Drupal: The Change We Need

Tim O'Reilly speaking at DrupalCon San Francisco, April 20, 2010.

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“The change we need,” according to Tim O’Reilly, keynote speaker on day two of DrupalCon San Francisco, “is DIY on a civic scale. ” We’ve come to rely on what O’Reilly called “vending machine government,” where we put tax dollars in and expect services out, but real progress in civic organizations during tough economic times will depend on grassroots efforts mimicking an agile, open-source approach.

Like, say, Drupal. As Drupal users ourselves, we at American Libraries have found we can be more nimble with how we approach web publishing than ever before. And because the platform is completely open, free, modular, highly extensible, and scalable, the sky’s the limit in terms of where we can go from here.

We chose Drupal as the content management system for our new platform because the CMS is so popular in libraries right now. Librarians, who have always embraced the DIY mentality, are now impacting the Drupal project in some exciting ways. DrupalCon San Francisco, April 19–21, was the first time a Drupal conference had a library-specific program, by Katherine Lynch, Amy Qualls-McClure, and Tammy Allgood. Cary Gordon of the Cherry Hill Company, a consulting group that specializes in providing a range of Drupal services to libraries, called this session “some real success” on the library group on Drupal.org. “We always knew that Drupal was important to libraries,” he said. “Now we have demonstrated that libraries are important to Drupal.”

Countless libraries all over the country are contributing to their communities and to the Drupal project by working on what O’Reilly called “stuff that matters.”

What really makes open source solutions “matter” is the spirit that drives the project. More than anything else at DrupalCon this year, I was impressed by the highly passionate—and highly contagious—fervor with which developers devote their time to community and philanthropic projects—and in doing so also contribute back to the Drupal project itself. In many cases, traditional vendor-based web solutions are a one-way street: The vendor delivers a website to the client; the client delivers content, products, or services to the users; the users consume. On the other hand, in the open-source, community-driven model, developers, clients, and even end users all contribute upstream to the future of the product itself while they’re also using the product to achieve their own goals.

At AL, we’re now more excited than ever to be part of the Drupal community. What started out as a “rogue website,” according to now-AL blogger Jason Griffey in the first public leak of the then-secret beta site, is now pushing the publication into a future where, despite uncertainties with where trends in publishing will go, we can be confident we’ll be able to stay on the leading edge of emerging trends—and, I hope, give back to the Drupal community too.