigger and more corporate clients every day, we simply cannot afford this sort of thing happening again, not even once.

Since this is a second transgression of the sort, by a company with a history, I would very much hope we're considering a temporary ban and a hard rule that if someone is that disruptive we will use security to escort them off the premises immediately, at the beginning of the night. Hosts like the ones we have, have security available, so this need not be an added expense and not a big affair on the night either.

On this night we had really big new companies there. One considering transitioning massive business form Joomla! to Drupal. I invited them and just hope they took home the rest of the night and forget about the continued disruption. Few speakers would have lasted well through such personal invasion of space,slurred shouts and the like and speakers are valuable resources. Even unconferencing was affected in a way that I think may inhibit participation notably. If our business sponsors for the Johannesburg DrupalCamp was there on the night (they were invited, but could not make it), we'd have had a huge mountain to climb to fix things with them.

Two last things regarding this:

I never taint people by association in work life. So I'm really aware of the fact that it's not a whole company's people I'm talking about here.