DrupalCon
State of Drupal presentation (March 2012)
Last week at DrupalCon Denver, I gave my traditional state of Drupal presentation. A total of 3000 were present at DrupalCon. A lot of people asked me for my slides. So in good tradition, you can download a copy of my slides (PDF, 21 MB) or you can watch a video recording of my keynote.
Higher education meet-up at DrupalCon
It's that time of year again where we are gearing up for another great DrupalCon. Next week, 3000 Drupalists, including more than 70 Acquians, will be migrating out west to the Rocky Mountains for an action packed week filled with sessions, stickers, beer, and lots of face time with the best open source community on the planet.
There is one remarkable event that caught my attention and that speaks volumes about an important trend we're seeing: the Higher Ed Drupal Users meeting on Wednesday.
Why is this so interesting you ask? Well ... it all started with one of Acquia's team members reaching out to a couple of universities from Canada to organize a meeting at DrupalCon where they could connect and share insider tips for what works for them at their respective university. However, it turned out they were already talking on a regular basis and what they really wanted was to talk to others from universities outside of their immediate circle. Word spread, and now what began as a lunch meeting has turned into a meet-up with approximately 50 Higher Education Drupal users coming together to talk about how they can grow Drupal on their campus and overcome the common challenges they are facing. This is what DrupalCon and the Drupal community are all about!
As Drupal adoption has grown, so has adoption in Higher Education. We recently found that out of 3260 universities that we tracked, over 35% of them are using Drupal including 71 of the top 100 universities like Harvard, Duke, MIT, UPenn, Princeton, UC Berkeley, Stanford, McGill, and many more. That is pretty amazing!
But it makes sense because Drupal provides significant advantages to universities, including support for large scale mulit-site deployments, fit with centralized IT organizations, low end-user training requirements, lower costs, appeal among digital natives and young developers, support for integration with campus authentication and authorization systems, and strong content relation capabilities - particularly taxonomy support for libraries.
I look forward to meeting with this unique group of Drupal users as they learn from each other, and undoubtedly teach us more about the specific needs in higher education. DrupalCon here we come!
Core Conversations at DrupalCon Denver
Like at previous DrupalCon's, I'm co-organizing a Core Conversations track at DrupalCon Denver.
The Core Conversations track is a place for people actively working on Drupal or Drupal.org to meet and plan the future of Drupal. Each session is either two 15 minute or one 30 minute presentation, followed by 30 minutes of discussion.
I know a lot of you contribute to Drupal or want to start contributing. If so, Core Conversations are a unique opportunity to present in front of key Drupal contributors, and to make the case for why we need to do more of A or B (e.g. authoring experience improvements, API overhauls, etc.). We need UX conversations, performance conversations, feature conversations, etc. Please share your ideas with the world through Drupal core.
If you have ideas for Drupal core, and you are attending DrupalCon, I suggest that you submit a proposal as soon as possible. The deadline is February 1st so don't wait too long. To get your ideas flowing, here are our conversations from Drupalcon London and Drupal Chicago.
DrupalCon Chicago wrapup
DrupalCon Chicago ended a few days ago. I'm mostly over my post-DrupalCon blues. As I'm digging out of the back-log of work and sending follow-up e-mails, though, I'm also trying to wrap my head around what happened at DrupalCon. Here are the things which stood out for me:
- DrupalCon Chicago had about 3,000 attendees, which translates to a tremendous amount of energy.
- Having everyone stay in the same hotel which was used for the conference was great. It still blows my mind that we rented basically the entire Sheraton hotel for one week.
- There were two excellent keynote talks: one from Clay Shirky and one from the Jared Spool -- both are people of whom I have admired for a long time.
- Jared Spool RTFM-ing me in his keynote.
- Kieran Lal bought a big round of drinks (and tried to expense it).
- The blue Drupal M&Ms that were provided backstage to help me get ready for my keynote were memorable.
- A Drupal couple getting married in Birds-of-a-Feather session at DrupalCon was spectacular. Congratulations to the happy couple!
- The opening party at the Field Museum was the best Drupal party to date. We danced with elephants and dinosaurs!
- We raised more than $700,000 USD from 60+ sponsors. Thanks to Palantir.net, Acquia and VPS.net for being Diamond Sponsors. Thanks to Workhabit, Trellon, Phase2 and Pantheon for being Platinum Sponsors. Without our sponsors, DrupalCon would not have happened.
- Creating the Drupal 8 development branch with many of the core developers in the room was energizing. We're ready for Drupal 8!
- Microsoft apologizing for IE6 with an advertisement in the DrupalCon program guide was incredible. They even offered a drink by way of an apology. Yes, it was a magical week.
- Drupal Watchdog, the very first Drupal print magazine, was distributed to every attendee. A year ago, I predicted that Drupal would one day have its own print magazine. I didn't expect it to happen this fast. Maybe I should predict that there will be a Drupal developer on the moon within ten years and see if it happens by next Drupal Con.
Thanks for all of the people that helped to organize DrupalCon, and thanks in particular to Tiffany Farris and George De Met. It takes a lot to coordinate an event like this and it is not something we should take for granted. You all did an amazing job. Thanks!
State of Drupal presentation (April 2010)
Two weeks ago at DrupalCon San Francisco I gave my traditional state of Drupal presentation. A total of 6000 people watched my keynote live; 3000 were present at DrupalCon, and another 3000 watched the live video stream. Nonetheless, a lot of people asked me for my slides. So in good tradition, you can download a copy of my slides (PDF, 48 MB) or you can watch a video recording of my keynote on archive.org.
Picture taken backstage while waiting to go on stage for my keynote.
Picture taken after my keynote just before packing up my laptop.
Drupal core developer summit at DrupalCon SF
On Saturday, April 17th, before DrupalCon San Francisco, I'm helping to organize the very first Drupal core developer summit. The goal of the Drupal core developer summit is to talk about ways we can improve Drupal core, and the core development processes, all while having a good time socializing with fellow core developers.
To make it lively and fun, we'll do a series of 10 minute lightning talks. In between the lightning talks, we'll have a number of meatier discussions or breakout sessions. The lightning talks will be divided in two categories: the first 8 lightning talks will take the format: "Why X sucks and how to improve it" where X can be anything in Drupal core; the last 8 lightning talks will take the format "Wouldn't it be awesome if ...". The idea behind the lightning talks is to educate core contributors about problems that need to be fixed, to present foundations for solutions, and to bootstrap collaboration.
The event is open to all, but ... in order to attend, you must be prepared to do a 10 minute lightning talk. To secure a ticket to the Drupal core developer summit, you have to submit a 4 slide presentation by March 17th, 2010.
We expect one background slide to provide context or to talk about the history of the problem, one slide with a clear problem statement, and a couple of slides to propose a solution. You can focus on big things (i.e. How session management can be made more scalable) or smaller things (i.e. Why drupal_get_schema() is slow and how to make it faster). Everyone who submitted slides ahead of time will be invited to attend. All slides will be shared publicly, but not everyone will be invited to present as we'll only have time for 16 lightning talks. Some talks will be hand-picked because they are important or particularly intriguing, other talks will be randomly selected the day of the event.
This should be a lot of fun!
