Every once in a while, the discussion of Drupal cerification comes up. Is a Drupal certification program a good thing or a bad thing? Are certification programs overrated? Isn't one's track record as a contributor on drupal.org the best measure of someone's past (and possibly future) performance? Should the Drupal Association manage the program, and if not, then who? What do other Open Source projects do?

Lots of unknowns and lots of subjective questions always make for a good discussion.

Ever wanted to see the Media Lab at MIT? An almost mythical place where "...the future is lived, not imagined ... a world where radical technology advances are taken for granted, ..." and technology is designed "... for people to create a better future".

I've visited the Media Lab before and it is highly recommended. This is your chance.

This week, twelve of us have gathered in Paris to continue our work on upgrading drupal.org.

Last week, we met at DrupalCamp Köln in Germany to start planning the Drupal.org redesign work. The intent of the meeting was to get a better handle on the work ahead of us, and to make preliminary design decisions. Further, we're starting to establish how we'll work together, and ultimately, how we scale out the work in the future.

We all went home from Germany with additional work to do:

As promised, we're organizing a series of sprints to help push the drupal.org redesign closer to completion. The drupal.org redesign is a massive project, and, when implemented, will be an important milestone for our community.

Good news! During the week of December 15, we're organizing a 5-day Fields in Drupal core code sprint at Acquia! The goal is to get CCK functionality into Drupal 7.

So far, Karen, Yves and Barry have signed up -- Karen and Yves are the main CCK maintainers, and Barry has done a lot of work on CCK as well.