I am often presented with visions of poor and haggard open source enthusiasts walking the streets in disarray and varying degrees of sanity. These programmers, artists and content managers could be working for upstanding corporations earning an honest dollar, instead they sit around working on projects with no monetary value. It’s bad enough that we have hordes of these people already but sadly they are training a new generation of open source zealots to tread in their meaningless empty footsteps.
It is commonly agreed upon that the only software worth producing is “enterprise” that is controlled by a single corporation. The unguided masses swear that a large distributed developer base is an alternative and possibly better solution to proprietary software. Why have thousands of people from various backgrounds work towards one goal when you can’t fire them? How can you trust the aim of an unguided group that isn’t driven by fear or money?
It is with this proposal that I suggest a solution to these problems. We need a comprehensive plan that will segment off the existing community along with those they wish to teach. I propose we create a meeting intended to draw in the masses with promises of openness, education and networking. Once these misguided souls are all corralled into one location we’ll leave them there for a weekend. A weekend together in their own chaos and squalor will surely show them the errors of their good natured ways as well as scare away potential followers.
This solution is not immaterial, it has a name, a time and a place. It is called Florida DrupalCamp and it will be hosted at MindComet on Feb 20th and 21st. If you know someone who needs to understand the dark and dangerous path they are heading down, please send them. This is a problem we all need to help fix.
Just in case you took me seriously, this entire post is satire/sarcasm and based off of Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” in an effort to get people to pay attention to the FL Drupal Camp.
This is the second Florida DrupalCamp and it is shaping up to be bigger and better than the prior years. This year we’ll feature three separate tracks of learning, have speakers from all over country and did I mention it’s catered?
In addition to us doing our standard *camp activities we’ll be hosing a special second day that isn’t in camp format. Instead of covering topics we’ll be building a website in one day for a Florida based nonprofit. While we’re building the site we’ll be pairing up Drupal experts with people who are new to Drupal in an effort to help a charity as well as teach the next generation of Drupal Experts.