A couple of weeks ago, I attended the fourth annual Flourish Open Source conferenc at UIC. At prior Flourish events, I've helped organize a coding sprint and led a project to develop a Drupal-based website for a local nonprofit organization, using drop-in volunteers at the event. I got on board with this year's event a little late in the process, but I was still hoping for a significant Drupal-interested turnout.

While the conference certainly met my expectations in other aspects (particularly the Android 101 workshop led by Uki Lucas), I was disappointed that the Drupal folks weren't much in attendance. I also didn't see much representation from the Plone, Wordpress, or Joomla! camps. Matt manned a table for the Chicago Drupal Meetup Group, and some friendly folks had a similar table set up for Plone, but that was it.

With a conference like Flourish, there is an immense potential for bringing some otherwise disconnected open source communities together. We've spent a lot of time arguing that Drupal is more powerful than Wordpress, or that Joomla is easier for newbies to use than either, but we haven't had a lot of conversations designed to figure out what we might learn from each other. For example, if someone's solving a particularly interesting mapping problem in Wordpress, is it entirely impossible that somewhere out there there's a Joomla developer who is struggling with the same problem? Or a Drupal developer who's already made an attempt to solve it?

To spark some of those conversations, however, we need to get some of those communities together first. I'm going to see if I can get on board with the Flourish planning folks who are thinking ahead to 2011, and suggest that we try to get the local Meetup groups for Drupal, Plone, Wordpress, Joomla and the like to schedule a Meetup to coincide with Flourish. Since Flourish has traditionally been a free conference, we should be able to get a large crowd of open source CMS folks in the room if this happens. The next step, of course, is to see if some of the folks running those meetups would be interested in rounding up topics of interest to their groups, and possibly speakers for those topics. Speaking for the Drupal world, I know Doug Vann has a ton of presentation experience on a variety of Drupal-related topics, and his employer might even help with a sponsorship. I can name several others who might be interested; we've put together 300-attendee Drupal Camps in Chicago and there's a 2k+ DrupalCon Chicago in the planning phase, so filling a Drupal-focused conference track at Flourish should be a piece of cake.

This way, next year, when Uki claims open source projects just don't understand good design, we might have quite a few voices in the room who disagree :)