The person I interviewed was Robert Garza of Chimera Software. I first met him at the IOL 2006 conference. We pretty much discussed most of the questions at the conference, or on a phone call this week. He was nice enough to type out his answers, as well as adding some details in that we didn’t have time to discuss.
One of the things that I was impressed with about Robert was his willingness to do things for free, just to promote his field. I think I always had this impression of consultants that the “clock was always ticking,” and that nothing comes free. That’s at least the impression that I got from one consulting firm that my last job dealt with. They charged us over $16,000 to get a rough draft of a Flash animation. What we got was a stick figure standing a circle. It was supposed to be a talking person standing on an island. I went out and learned Flash that day and did something twice as good as they did in one day.
Robert is a Moodle consultant. He helps people get Moodle going, basically. But he also hands out free CD’s with Moodle pre-installed, and puts together Moodle groups. All of this stuff is for free, and of course, people could learn that they are free to install Moodle themselves and not hire anyone. But I think most people will go the consultant route with it.
I wonder how much of his willingness to share comes from working with a community of open source developers, like those who put together the Moodle. I have always found folks in the Moodle.org group that were more than willing to share their time and expertise, and frankly, I think a lot of it is because they are feel they get something out of it as well.