It’s Sunday night and I’m on board the WiFi-equipped bus from Manhattan to Boston for DrupalCon Boston 2008. My Digital202 colleague Ben Horst is already there and the both of us are looking forward to a few solid days of learning, connecting with others in the community (many of whom we’ve worked with but never met) and diving into subjects like online communities, collaboration and the future of Drupal.

I wanted to share what we hope to bring to and gain from DrupalCon, and I think that this post will serve to help us make the right connections and participate in the right discussions. We had originally thought to lead a discussion on Drupal as the ultimate team collaboration platform, but have since decided to pull back from that. I felt we’d be more effective joining existing formal and “birds of a feather” sessions that are relevant, and connecting with other individuals and groups to share ideas and form relationships. Read on to learn about what motivates us and what you might hear us talking about at DrupalCon.

Given the nature of our work here at Woven, I read a number of blogs and other publications having to do with collaboration. One of these, Collaboration Loop, profiles collaboration technologies in the enterprise space. They usually focus on enterprise grade offerings from the larger commercial players, but they just featured a short article on the open source Drupal platform. Coincidentally, it’s the very platform we’re basing our work on. I thought the article nicely relayed some of the very reasons we chose to make Drupal a crucial part of our strategy, and it presents a good case for why Drupal may give some of the enterprise offerings a run for their money.

IBM recently announced its Lotus Connections suite of products, touted as “Social Software for Business”, and I wanted to share a quick word.

Lotus Connections has five Web 2.0-based components — Activities, Communities, Dogear, Profiles and Blogs — that help business people quickly connect and build new relationships based on their individual needs. […] Lotus Connections helps organizations foster a sense of community, especially among geographically dispersed teams, helping employees come together to share their knowledge and collaborate on a project.

This announcement by a technology giant gives further credibility to those of us innovating in the team collaboration space. The market is forming, awareness is spreading, and it’s only a matter of time before team collaboration tools like these become commonplace. It underscores that these tools will be leveraged even across conventional enterprises (not just for loosely formed distributed teams) and affirms my belief that these tools will in fact be the catalyst for evolutionary change in the very structure and model of these organizations.

Freelancers Union is an organization that aims to represent America’s growing independent workforce. Focusing first on New York, the organization primarily offers group-rate health insurance (as it has done for years now) and is expanding with other kinds of coverage across the US. They also advocate for political change, focusing on issues of concern to independent workers — issues like double taxation (when you’re both an employer and an employee), limited access to health insurance, retirement savings options, employment laws, and legal redress for non-paying clients. They provide important information and facts about New York’s independent workforce, publishing frequent reports and studies. They’ve started a number of educational events and networking opportunities catered to freelancers. They operate a basic, free community web site that lets members post and search for freelance gigs, share information amongst each other, and generally interact.

I first discovered Freelancers Union via their advertising campaign on the New York City subway system. “Member profiles, post gigs, find jobs”, the wall ads announced. “It’s like one, giant octopus”, one of the ads proclaimed, and I took to the message. I immediately recognized it as something in the same vein as what I’m doing here. Woven is all about supporting the geographically distributed workforce, while Freelancers Union seemed to be addressing the “independent” workforce locally in New York.