Flourish was a blast

I had a great time at Flourish. My Dad has been learning about Drupal for a while and since a Drupal person (Hey Angela!) was presenting, I thought he might be interested in spending some good Father/Son time together. He really seemed to enjoy himself. On Saturday it was really all about meeting up with the rest of the Ubuntu Chicago Loco. What a great group of people! I really enjoy our enthusiasm for open source and Ubuntu. I enjoyed the Chris DiBona during his key note. It was interesting to hear more about Google's Summer of Code project. Especially after hearing Angela Byron's talk on Friday. She was, by far, the best speaker of the weekend. I wish everyone had the chance to listen to her talk. You might think to yourself... Women in Open Source? Why would I want to go to that? I'm not a women. Well duh! That is exactly the point. It turns out that women make only about 1.5% of the participants in open source projects. That is so much lower than I would have guessed. Her talk on tolerance and openness in a community really hit home. This is exactly why I think that Ubuntu is so successful. The Ubuntu community, much more so than other Linux distro's that I've dealt with, is so much more open to all kinds of people. The attitude from Ubuntu is everything. Linux is Linux. We are all using the same code more or less. What makes a distro for me is the community backing it. I think Ubuntu has a lock on community right now, and I want to make sure that it stays that way and even gets better. Drupal is another project that I was attracted to because of its community. When a community is more open, as Angela stated in her talk, it can now include so many more people than other less tolerant communities. If the barrier of entry to a community is being flamed, called a newb, being mocked, or even worse. Why would that person want to contribute to the project? Not only that, as Angela also reminded us, why would other people in that community want to be associated with such intolerant behavior? Ubuntu is really onto something here and Angela just re-enforced it for me. Its exciting to me that my favorite projects (Ubuntu and Drupal) are also two of the better open source communities out there.  Now I'm off to try and whack some MythTV package bugs!