Does your organization have a Drupal powered website? Are you the only one who understands how it works and the community that powers it? If so, consider taking your boss, communications director, or other non-initiated co-workers to Drupal Lunch – a brief, lively, and tasty introductory presentation to the Drupal software and community.
Our discussion will be targeted at professionals who use or could use Drupal in their jobs – but as non developers. We’ll demonstrate the software’s capabilities, discuss the support services available, and give an orientation of the open source community behind it. After the presentations, we will have plenty of time for questions and answers with Drupal experts.
DrupalCon will bring 1,300+ Drupal developers together to learn, share ideas, and advance Drupal. For those not familiar with Drupal and its community, being immersed in DrupalCon DC – with some instruction – is the perfect way to find out more.
The event costs $20 and includes lunch. You can sign up here.
DrupalCon DC has some unique challenges for data connectivity. In particular, there will be a dense concentration of technical users with high expectations and demands for their internet access. I worked with our vendor Smart City Wireless to design what should be a killer wireless network that’s within our budget.
While we are expecting 1,300+ attendees at DrupalCon, we designed our network to support 2,000 simultaneous wireless devices based on the assumption that every attendee will have at least one wireless device (i.e laptop, 3G cell phone, etc.) and about half of them will have two active devices. We expect people to be using email, web, and even VOIP on this network so with that in mind, DrupalCon is giving every device 768kbits/s of dedicated bandwidth to the access point.
We also knew that a lot of people were going to want to be online in an area at once (like for Dries’ keynote). We ordered 10 additional access points and mapped out where they should be installed – with six extra access points going in the keynote room, which will hold 1,300 people, and one extra access point in the four main session rooms – which each hold about 250 people. The access points are uplinked into a gigabit network which is connected to the internet via an unthrottled a DS3 (45mbits/s) link.
With this infrastructure and bandwidth, we expect to deliver a fast and pleasant wireless experience for everyone at DrupalCon DC. Any comments or concerns? Please post them in the comments.
The company I work for – Blackmesh – is part of the organizing team of DrupalCon DC, and we were happy to help make sure that we have great wireless internet access throughout DrupalCon DC.
With DrupalCon starting in less than a week, we’re running out of time to complete any ticket transfer ahead of the conference. If you are planning to transfer your ticket to someone else, you’ll need to contact us by 11:00 pm EST tonight to let us know about it. To make a ticket transfer, we need the usernames on the DrupalCon website of both the buyer and the seller of the ticket, so please include that information – it will speed things up. If you’ve already sent a note in about a transfer – we’ll be in touch today to finalize the transfer.
Tonight, we’ll take down the ticket transfer forum and will cut off transferring tickets. We’re happy that so many people were able to get admission in this way.
UPDATE (3/2): The following shifts need help:
Wed 3/4 2pm-6:30pm - need 3 people
Thurs 3/5 8am-10am - need 1 person
Thurs 3/5 10am-2pm - need 3 people
Thurs 3/5 2pm-630pm - need 2 people
Fri 3/6 10am-2pm - need 2 people
Contact Chris at dcvolunteer@echoditto.com to give us a hand. And a million thanks. The t-shirt you'll get out if it is pretty awesome.
UPDATE (2/26): Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday late morning/midday shifts need a bunch of help.
Loads of you have volunteered your time since this post went up just over a day ago. Thanks to everyone for the help!
Want to help ensure that Drupalcon is the success we're all expecting it to be? Come volunteer! We need help with a bunch of short shifts at the registration desk and setting up ahead of time. Beyond earning our endless affection, you'll get a chance to meet just about every Drupaler that walks through the Convention Center doors.
You'll also get a fairly unique shirt out of this. These are only available to volunteers:
Here are the available shifts:
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p>Event Setup – Tuesday, March 3
Help in the morning or midday. Great chance to meet Drupalers before the conference! This will involve getting signs, registration materials, and other misc. in place.
Can you name all five great apes? What's the difference between an ape and a monkey? Why do white-cheeked gibbons change color as they age? And what does all of this have to do with Drupal?
The answer to the last question is -- well, nothing really, except that my husband incanus and I used to live in DC, I used to volunteer at the National Zoo, and bonniebogle has asked me to talk a bit about the zoo in case you'd like to make it part of your trip to our nation's capital next week.
And to answer the other questions, you'll just have to join me on a non-official special zoo tour. The original idea behind this was to give Drupaler significant others who aren't attending the conference something to do. The date isn't set in stone yet, but if it's something you'd be interested in, leave a comment on the forum post and we'll try to nail it down in the next week.
One of the best things about the zoo, as well as nearly every museum in DC, is that it's completely free! That's right, you just walk right in the front door, plus you can visit DC's museums as many times as you like during your stay.
The other thing that's great about the zoo right now is that they have a new baby gorilla! According to the zoo's website: