Day two of our video work station and we captured another nice little video. A little more serious than the bacon haze!

Robin Puga and I go way back, as we explain in the video. He’s finishing up a stint at the BC Institute For Co-operative Studies and looking at starting a co-op of his own here in Vancouver, likely with a focus on web work and open source.

The Chicago Tech Cooperative and Civic Actions are the two co-op related companies that I know doing Drupal related work. I think the co-op model and open source are a good fit, as is co-op and independent web workers. I’m hoping that Robin does give a session on “What is the co-op model?” at BarCamp Vancouver.

Find out more about co-ops and Robin’s progress at Each for All, a radio show and podcast about co-op models.

I’m heading to Boston for the next 6 days for the annual North American Drupal convention, aka Drupalcon Boston 2008.

It’s no secret that I’m a fan of the Drupal framework (I’m a Permanent Member of the Belgian-based Drupal Association), but the relevance here is my experience with open source development communities and methodologies in general. I was impressed and moved by Matt Mullenweg’s keynote at the recently finished Northern Voice 2008 conference: almost half of it was dedicated to open source. One line that he said really rang true for me (paraphrased): “the long term utility of proprietary software trends toward zero”.

I’m giving one presentation on mapping business requirements to code, participating in a panel on training your in house team on Drupal, and helping to moderate a birds of a feather (BoF) session on RDF and the Semantic Web in Drupal. Oh, and likely having one or two business and technical meetings ranging from my friends at brand new Acquia, to those crazy aggregation hackers from D.C., Development Seed.

While the conference is sold out (800 seats!), there are various social events in and around the conference. Drop a comment if you’d like to meet up while I’m in Boston. Are you using Dopplr yet? I’m finding it to be a useful tool, feel free to add me to see where I’ll show up next.