A physical object these days, from a car to a camera, is more defined by software than hardware.  For instance the gas pedal in your car is not actually attached to the engine.  In the old days is was attached to a cable that controlled a valve in the carburetor – push is hard and the valve let in more gas and the engine ran faster.  How it functioned was defined by the hardware components and their mechanical adjustments.  Today your gas pedal controls a switch that feeds information into a computer which based on its programmed responses will tell different parts of the engine to react based on your input.   It is possible to change the programming to make your car super gas-efficient or a race-ready speed rocket – still within the larger limits of the engine and other components, but there can be a considerable range of software variability possible.  Other hardware has the same issues – for instance the shutter button on your camera isn’t actually attached to the camera shutter – again it triggers a stream of software cause and effect.

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I just finished The Craftsman by Richard Sennett.  I don’t quite remember how I came across the book, but I’m glad I did.  It is a thoughtful and well presented work on the concepts of craft and craftsmanship with much application to our modern work lives.  I see his presentation as breaking down into two broad categories – management and teaching.  Here I’ll talk on the management side.

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I am leading an effort at our university to create a community resource site to support the work of our distributed web developers.  Our school has the fairly typical situation where individual or small groups (2 or 3) handle web design/programming work for departments, centers and other units.  They work with a high level of autonomy, serving the needs of their department with little coordination with any centralized resource.  Over the last couple of years a growing group has joined an informal web developers round table, meeting periodically in forums where people showcase their latest projects, and use those as jumping off points for the group to share ideas, lessons learned and other knowledge.

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A wiki page on Drupal Groups has a growing list of educational institutions running Drupal.  I bet you could cross-check this list against similar listings for WordPress usage and find many of the same names.  Using one doesn’t presuppose using the other.  In fact both can be valuable pieces of the institutional web tool belt, serving a wide range of uses and users.  The important thing to remember is we technology people care about these ‘plumbing’ issues.  Normal people just want their web sites/applications to work.

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The deeper I dig into Drupal as a content management system the more impressed I am.  Especially for creating community sites it has powerful core-based features for things like relationship behaviors, forums, and individual user blogs.  The coming release of Drupal 7 promises a much improved user interface, addressing the many legitimate user complaints.  If you have been disappointed by Drupal in the past I encourage you to take another look.

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RedHat has started an on-line book on creating open source communities.  Much of the focus so far seems directed towards open source software projects, but there is plenty of relevance to a broader notion of open communities.  I like the description of communities of practice as “groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly.” This is exactly the type of energy I’m hoping we can harness in our workplace.

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