Jacob Redding, John Zhu, and Scales ran this session. I've known Scales for about a year and a half and was pretty amazed (but not surprised) when he announced that he was moving to China. The three of them talked about China, the Drupal project, and why the Open Source community makes so much sense in the Chinese environment.

Jay Batson and Dries presented an introduction to Acquia. This is a report on what was said and is based on my notes at the time.

Dries had the idea to start a company and at Drupalcon in Sunnyvale, Jay "dropped out of the sky". Drupal was finding its way to a tipping point. Its usability has improved, but still could be further improved upon and to be really successful the overall ecosystem must be increased.

Acquia will seek to be a provider of services like Ubuntu, Zend, RedHat, and MySQL all of which have commercial ventures/companies behind them.

Cooperation and Collaboration--can it happen between shops?

One of the challenges faced by different Drupal houses is overlap of efforts. For any given client, there may be several solutions for the same problem that has faced other developers. Similar solutions come up again and and again--meaning there is a waste of time and a waste of code. Often code that goes into a client project, it dies in a client project. If code is contributable back to the community, share it. It belongs in Drupal CVS.

Despite two wars, a looming recession, a shrinking job market, and a tanking stock exchange, the arts may have one of the best years in decades.

In 1992, the National Endowment for the Arts appropriation was almost $176 million--the largest ever. Little did the agency know, that a piece created by Serrano in 1988 was poised to cause the agency the most precipitous decline ever.

Between 1989 and 1990, the Corcoran Gallery displayed Mapplethorpe and Serrano works that created a bit of a firestorm. The NEA continued to enjoy fairly robust funding until 1994 when the Republican party took over. Congress very nearly eliminated funding all-together. The agency's budget was cut by 40% dropping its funding levels to $99.5 million. This may seem like a lot of money, but in a country as large as the United States, it is a tiny drop.

To illustrate, in 2003/2004 The following countries funded, per capita, at the following rates (in Canadian Dollars):

My family has taken a short working vacation and flown to Orlando to see the mouse. Despite waking up at 5 am to get an early morning flight, the time change had us arriving mid afternoon and not getting to the hotel until dinner time. We are staying at the mouse's "Animal Kingdom Lodge" and I must say that arriving at the airport, not having to pick up luggage, and having a coach take us to the door of the resort was pretty terrific. We were delighted to find out that they upgraded our room to a "Savannah" view which has us looking out on ostriches, giraffes, and water-buffalo from our balcony. Pretty cool.

Happy New Year! I hope you have a healthy, prosperous, and happy 2008.