Double Header: Branding the Bazaar, and Drupal Content Management System
Date and Time
Wednesday, August 19, 2009 from 6:30 pm to 9:00 pm
Location
MIT Building E-51, Room 315
Doug Sweetser
Patrick Keating
Summary
Two short talks: one on opensource brnading, and one on Drupal
Abstract
Patrick Keating: How can a brand add equity to and be controlled by the organization when its product(s) and brand heritage are, at least in part, developed by volunteers outside of the company's control? If recent acquisitions by Yahoo and Oracle are any indication, this seemingly unusual question is one faced and increasingly answered by today's leading Commercial Open Source organizations. Doug Sweetser: HTML was designed so the physicists at CERN could present a paper with a few figures and data by adding a tags that could be remembered and typed in vi or emacs. The format was meant to tolerate the kinds of errors individuals make. For a web site with where many people can contribute content, site management goes beyond what HTML alone can do. Yet there are so many technologies which quickly change. Who has the time to keep track of how these technologies work with the diverse collections of available browsers? Rely on another community to update and evolve the software in the open.