Vamos Al Futuro: World View Diversity and Open Source

mabfire

Being a professional in the Drupal community often keeps one focused on only the highest technology and focused on the present and future. And while the future is rushing towards us at what feels like a faster and faster pace, sometimes taking a breath and looking at where we are positioned in the context of the past and at the nexus of cultural history can be a healthy moment to pause on what this means and how we can move into the future while not forgetting the past.

As Drupal 8 is finally out in the world being used to build, Drupal is arguably the only one truly globalized open source CMS. Drupal powers an every growing scope of the internet including academic institutions, Fortune 500 platforms, grassroots election sites and activist portals - and the global potential for intercultural collaboration and use cases will only continue to grow as multi-lingual becomes a first class in-core citizen.

Based on past talks around the same theme in DrupalCamp Mexico, Drupal Picchu, Drupal Camp Costa Rica and BADcamp, I’ll talk about how some indigenous philosophical traditions actually presage and inform many technical and community development best practices, strategies and techniques.

When I first saw Drupal back in 4.7 while working at an indigenous rights non-profit, I had a sense that this tool and community was going to be crucial to communication and knowledge frameworks that are critical for the future of our planet. Sitting in the end user and content camp for much of Drupal’s development cycle, I’ve been an observer and early ‘beta tester’ of some of the key modules like Views (now in core). As we are on the cusp of seeing so many improvements to the experience and the adoption grow globally a lot of why I stuck with Drupal is now coming to fruition.

This is Drupal. What we have to start from and the biggest asset that Drupal has is the incredible community of people that develop it's core, use it to get their content to the world make it easy to host, consult on strategies and share approaches with others through an international network of events & trainings.

We need to widen our scope of what this thing can do - and how we build ontologies, process, and set the tone of the true innovation around content collaboration, editing, developer experience and community collaboration to continue to iterate and grow.

I want to inspire and educate developers and others in the community with both how technology can really help with the “original” grass roots movements of indigenous peoples, as well as share the surprisingly relevant and useful ancient wisdom that many of these indigenous cultures are for the first time able to share with global audiences through very modern technologies such as Drupal. As technology evolves, we need to ensure that internet culture and indeed global culture is evolved with it as much as eroded by it.

https://www.drupalgovcon.org/program/sessions/vamos-al-futuro-world-view-diversity-and-open-source

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