Integrity

A question recently came up on our internal team list. One of our team members was looking for recommendations on where to move her money.  She was currently banking with Chase and was disturbed by learning of the connection between Chase and BP.  This being just one reason of many to move your money from a big bank like Chase, she decided it was time.  Many of us at CivicActions bank with local banks or credit unions and the responses to her query brought many stories of others who had either recently or long been banking with credit unions.

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This past year, CivicActions has undergone a transformation in the way that we organize project teams.  We've moved from a "matrix" model (people contributing to several projects) to what we call "Pods" (dedicated teams focused on one or two projects at a time). This transformation has yielded incredible results for clients and project team members. This model also means that we can more easily scale, which we are preparing to do in 2010.

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In Seattle, our local Drupal User Group is organizing a Drupal conference called the Pacific Northwest Drupal Summit.  This event includes technical and business oriented talks.  It's going to be a great time, and I recommend signing up now before it fills up. 

We are limited to 150 people, and we already have about 50 people signed up. 

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"If we don't succeed, we run the risk of failure." Anonymous, often attributed to Dan Quayle

Determining if your website project will be a success or failure is tricky. It's like trying to decide if the pizza you're about to eat will be good or bad (which can be a trick question- when is pizza ever that bad?). 

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Last week was quite interesting, I happened to show up at Google IO developer Conference 2009. Committing to writing about the entire Google IO event in a single post is a tough job, so friends here is a succinct post covering the topics that seems most exciting to me.

1. Google wave:

As many may have read already, Google announced a new Internet-based communications and collaboration platform Google Wave in the second day's key note talk at Google IO. Google Wave seems to be an integrated communications platform that brings together email, chat, twitter, social networks, photo-sharing, and collaborative editing features. Google describes a 'wave' as "equal parts conversation and document" and the Wave team basically sees it as a replacement for email and other collaboration tools. Google's announcement of wave was the most exiting technical demonstration I ever been to, it was full of cheers, applause and whistling, evidence of the excitement about this new product which could revolutionize the world of emails, instant messaging, photo sharing, blogging, social networking and intranet communications.

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At DrupalCon DC 2009 I co-presented a talk on Quality Assurance and the Drupal Development Process with fellow CivicActions' team member Nathaniel Catchpole. Here is our slide deck from the presentation, and a link to the Presentation video. We covered some of the ways that techniques such as User Stories, Acceptance Tests and SimpleTests can be used pro-actively, before trouble is discovered.

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This Saturday the Seattle DUG is hosting a one day DrupalCamp. We are calling it a MiniCamp, because we usually manage two day events. This one is a little different. In true BarCamp style, we are not specifying speakers or topics. Heck, a schedule barely exists. The intent is to bring people together, to cooperate and learn more about Drupal. I am really excited about this, because there is more opportunity for everyone to participate.

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Data mining systems like Google Analytics (used by some of our sites) that collect and analyze vast amounts of user data raise privacy concerns that need to be carefully considered when building community and social networking sites. As societal interactions rely on trust or reputation, it's important that this trust can be accumulated and even measured in a safe and secure way.

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Have I ever told you how much I love data? After listening to Larry Garfield's talk Drupal Databases: The Next Generation, I now love data more than ever! The database layer for Drupal 7 has been completely rewritten to take advantage of PHP's PDO extenion. Not only does it allow Drupal to work with many different database types it also simplifies how developers interact with the database.

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