Though I haven’t posted here in a while (look for updates next month!), I’ve been busy working on some exciting projects. So much so, that I’ve been looking for help…

Dtek evolved to its present form a few years ago as co-founder Rhys Daunic built up a full workload of media education consulting services with The Media Spot. That made me essentially a one-man operation, though I continued to partner with similar shops and freelancers on a project-basis, chief among these being the tight partnership I have with the design and coding team at Bad Feather. Now Dtek is poised to enter a new period of growth as we’re building more substantial web sites that require more resources, code, and maintenance, as well as continuing to maintain long-term relationships with many existing clients.

So I’m thrilled to have Greg Lyle on board in a consulting role. As a developer and systems administrator with a strong Unix and Free and Open Source Software background, Greg is in a great spot to help expand the services that Dtek is offering in exactly the ways that our clients need. He’s worked with a couple of other Drupal-focused web development shops in the past, and worked on a diverse set of projects including a back-end web site for a 2008 presidential campaign.

Hopefully Greg and I will make great strides together — look for more out of Dtek from this new working relationship! But first, time for a few days off for the holiday

I had a great time at DrupalCampNYC6 today! I got in on sessions about mobile Drupal sites, the Token module, Drupal and the Semantic Web, and mapping and geocoding in Drupal.

It’s fun to get together with fellow geek open source developers and share experiences about our favorite content management system. It’s also excellent to start putting faces and real people with folks I’ve only interacted with digitally. Too bad we can’t make it to DrupalCon DC.

Many thanks to the event sponsors, all the session presenters, and Eric at OpenFlows and all the other volunteers who organized the event.

[EDIT 3/2: Check out the write-up in today's NY Times!]

The Drupal content management platform is a favorite tool of ours here at Dtek. The Drupal community continues to grow, and Drupal is powering more and more web sites out there. A few sites of particular interest to me personally have caught my eye recently:

• President Obama’s Official Stimulus and Economic Recovery web site (and write-up by Drupal project lead, Dries Buytaert)
• Human Rights Watch (and write-up by Drupal project lead, Dries Buytaert)
• World Food Programme (and write-up by Drupal project lead, Dries Buytaert)
• Mother Jones (and write-up by Drupal project lead, Dries Buytaert)
• Google’s Measurement Lab (and write-up by Drupal project lead, Dries Buytaert)
• Al Jazeera Creative Commons repository of video footage from the recent Gaza violence (and write-up by Drupal rockstar Robert Douglass)
• bobdylan.com
• And last but not least, Rhys and my alma mater, Washington University in St. Louis

We love Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) here at Dtek, and since it powers virtually everything we do, it’s crucial to our clients, too. But we don’t often have the chance to discuss it with our community, so I thought I’d write up a bit more about it here.

In the office, we use FOSS everywhere from the WordPress blog software generating the web page you’re reading now, to the OpenOffice software we use to author documents on the desktop, to the entire GNU/Linux operating system that runs on our office computers. And of course the Firefox web browser I’m using to write this is FOSS, too! As far as the services we provide, we build our web sites on a FOSS platform: from the operating system to the web server, database server, and scripting languages.

FOSS represents an entirely new model of collaborative production made possible by the advent of computer networks, and the Internet in particular. Crucially, the “F” in FOSS stands for “free” as in speech, meaning that anyone is free to see how the software works, and modify it as they’d like. (The fact that most FOSS is also “free” as in beer is nice, too!) And that’s exactly how it works: people all over the globe contribute to the development of FOSS, often making small contributions piece by piece. But the resulting software, as my examples above illustrate, can be excellent — rivaling and often surpassing similar projects produced in the more familiar, proprietary/closed manner.

It can be hard to wrap your mind around this idea and its implications at first, but it’s fascinating stuff and at the heart of our new economy and culture. At Dtek, it directly informs our professional ethos and fits our personal convictions, too. Ask us more about FOSS the next time we work together! And if you’re interested, here’s some additional reading we’d recommend:

• The Free Software Definition from the GNU Project, and the Free Software Foundation
• Open Source Initiative
• And for you economists out there, The Wealth of Networks by Yochai Benkler