From the user conference aka DrupalCon Part 1 at Portland State University on Tuesday August 2nd and the free Drupal BOF at OSCON on August 4th, I learned that it's all about the people. Drupal has awesome technology but the biggest challenge going forward in my opinion is harnessing that technology to meet people's needs and making people aware of how they can use that technology.

Here's some of my impressions from DrupalCon Portland 2005 Part 1 - For Users:

• We are all users. And users will drive the adoption and the evolution of the platform so we should listen carefully to what they say and do what we can to make things better.
• We have everything in place to take Drupal to the next level where there are far more users than developers, consultants, community builders and documenters. We have the consultants, the developers, the trainers, etc. We just need to grow and nurture this community or ecosystem. Easier said than done but there are precedents e.g. Mozilla, MySQL, etc. I asked Asa Dotzler at his OSCON Mozilla community session if there was a book on open source community building (Mozilla's community is Drupal's community writ large or Drupal is where Mozilla was a few years back) and of course there isn't. But still much to learn from them.
• Those of us already in the ecosystem have to welcome new people and document the entry points into the community, create more entry points and ways to work with the community. I don't think this is 100% clear for even developers; it certainly isn't for documenters and others.
• John VanDyk's Content Construction Kit coupled with next generation forms from Adrian Rossouw give the users what they want: the ability to create new types of content without programming and without database administrators in a scalable, robust way. This is something no other CMS has AFAIK.
• John VanDyk's publish and subscribe which enables the flow of rich data up and down a collection of Drupal (and perhaps other) sites is also badly needed by users. It's increasingly (like Doug Kaye's IT conversations and learning institutions and organizations with lots of sites like REALNEO) about having a family or umbrella of sites. Stuff should live in the appropriate site and flow to other sites that are relevant. RSS is as Boris says the lowest common denominator. With publish and subscribe we can do this much better. Again, AFAIK, no other CMS is doing this.
• CiviCRM is rocks. The best is yet to come for this project!
• Ajax is easy and powerful and will be omnipresent in Drupal (but of course in the Drupal way so it degrades gracefully). The fact that Alex Russell of Dojo was able to hack a quick demo in 2 hours shows the extreme developer friendliness of Drupal. What's in it for users? Quicker, richer, more responsive user interfaces that are still cross browser and cross platform.
• Lynn Siprelle's training for people using Civic Space sites rocked. We need training not only for users and admins but also for developers and documenters.

Call me a "new ager" or dreamer, but I love the way we ran the Drupal online community BOF at OSCON on Thursday August 4th. We all sat in a circle and had a conversation with everybody not just a few loud people (speaking only for myself and Boris!)! Here some impressions from the Drupal online community and citizen journalism BOF at OSCON:

• Why has Drupal succeeded for online communities where Plone, Mambo and Java based solutions have not? Why are PlanetCocoon, BlufftonToday, Urban Vancouver, Bayosphere, Ourmedia, etc. using Drupal and not something else? I think it can be boiled down to these things:
  • Drupal is community friendly out of the box, i.e. it has community features like blogs, forums and RSS in and out without writing code
  • Drupal is developer friendly so if out of the box it's not quite what you want, you can get a developer to tweak it to your needs easily and inexpensively
  • No other system has this combination of features. If they did, people would use them
  • The Dean Campaign, and Civic Space (and to a much smaller extent Bryght) have done an excellent awareness and public marketing campaign for Drupal.
• Again we still have ways to go. e,g, Drupal could be more right to left friendly. Is there an Arabic version (Jean Michel of the UN wanted this)?
• How about serving up static content from stuff in text files? For some strange reason, people want to do this :-) !?!
• Again, the community needs more entry points and needs to document entry points into the Drupal ecosystem