Wim Mostrey Engaging Drupal

I attended the OpenCollection seminar today which was organized by FARO (which is running Drupal by the way) and I'm really glad it turned out to be a big success. There were people from a lot of different fields throughout the Dutch and French cultural scene. I was afraid the concept of "open source" would be seen only as gratis and not so much as libre. It was with great pleasure that I heard people talking about how they persuaded their management into allowing them to contribute enhancements back to the project, or to fund Whirl-i-Gig for developing new features, or that people were busy translating the software in Dutch and Spanish.

I was impressed at how Whirl-i-Gig developed the OpenCollection software. You can view a demonstration and try it out yourself in the sandbox. I do wonder why there are no plans to focus more on the API and leave the bells and whistles (taxonomy, comments, theming, ...) to CMSes and open the gate to interoperability. People in the audience rose the question about integrating OpenCollection with Flickr for instance. Seth Kaufman's reply was to be expected: you can always scratch your own itch.

You can view the presentations at FARO, they put the videos online within a couple of hours after the seminar ended. I would like to thank them for a professional and inspiring day and I hope to attend more of their seminars in the future.