Tuesday this week marks the official start of DrupalCon in Washington, D.C. for the first time this year, and it’s going to be awesome. On Thursday morning at 11:30, we’re hosting a coffee for interested members of the press, and we want to extend the invite to bloggers who might be interested in writing about the event.
The event will be on Thursday morning, March 5, 11:30-12:30 at the Washington Convention Center. Key members of the Drupal and open source community at large will be attending, and if you’d like to speak with someone about a particular issue, please let us know and we’ll get you hooked up with the right people depending on your interest. The agenda for the coffee event will be as follows:
- Business of open source update
- Recap of Drupal founder Dries Buytaert’s The State of Drupal keynote from the Wednesday, March 3 explaining more about the Drupal project
- Update on the vibrancy and strength of the D.C. technology community from local community members, particularly related to web technology
- Questions & Answers
The event will be a great way to learn more about the Drupal community, the DrupalCon conference, and some of the latest happenings in the D.C. tech scene in general. There’s a large and active local Drupal community in Washington, ranging from individual bloggers and small NGO’s to large businesses. Drupal’s government use includes custom intranet sites for the SPAWAR project at the Department of Defense and the White House’s new Recovery.gov website. To find out more about DrupalCon, you can visit http://dc2009.drupalcon.org/press.
If you’re interested, we’d love to see you there! We’re asking press to let us know if they’re planning to come so we can make sure we have a press pass available for you – email us at info@developmentseed.org and we’ll make sure you’re set.
We've had some time now to look over the wonderful sessions on the Drupalcon schedule. One thing that I noticed was that there were many more proposed Design and Usability sessions than could fit on the schedule. But there's good news!
With Drupalcon's BOF Sessions (Birds of a Feather), we can have more!
The scheduled Design+Usability sessions will run exclusively on Wednesday all day and Thursday afternoon, so I'm organizing a BoF track of D+U sessions that will run in the time gaps in between (Thursday morning and Friday all day).
These sessions will include great Design and Usability mavens from the Drupal Community, including:
- Jason Chinn of Magicspark (magicspark) and John Wilkins of Palantir (JohnAlbin) will be merging their two separate session proposals into a Zen Super-Session covering "Getting Started" to "Advanced Layout" ideas.
- Nyk Cowham of Forum One Communications (ncowham) will be presenting Beautifying Your Drupal Forms so that your designer and usability guru will both be pleased.
- Preston So of Monarch Digital (prestonso) and Matt Tucker of pingVision (ultimateboy) will be presenting their Theming Out of the Box: Designing in Drupal where they will be stretching the limits of how Drupal looks and feels.
- Colleen Carroll of Palantir (caroltron) and John Wilkins of Palantir (JohnAlbin) will be presenting Sustainable Markup: How to be a themer in Drupal and be Zen and talking about creating themes that are easier to maintain, extend, and upgrade.
- Jeff Noyes of Acquia (noyz) will be helping Mark Boulton and Leisa Reichelt with their Blue Sky Design Workshops. And tentatively (if Jeff's got time) will be presenting Low-fidelity usability testing using ConnectPro and Skype which could put a mini-Usability Lab in everyone's house.
The sessions above will be more than just your average BOF meetups - they will be full-blown presentations. And they will be just as awesome as the scheduled Design + Usability sessions. Since this is a BOF track, the final schedule will be available on the BOF board next to the on-site registration. So don't plan your full schedule until you arrive at Drupalcon DC; because there's more to come!
I will be posting session updates and interesting Design and Usability info on Twitter @moreDCDC.
We'd like to say a HUGE thank you to the 20+ people from the DC Drupal community who came out this afternoon to take on the giant task of stuffing 1,400 bags with all kinds of fun Drupal swag. We'll be giving these bags to everyone attending DrupalCon.
Here's some of the tired but happy DC crew after finishing stuffing the bags. Yes, the boxes are stacked to the ceiling : )
You can register at DrupalCon and get your swag this Tuesday from 4:00 - 6:30 pm and join us for drinks at RFD after. If you're not in town until Wednesday, registration opens at 8:00 am sharp!
Can't wait that long? Check out the photos for some clues.
If you’re planning to Tweet about DrupalCon, post photos from the event to Flickr, or (verb) on (random web service), we should all get on the same page with what tags to use. The more coordinated we are, the better off we’ll be for seeing what’s actually going on and finding related content someday down the road. It will be great to see DrupalCon trending on Twitter too if we do this right. ;)
So, toward that end, we want to make an effort to at least use a couple standard tags. Here’s what’s been decided:
- #drupalcon for Twitter. It already has solid use and it’s not as long as #drupalcondc2009 — after all, you’ve only got 140 characters.
- “drupalcondc2009” on Flickr, and “drupalcon” as well if you want to use it. This will let users in the future sort on all the images from just this event, and if you use “drupalcon” as well, it will let us see all the images from past DrupalCon’s. For sure though, use “drupalcondc2009” so that everyone can find your images for just this event.
Same logic applies to other services — let’s stick to these two tags wherever we can and get the most mileage we can out of these services. Also, if you’re not following yet, @DrupalCon is about to get really active on Twitter, and Flickr user a-barth is going to be in town this weekend taking pictures already.
If you’re in town on Tuesday, come register for DrupalCon early. Registration opens on Tuesday at 4:00 and runs until 6:30 pm. Come early to get checked in, meet up with everyone, get your swag, and then head out for the pre-conference party together. There are 1,300+ people coming to the conference, and if most of them show up for registration on Wednesday morning, you’ll be particularly glad you came on Tuesday.
When you get to the Convention Center, the main entrance is straight across the building from the main streent entrace and 7th and L Streets, and it’s really close to the entrance from the Metro if you’re taking the train.
Registration will go until 6:30 pm, and everyone who’s in town on Tuesday will be meeting up at the Convention Center at 6:30 pm to walk over to RFD for the pre-party. So come early, get prepped for a great week, and hang out after with all the die-hard DrupalCon early birds.