I'm just wrapping up 4 days of this year's North American Drupalcon in Washington, DC - http://dc2009.drupalcon.org. First off, the the DCDC team led by the folks at Development Seed have done a fantastic job. Everything from the venue to the identity design of the whole conference have been most excellently pulled together. They've set a new bar for organization and professionalism. And a new high of almost 1500 attendees, up from 900 in Boston a year ago.

For me, I've really enjoyed "coming back". I didn't make it to Szeged in the fall, and I've spent the past 8 months not having Drupal as a day job. That has, in fact, re-energized me about being involved in the Drupal community in the context that I feel like being involved. I can work on concepts and projects that interest and excite me, without any ties to clients or projects or commercial interests.

This time around, I didn't give a presentation around install profiles, although I did sit in on the session. I think we ended up with the catalyzation of having lots of the different overlapping solutions work together. Oh, and by the way, any bitching about install profiles not doing packages or post install stuff or any of a host of other things -- we know, we've always known that, it was hard enough to get them in, never mind boil the ocean and have them do everything else. It took from 4.5 through to Drupal 5 to get them in at all! Anyway, core hooks for import / export sounds like a very achievable goal for D7.

The presentation I did give -- Practical Semantic Web (and Why You Should Care) is up on SlideShare and also available as video on the Internet Archive. More on that in a complete post.

I said at the end of my presentation that Drupal's mission is to "evolve the web". I'd like to be a part of evolving the web, and I see my involvement in Drupal as keeping in touch with that.

My cab should be here in minutes, so this is going to be a quick and dirty post. I'm just getting over a cold and trying to be in top shape for Drupalcon Boston 2008 so apologies for the last minute posting.

I'm running a session in the site building track on Mapping business requirements to Drupal modules - a gap - fit process. This could as easily have fit into the business track, and really it will bridge both. I'm looking forward to making this, in part, an interactive session, a way to raise some interesting questions, and ideally to share best practices. Expect everything from project management, scoping, to Boris' gold star module development. Oh, and I'm going to yell at people for not expanding their business models.

The good folks at Palantir asked me to help sit on a panel to discuss getting your team up to speed in Drupal. I don't have a good outline of that yet, but I have lots of ideas around that concept. Anything new? Perhaps not, but working with the larger team at Raincity Studios has been a joy, especially in the mentoring department.

Lastly, I'm moderating a birds of a feather (BoF) session on RDF and the Semantic Web...but really, I'll just be a remote mouthpiece for Arto Bendiken the architect and programmer behind this latest wave for Drupal.

I'm using a couple of different tools to broadcast messages out about happenings at this event. A forum post on the Drupalcon site talked about one way to use Pownce / Twitter. I also like Twemes, something built locally in Vancouver to track stuff on Twitter using hashtags. Simply use the hashtag #drupalcon and all your twitters will end up on this page: http://twemes.com/drupalcon -- there's also an RSS feed on that page. For Jaiku, I figure we can re-use the #drupal channel, since it's not that high volume in any case. Posts here on this blog will be using the Drupalcon Boston 2008 tag (again, there's a feed on that page). Any Utterz* I will tag with that as well.

I've posted also on the Raincity blog and over on here. See you soon!

This is not a wrap up post about DrupalCon Barcelona (I'm notoriously bad at those, with all these fresh ideas swirling in my head instead), but rather a post about the Drupal Association.

We had an open panel / community feedback session at DrupalCon with the members of the association. I was very proud to be sitting there with those folks, even more so after each person spoke about what they want to do as part of the association. But...

...but let's not get to the "but" yet. The photo at left is myself, Dries, and Kieran sitting down at OSCON 2005. This is when we first started discussing the idea that, well, Drupal was getting pretty big, and we might need some other entity to help support it. What it really came down to is that at the very least, we needed a checking account: shuffling money between companies and Dries' personal Paypal account, etc. were getting increasingly painful. And heck, we had a conference with a whole 50 people show up!

2 years later and we've had many more successful DrupalCons. Sticking just to Europe, we had 150 people last year, and almost 450 this year. That's a tripling every year, and it's clear that the Association really is needed to help handle the logistics around these gatherings.

Back to the "but". The Association is almost a year old. It's been tough getting started, with only Kieran Lal having had previous experience serving on a board / running an association, and some of the busiest community contributors upping their contribution. We've got some of the nuts and bolts tackled now (accounting, legal, meetings, roles, etc.), have gone through some growing pains, and are pretty much ready to kick ass. We've got our first General Assembly ahead of us in a couple of months time, which will likely see the Permanent Membership grow and we'll have a new board elected.

One of the big points from the community was they wanted more feedback about what the Association was doing...but also how they can help, and what they can expect from the Association. We've talked internally and will try to adopt the Mozilla Foundation model of "reporting via blog". See Zak Greant's MoFo Weekly Reports for an example. This blog post isn't really a report in that style...I just sent off a bunch of email that should be good material for next week's report, and have tried to put a few bits of info in the footer that are a bit report-like.

And me? Well, I need to continue the process of getting things off my plate and having someone else's name attached to responsibilities, and to look at recruiting more people across the community to help run various initiatives. My main "hat" within the Board is marketing...I do a lot of that through direct outreach now, but there are so many other large and small things that could/should be done. For starters, I need to put some energy into gathering all the marketing folks back at home base -- http://groups.drupal.org/drupal-marketing. There were many "marketing only" folks that came up to me after the panel to say "how can we help?" ... many business cards to go through!

I would also like to serve as a direct channel to many large entities that are now starting to interact with the Drupal community -- larger enterprises, governments, universities, research initiatives, and so on.

In particular, it's my not so secret ambition to start at home in Canada / Vancouver and encourage local and federal governments to fund and support open source in general, and Drupal in particular. How about a 3rd Computer Science university course on "Coding for Open Source", including a section on Drupal in particular...

OK, time to wrap this up. I'm re-invigorated both about the Drupal Association and my role within it, and of course with the Drupal community as a whole after such a large gathering in Barcelona.

Update: after a little sleep, I realize I forgot to link to Planet Drupal Association -- you can subscribe to a feed of all posts there. Also a few minor updates to reports below. Case studies!

So, I'm madly rushing around the house throwing stuff together, doing laundry, etc. (Later: I'm plugged in at the airport, waiting to board).

Dave set up some travel tips for me, and I asked 43 Places what the best beaches in Barcelona are.

Unfortunately, it doesn't look like I'll have time to make the flight to Malta to visit Darren and Julie. I didn't realize there was a direct flight from Barcelona to Malta. I've still got my fingers crossed that I can shuffle my flight back, so we'll see about this...

Oh, right, why am I going? We've got some client work to meet up around, and that's followed by DrupalCon Barcelona 2007. This looks to be the largest Drupal event ever, with almost 400 people attending.

Anyone have other tips? Leave a comment! I'm going to try and produce a fair amount of social media, so follow the Flickr stream. See you in 10 days!

I can't believe it's been almost 4 years since I last bumped into Mark Pratt (entry from November 2003 about OpenSourceXperts). A chance IM conversation today let me know that he is now based out of Barcelona, but my trip to attend DrupalCon Barcelona means that I'm just going to miss him while he makes a trip to the US.

Mark is a Zope expert, open source business model experimenter, and more. He told me he's now got a great consulting firm, Vanguardistas, that are doing "amazing things with Zope3". I admit to knowing very little about the cool stuff going on in Zope3, so it will be interesting to hear more. And of course, we're all partners in waving the flag of open source goodness, especially in Europe.

I'll be missing Mark in Barcelona, but he's connected me to some of his colleagues at Vanguardistas, and told me that La Bombeta is where I'll have to go for delicious, cheap food. I'm really looking forward to this trip...I really have to make plans to be in Europe more regularly: there are so many great people and projects to get connected to, never mind the side benefits like great food :P

I've just gotten back from a whirlwind conferennnce tour -- Euro OSCON, GovCamp, DrupalCon Brussels, and BarCamp Brussels, all packed into a little less than a week in Belgium.

I acknowlege that I'm pretty much hopeless when it comes to conference blogging: my mind is spinning with all the talks and face to face meetups with people, and I can't seem to slow down to get something useful posted.

I did manage to write up two lengthy posts relating to discussions with Ton Zijlstra at BarCamp Brussels, which I'll be posting later today, and I uploaded a handful of pictures to my Flickr account. Now to dive back into work...talk soon!

I just got back today from a long week in Amsterdam, having attended a grand total of 3 conferences: Euro OSCON, DrupalCon, and BarCamp. I met a huge group of people

I would like to thank Chris Pirillo (check out his new gada.be multi-search service) for supporting BarCamp. Chris: wish you could have been there, buddy...we could have worked on our plans for World Domination, and probably gotten pretty close.

It didn't quite turn out to be the "hackfest" that my preconceptions led me to believe. Or perhaps the hacking was more of the "hack your brain" kind. More on BarCamp and these other conferences later: one big thing I learned is that I am not very good at creating artifacts while attending conferences. I'm very much in the moment, having intense sessions with people and trying to integrate it all internally. Inserting a computer into the mix means I miss what's happening. Paper seems to work OK for notes (maybe a tablet would, too?)...now I just have to transcribe all the bits and pieces, especially what essentially turned into an interview with Ralph and Edwinn of the Jabber Software Foundation.

Well, I'm still in Amsterdam nearing the end of the week but it feels like things are just getting started. I'm actually sitting in de Brakke Grond, site of the DrupalCon, as Moshe Weitzman walks us through the simpletest framework for unit testing in Drupal.

The first OSCON in Europe is just ending. I was disappointed that we couldn't integrate more fully, but Chris Messina and I had a really long and fruitful discussion with Gina Blaber and Margi Levin of O'Reilly's conference team. The team is already looking at planning the next OSCON event in Europe, and I'm looking forward to have a really interesting set of satellite events in partnership with O'Reilly in the future.

And yeah, BarCampAmsterdam. It starts...well, it started about an hour ago, I'm just still finishing my last conference! Yes, things are busy, so busy that I didn't get a chance to bang the drum about some cool hacking stuff that I hope to see accomplished during BarCamp (there's a long story about the lack of Internet connectivity in Amsterdam as well). So, on to the hand waving, or Cool Things I'd Love to See Hackers Build at BarCamp:

The Drupal community was in the process of organizing a meet up around O'Reilly's EuroOSCON event when we heard the bad news: since this is O'Reilly's first OSCON event in Europe, they had limited space and wouldn't have an exhibit hall, and hence wouldn't have room for booths from open source projects. Károly Négyesi is giving a talk, but we would have no booth to man, making it hard to meet a lot of the interesting people that are going to be there.

We were somewhat dejected, but then we had An Idea: why not do our own event, and invite other open source projects to come along. Hmmm...what did this sound like? It sounds like BarCamp. So, please join us in helping to organize/attend/promote BarCamp Amsterdam*.

Messina, patron saint of BarCamps everywhere, has posted about this as well -- so we're off to the races!

* I wanted to call it HamsterCamp...after all, we've got a Moose Camp