Yasuko

In a few hours, I'll be on a train to D.C. to attend my second DrupalCon, the annual North American conference dedicated to Drupal, the open-source content management system and web development framework. I will be away until Saturday. Yasuko is now teaching in Tokyo and will not return until March 10. It is one of the very rare times that both Yasuko and I will be away from CRS while CRS remains open. We leave the Center in your very capable hands. Officially, Yasuko's class assistant Makiko Mizuta and artists-in-residence Mariko Endo, Nana Masuda, and Aya Shibahara have the keys and will run the show, and Michael McCullough will lead the meditation, but all of you are responsible for maintaining the great energy and community spirit that keeps CRS going. I am more and more grateful toward and inspired by you guys and your ready willingness to help make CRS as special as possible. Thank you for letting me trust you.

In the fall of 2007 we re-built our web site using Drupal, and since that time I have slowly learned more and more about it and taken part in the Drupal community. Like CRS, Drupal is built by many amazing and brilliant people, most of whom give their time and ideas freely in order to help create the best web platform possible. Their enthusiasm to make the web a more powerful and easier-to-use tool in order to make the world a better place is inspiring and intellectually stimulating. Cloud problem solving can be something to behold. Most if not all of the time in this community egos are checked at the door (or thrown out of the door!) and the best ideas win out.

Our web site of course has had frequent ahem issues. I am constantly trying to improve things and don't always have time to test thoroughly first. And I can't read Japanese, making it difficult to always stay on top of a bilingual site. Fortunately, Aya and Nana are learning and helping me more and more.

Our web site does not yet begin to reflect the vision we have for it. But we'll get there. The Drupal community is, as always, on the verge of contributing some powerful new features: better search, better shopping, better calendar system, more and better handling of images and multimedia. Our move to a better space ought to both require more of our site and provide us with greater staff resources to fulfill those requirements. As well, we hope to free up more of our time to create exciting new print and multimedia content for you on a regular basis. In four day's time, I hope to be a little bit closer to fulfilling that vision, to the Drupal community, and ultimately to all of you.

See you next week!

Christopher Pelham
Director
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