typo(s), tendency and text

I have attended an unconference before, but never a BarCamp. Since Thomas brevik, Jannicke Røgler, Magnus Enger and I are organizing an unconference about libraries and Free Software in november in Bergen, it is especially interesting to me how those are methodically organized.

The 4. DrupalCamp Paris was organized with two white boards and one welcoming hosts who explained and motivated the attendees to write their topics into the time slots in the tables on the two white boards. Someone set up a microphone, and one talk topic was explained by the person having the talk. No others, but that was part of the productive chaos that followed. What was clear before, was which rooms where available.Everything else, which topics would be discussed or talked about, was unclear. The attendees brought their topics with them.

I scheduled two meetings by writing them on the white board. One for Drupalers from Norway, Sweden and Denmark. And one for people who use Drupal for libraries. But first I attended a meeting about the integration of the wave protocol and Drupal. It was a very interesting chat about possible social implications of this different way of communicating, about how Drupal could authenticate against a wave server, and what use case there might be.

The meetings with both the Swedish Drupalers and the librarian Drupalers were also very interesting. I got a lot of ideas of how to do different tasks, and discussed several ways hat I already knew about, but which are complex.

I would say that the BarCamp approach is very good to get to know people and discuss topics with a high comfort level regardless of how much one knows about the topic. But some things could be easily done to improve the experience. Mark the space for the discussion groups. If it is noisy, get up some molton-curtains between those spaces. (I could not even understand what I was saying at some points, let alone what the swedish people were saying in swedish.) And round up what was discussed and how people can get in touch afterwards. Make blank wiki pages to use as a form, or hand out forms on paper and copy up a booklet to give to the participants. But, well, there is always room for criticism and improvement. It was very nice, and now i have talked to some people and the awkwardness of not knowing anyone is now over.

As the libraries in Nordhordland are preparing to get the "Aquabrowser" installed, a vendor-installed layer to their catalogues that is supposed to add advanced and eye-candy search possibilities to their collections, there is a very interesting module project for Drupal: The SOPAC, aka the social OPAC. It could provide a functionality that is comparable to that.

It is especially interesting, because what most of the libraries in the norwegian districts suffer from is lack of time and money - which often ends up forgetting how people tend to use - and how they are looking for media. Dividing your webside and the web interface of the catalogue is not helping.

This is a problem that all libraries want to fix, but not everybody is so lucky to have the necessary resources to do that. Still, library services are not less needed whether they are being online or offline.

You can get an idea of what the Social OPAC can do if you look at the catalogue of the Darien library.

Libraries are a public service, and tend to be very interested in Open Source publishing. Recently I am looking into open source content management systems for small public libraries in the region where I live now. Since the solution has to be usable, stable and sustainable, I try to focus on the three to four most stable communities on this sector. These seem to be:

• Drupal
• Joomla
• Typo3
• WordPress

My first anticipation is, that Typo3 might be a little overweight for the purpose of building a cost effective and stable solution that will last the next years. And WordPress might be a little underweight. But could still be viable: There are so many people using it, and there are methods to automate updates of websites, that people within my range have had good experiences with.  My gut feeling says Drupal, though it will be a lot to learn for me. Joomla isn't bad, either. But there are so many modules, themes and plugins that are non-free. And although I totally understand people have to make a living by writing software, I have to make this project reliable for the future. Not for all future, but for the next 3 till 4 years.

Another point is, that I feel that Joomlas administration panel is much more complicated than Drupals. On Drupal you have a lot of functions already build in, and if you simply set them together, the site already after fifteen minutes seems to get more and more structure. And the admin panel is not only easier to look at, it also makes all the built-in functionality visible very soon.

Don't worry, dear Joomla, WP and Typo3 evangelists. I will get into some testing, before I decide. And I will not base the decision on gut feeling. But until then, I have to think and evaluate a lot.