I'm beat. After I came back to the hotel I worked out on the eliptical for about 40 minutes, showered and then went to Ruby Tuesdays for dinner. Lots of thoughts in my noggin after a day with the Drupalers. DrupalCon is packed with people. There are about 1500 people there and there are only a few vendors.Sun Microsystems, Acquia, and some others but there is almost a dearth of people trying to get you to buy there product. For once, and this is the beauty of the open source community there are people genuinely interested in helping other people. Everyone of the folks that I listened to had an occupation and they were getting paid to do host, code, consult, write, etc. but at no time was it readily apparent that was a primary motive for being involved with Drupal or why they had come to this event.

I ate lunch with a guy I met at the keynote. He was from Hungary. He had flown ten hours to be here. I also had lunch with a guy who builds websites for labor unions. He gets paid but he also does it because he believes in what he does and sometimes I'm sure he does pro bono work.  I've thought for sometime that open source is a new paradigm and this lack of a focus on the buck is refreshing.

Another session I really enjoyed was "Drupal in the Newsroom."  I'd like to have some of the folks who've been arguing over whether we should have MS Office or OpenOffice.org. It was apparent from this session that these chaps and these sites used neither. That means that they are using FCKEditor, TinyMCE or some other GUI editor that's part of Drupal. In other words the writing technique supersedes the type or brand of software used. As I sat there listening to these three or four guys talk about their sites which included The New York Observer, Mother Jones, and McClatchy News I was struck how important teaching children/students to express themselves is and how important it is to teach and model critical thinking, but also how little importance paper, pencil or for that matter traditional wordprocessing software is. Desktop publishing which we still teach in different school systems has been supplanted by web publishing and I think that's where our emphasis ought to be.

In each case the spokesman for these organizations who were on the panel said that open source was a no brainer. They had used proprietary CMS and the cost for large organizations is prohibitive. When questioned about why they didn't use other systems like Joomla and Wordpress for them it was the ability to scale a site and to tailor their publishing to the web. I spent some time at the advanced theming presentation, but left because it was a bit over my head. My last session of the day was how Drupal can be used with SMS and in that case the SMS Framework module within Drupal. This particular presenter had used this software to help monitor our own recently completed presidential election cycle and Drupal and this technology had been used in the Sudan to monitor their elections as well. I've used SMSFramework on a site that I put together last fall and I only used it for outbound SMS. What was interesting to me from an educational standpoint was/is that SMS Framework and Drupal could be used to record interaction that students and/or teachers might have with a site. That could be a homework help site, a media site, and I'm sure you can think of some other uses.

I used Twitter today to "tweet" what was happening, but I was tweeting so much that my battery began to grow dim. Tomorrow, I'm packing my cell phone charger and I'll tweet more I hope. Many of the DrupalCon attendees are carrying laptops and of that number Macs outnumber Windows units. Many are carrying Ubuntu equipped notebooks and there is/are a large number of folks who are carrying netbooks of many different varieties. I'll write more tomorrow.

BTW my twitter URL is http://twitter.com/dgdubya.