We started the process of becoming a B Corporation early in 2013 after being exposed to it through HubOttawa in January. Initially it seemed like it would be an interesting way to more officially support the kind of work that we've been doing since we began in 1999. There are plenty of people who see starting a web business as a type of get-rich-quick scheme. I started OpenConcept for a very different reason; I saw that running a small business could be a way I could work to make the world better.
I was surprised though when I first took the online assessment at how much better OpenConcept...
Community
By Mike Gifford
on 10/04/2013
We were successfully able to raise the funds to bring Vincenzo to DrupalCon. Thanks everyone, was a great community effort!
I first encountered @falcon03 in the Drupal 8 issue queue in September of 2012. At that point I didn't know why he was interested in accessibility issues or what, if anything, he had to contribute to the discussion. With the Drupal 7 Core issue queues, over 400 people have participated in the discussions, patches and tests. Most are active on just a couple issues out of the many that were tagged with accessibility. A few of the participants, like Jason Kiss, had...
I first encountered @falcon03 in the Drupal 8 issue queue in September of 2012. At that point I didn't know why he was interested in accessibility issues or what, if anything, he had to contribute to the discussion. With the Drupal 7 Core issue queues, over 400 people have participated in the discussions, patches and tests. Most are active on just a couple issues out of the many that were tagged with accessibility. A few of the participants, like Jason Kiss, had...
By Mike Gifford
on 25/03/2013
We really enjoyed the opportunity to be part of organizing Ottawa's first DrupalCamp. It was a great success, and as a platinum sponsor we were happy to see it take place. There were a lot of good presentations, but we'd like to highlight a few of them here on our site. The first is a great talk by Tom Erickson, CEO of Acquia talking about Drupal & government around the world. As an Acquia Partner, OpenConcept was really happy that so many of their team was able to come in to participate in this event.
It was also a pleasure to have Andrew Hoppin, CEO of New Amsterdam Ideas involved in...
It was also a pleasure to have Andrew Hoppin, CEO of New Amsterdam Ideas involved in...
By Mike Gifford
on 03/03/2009
I think there are a number of ways that Drupal 7 could be much more accessible out of the box than it is right now. I've spent a bit of time working on a few items to improve and document some accessibility enhancements. Spent some time going through WCAG 2.0 documentation & comparing it with Drupal Core. And have been making patches and proposing best practices enhancements for a number of projects.
I'm definitely much more of a PHP/MySQL developer, but the complexity of finding a neat solution that works for SEO, across all major browsers, and also with several screen readers is pretty...
I'm definitely much more of a PHP/MySQL developer, but the complexity of finding a neat solution that works for SEO, across all major browsers, and also with several screen readers is pretty...
By Mike Gifford
on 30/08/2008
Drupal tries to make it as easy as possible for users to start participating in an online community. A lot of effort has been put into making the user registration process as simple as possible, however, given the nature of online spammers/hackers it is important to put in some controls to see that only the people you want to give access to are given rights on your site.
So usually users will either see a text box on the sidebar, or click on a link which takes them to a registration page(full sized version of the one to the right). This will allow you to enter in your preferred username...
So usually users will either see a text box on the sidebar, or click on a link which takes them to a registration page(full sized version of the one to the right). This will allow you to enter in your preferred username...
By Mike Gifford
on 20/07/2007
Like everyone else out there I'm sick of spam but like the idea of bringing user feedback to blog notes like this. I thought I'd list some alternatives to those wiggly letters that are so often inconsistently applied and are often difficult to read. CAPTCHA stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. Solving captchas should be fun, or at least less monotonous. I'd like to see these implemented in open source applications like Drupal and perhaps we'll get the time to do this ourselves at some time.
Type in the time displayed on an analog clock or...
Type in the time displayed on an analog clock or...
By Mike Gifford
on 17/04/2007
I've been listening to some very interesting podcasts lately on Open Source Conversations, the best have been focused on the concept of the wiki. The most inspiring have been Mitchell Kapor's Wikipedia and Knowledge Communities and the panel discussion with Josh Bancroft, Ned Gulley and a few others, available in the podcast's archive, Wikis in Enterprises - Wikimania 2006.
It's been a week or so since I listened to Mitchell's talk. Couple things that struck me from this was the fact that despite the fact that Wikipedia is having a huge impact on how we work, and how we will do so in the...
It's been a week or so since I listened to Mitchell's talk. Couple things that struck me from this was the fact that despite the fact that Wikipedia is having a huge impact on how we work, and how we will do so in the...