Summary: Part 1 of a 2-part conversation with Angie Byron in front of the cameras at NYC Camp 2014. In this part of our conversation we go over some of the inspiring and thought-provoking ideas we encountered there, and then jump to some of the benefits to users of the technical improvements built into Drupal 8. What are the consequences of your technology? Angie explains why she was excited to be at the UN for NYC Camp, "I felt really energized coming in here. I got into Drupal from a humanitarian angle. I love the whole open source ethos around empowering other people. I am really excited that an organization like the United Nations is using open source and especially Drupal (!) to make a difference in the world." Inspired by the keynote and subsequent panel discussion with the CITO of the United Nations, Atefeh Riazi and thinking about the role of technology in change and what the Drupal project could do to make the world a better place, Angie points out, "We always thing, as idealistic programmers, that everything we do with technology is going to make the world a better place. It was interesting that she challenged that notion a little bit to actually look at the full picture and really think 50 years ahead at what the actual social, economic, and environmental impact of those things will be. That was really thought-provoking." Developers often get caught in technical minutiae, fixing bugs, and such, "but then ignore the other ways that those things could be used both to the benefit and detriment of humanity. That was a neat angle, pushing us to think broader than our own selves in terms of our impact on the world as open source developers. Empowering others with Drupal Atefeh Riazi's suggestions for where Drupal might make a difference included mapping and predictive analysis, she mentioned the challenges of limited bandwidth and mobile devices. "Drupal can play a really big part in this [helping and empowering others]." Here, Angie expresses very elegantly what I consider the fundamental decision that has informed how we design and build the software itself. What I get excited about is that in Drupal essentially, what we do as Drupal developers is we make really abstract complicated programming concepts accessible to non-developers. When we write things like the Views module, you can do very sophisticated queries, and charts, and maps, and all kinds of things just by clicking a few buttons without having to understand all the code that comes underneath it. What I get really excited about is the idea that Drupal – particularly in Drupal 8 – could be this vehicle through which we create really easily accessible things that could be piped through a mobile application or usable on the internet, and used as a tool to help those people who are on the front lines trying to make the world a better place. We can build technology to enable that. This is not top-down. Drupal empowers anyone with access to the internet to communicate with the world: their peers, their neighbors, or even create communities of common interest and common action with others in similar situations around the world. "One of the core pieces that Drupal helps people do is community. It helps people engage with others even if they can't do that physically. Drupal is a wonderful tool for enabling that, as long as we can get the user experience right so that it is accessible to as many people as possible." Drupal 8's role in empowerment Empowering people in developing countries with technology today often involves mobile networks and devices, limited bandwidth and other challenges. There are a few features of Drupal 8 that will really help empowerment. The Web Services Initiative is probably the biggest one. It will transform Drupal 8 from from this thing that assumes that everything it is serving out to is a desktop browser rendering full HTML pages. Instead, it just turns everything into a request and a...
