So, apparently, I've been a little lazy with respect to my blog. It's not as though I haven't been busy though. Anyway, I'm about to go on a little vacation so I thought I'd bundle up a little news...

1) The Koumbit project is really picking up steam now even if the current website still really sucks. A whole series of contracts have come through and we have half a dozen geeks working near-fulltime at the moment. We are working on a new site too. It'll be a multilingual Drupal site using the internationalisation (i18n) module. It had been a long time since I had tried the i18n module... things are coming together nicely... except that it still requires patches to the core files. WTF!? I don't get why the Drupal community hasn't rallied around this module. In my circles, the innaquate management of multilingual content is the most prominently recognised limitation remaining with Drupal. Anyway, Koumbit is going strong and the contrats are pilling up. It is just a matter of time before we upgrade our infrastructure from a one-server to a four-server configuration and get in touch with the other principal players in the Drupal sphere to figure out how we can all collaborate more effectively.

2) We have started work on a voting module for Drupal that will enable groups to take decisions via the web and evaluate the representativity/validity of these decisions. I have been talking about this idea for years now and it is finally getting underway. While we are still at a very preliminary stage, i.e. we have almost no code to speak of, the idea has matured through a series of discussions and planning exercises. You can find out (a little) more about this project at voting.gnuvernment.org. The coolest thing is that Koumbit now has some $$ to reinvest into R&D and this project is likely to get a piece of the pie.

3) And finally I'll mention that I have been working on tons of Drupal sites even if I haven't yet listed any of the recent ones in the "websites section" of my blog. Probably the proudest moment recently was successfully upgrading a site from Drupal 4.2 to 4.6. This is pretty key as a whole bunch of my/our older clients are going to be needing this very soon... especially with the recent security holes found in Drupal and the fact that the older versions are no longer being supported.

Anyway, that's all for now... not because I don't have more news to share... I just need to get some real work done before I leave. :-)

So what does GNUvernment mean anyway? Why don't you tell me?

I first heard the term "GNUvernment" from William Waits. In fact, if you look it up on Google you'll find this. Let's keep this discussion going...

One thing is for sure, the roots of the word "gnuvernment" are "GNU" and "government". Each of these evokes a series of founding principles which, in turn, shape and are shaped by our societies' and their increasing use and dependence on technology.

What happens if you try to take the best principles of each and apply them to the other? I don't know. But it doesn't mean that I shouldn't even try to imagine it. Hmmmm... so what do you get when you take the best values from "GNU" and "government", mix in a dash of techno-revolutionary pipe dreaming and a pinch of common sense? Why don't you tell me?