This last Saturday, I was at DrupalCamp here in New York. I went because I:
(a) wanted to meet people that could possibly work with us and(b) learn more about Drupal, especially its new release, version 5.0.
It was wicked fun, and I have some musings about what I learned later. Skip this paragraph if you already know about Drupal...in case you don't know what Drupal is, it's a feature-rich open-source web Content Management System that simplifies publishing web content. For example, it has a What-you-see-if-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) content editor, so you don't necessarily have to learn HTML to publish web pages. Several organizations, notably MTV UK as well as certain clients of EchoDitto, like the Pearl Harbor Stories Project, use Drupal. I should note that Drupal can be a partial alternative to the packages that the two companies Michael talks about in this post, although there are pros and cons to making that choice.
A few anecdotal takeaways that might be useful to you:
(1) The crowd at Drupalcamp NYC split into two camps: those who already knew a lot about Drupal (let's call them super-users), and folks who were there just to get a feel for Drupal or to learn more (we'll call them newbies). The latter was in the definite majority. That said, I thought the super-users--like the good folks at Advomatic--generally did a good job being helpful to the newbies.
(2) What's most interesting to me, though, is that many of the super-users (including, of course, the EchoDitto contingent) were actively looking for people to hire. In fact, that was pretty much the purpose of a lot of super-users there. It's also useful for me to note that the super-users were not always part of companies like EchoDitto -- many of them were well-versed freelancers. Which is interesting to me -- clearly, there's a lot of demand for Drupal-based websites, but not enough people building them. Somewhat counter-intuitively, I will say that as good as these events are from a social + learning perspective, they may not be the best place for recruiting talent.
(3) Setting aside sociological phenomena that I believe informs the drive toward more independent contractors I observed at Drupalcamp (for example, read this book), it was fairly clear to me that a higher level of coordination (does NOT mean collusion) amongst the different Drupal developers/companies could be useful. I don't know what that entails necessarily but perhaps a shared opportunities/business development portal is a useful thing? I'm open to ideas here, I admit that this is not a clear idea, but what do you all think? I'd like to presume positive intent on all parties' if we get into this conversation on this blog...there's a great deal of demand for Drupal services, and no one entity (company or individual contractor) is filling all of it.
One last note: props to Noel Hidalgo, who I thought did a great job making the conference happen.
Disclosure: EchoDitto was a sponsor of this year's Drupalcamp.
