I am looking back on a great year of events and conversations with people in and around Acquia, open source, government, and business. I think I could happily repost at least 75% of the podcasts I published in 2014 as "greatest hits," but then we'd never get on to all the cool stuff I am lining up for 2015! Nonetheless, here's a recording from one of my favorite moments from 2014: Drupal Dev Days in Szeged Hungary, where more than 300 contributors went wild working together on Drupal, I was honored to be the keynote speaker, and where Adam Juran and Campbell Vertesi debuted their now-legendary "Coder v Themer" ultimate smackdown grudge-match. In this podcast, Michael "Schnitzel" Schmid and I talk Drupal 8 from his perspective as a service provider.

Read the full post and see the conversation video at the Acquia Developer Center: https://dev.acquia.com/podcast/145-drupal-8-means-better-business-2014-greatest-hits-rebroadcast-michael-schmid

Part 2 – Larry Garfield and I had a long chat in front of my camera at DrupalCon Amsterdam to warm him up for writing "Building Bridges: Linking Islands" in the Future of PHP guest blog series on Acquia.com. In this second part of our conversation, we touch on Drupal's specialist value-adds over and above straight PHP, what defines community, sustainable contribution and services v products businesses, rebuilding Drupal's foundations to make a better project for everyone, the php[world] conference and Drupal 8 itself as manifestations of all the good changes coming with PHP interoperability, how communities are building bridges between their islands and sharing innovation, and how to do the Drupal Hug™.

Read the full post and see the conversation video at the Acquia Developer Center: https://dev.acquia.com/podcast/166-drupal-php-linking-islands-22-larry-garfield

Part 1 – Larry Garfield and I had a long chat in front of my camera at DrupalCon Amsterdam. Part of the idea was to help Larry prepare his thoughts for writing the blog post that has turned into "Building Bridges: Linking Islands" in the Future of PHP guest blog series on Acquia.com. In this part we cover Larry's start in Drupal, some project history, what Drupal can teach (and needs to learn) about contribution and community ("celebrating the newbie" and the power of "thank you"), The New PHP, fuzzy project boundaries and inter-project collaboration.

Read the full post and see the conversation video at the Acquia Developer Center: https://dev.acquia.com/podcast/165-drupal-php-linking-islands-12-larry-garfield

Chris Jolly, CTO Ontraq Europe, and his company have a strong technical background, going back to "old school" (pre-internet) IT. Their main focus until now has been eCommerce, Symfony, and solving hard problems like legacy-system integrations. Now, thanks to its use of Symfony framework components, they've started using Drupal 8 as their content management technology of choice! Chris and I talked at DrupalCon Amsterdam about getting there and what they're up to now.

Read the full post and see the conversation video at the Acquia Developer Center: https://dev.acquia.com/podcast/164-symfony-shop-embraces-drupal-8-gets-down-business

At the 2014 Government ICT 2.0 conference in London, I gave a presentation on Drupal and open source software as an essential facilitator in the practice of good digital government today, "Code for a Better World: Open Source Drupal + Government." (presentation slides embedded below). Hugo Pickford-Wardle, Chief Innovation Officer at Matter Digital, helped me out by speaking for ten minutes about Matter's activities and experience on the front lines of government transformation in the UK today. Afterward, we got the chance to sit down and talk in front of the camera about all this and a lot more.

Read the full post and see the conversation video at the Acquia Developer Center: https://dev.acquia.com/podcast/163-digital-government-and-content-moon-hugo-pickford-wardle