I’m at DrupalCamp, surrounded by a sea of (other) MacBook-toting geeks.
There’s a conference of Marxists using the same space. A while ago they came in and carried off a couple of our tables, which was a tricky moment for the DrupalCamp organizers: “Oh yeah. I’m going to go tell the guy who doesn’t believe in private property that those are MY TABLES.” Eventually a common understanding emerged — Drupal being Open Source, code free as in speech and free as in beer and all that — and I think the tables came back.
Nonetheless, I put on my dorky conference t-shirt. There are hardly any women at DrupalCamp and I didn’t want to be mistaken for one of the Marxists.
A tech summary:
I’ve developed a long list of Drupal modules to look at and a much better understanding of how presentation elements function, so I may have to bug our poor db guy less often with silly questions and he won’t have to bug me to upgrade versions. Good.
Drupal supports OpenID. I’m still unconvinced that OpenID is a good idea. Technically, yeah. Makes things a lot easier. But practically speaking I do not think most users have a deep enough understanding of what information is where and how it’s used and how to control it for OpenID to be an acceptable risk. An example: how many people actually give Facebook their Gmail/Hotmail/Yahoo! password, which would be a hugely insecure thing to do, so they can auto-import their contacts? 99%, I bet. And suddenly these folks are going to be able to make appropriate decisions about their OpenID information?
Issues surrounding the value of anonymity and the value of maintaining multiple personas aren’t a part of the OpenID discussion at all. Admittedly the technical forum is not the place for those discussions, but they aren’t happening anywhere else either from what I can tell. Those things will be key factors in how OpenID should be presented to non-geeks, especially female non-geeks. I suspect that goes back to the lack of women in Open Source generally. Talk to women for a very short time and you’ll hear just how highly anonymity is valued.
Anyway, the technical stuff is great, and the Marxists have entertainingly wild outfits that balance out our dorky t-shirts, so there’s visual as well as technical entertainment.