Moeed Ahmad on Drupal at Al Jazeera

Moeed Ahmad (aka mooed) is the Head of New Media at Al Jazeera, and he talks about how he's been slowly introducing Drupal into the newsroom at Al Jazeera. Ahmad has been a long-time personal Drupal user, but didn't believe that there was much chance of moving the two main Al Jazeera sites (Al Jazeera English and Al Jazeera Arabic) over to Drupal until some very recent success stories with Drupal.

Al Jazeera has been on the forefront of covering the revolutions happening in Tunisia, Egypt and the great Middle Eastern region, and did an experiment by running their live blog functionality with Drupal. They were able to iterate and quickly be able to deploy functionality through Drupal that it made the upper level management re-evaluate whether or not Al Jazeera could use Drupal more extensively. Ahmad talks about this process, the challenges that Open Source faces in the Middle East in a culture of Microsoft .NET developers, as well as the process of coming to DrupalCon with one of his bosses to introduce him to the Drupal community.

Special things to Benjamin Doherty (aka bangpound) for going above and beyond the call of duty to help make this connection and interview happen.