Submitted by dougvann on Sat, 2010-05-08 10:45
Five guys from Duo Consulting, four days, one awesome city, and one amazing event all proved to be time well spent. The Five of us were no match for the 6 tracks and the untold number of Birds of a Feather breakout rooms. I presented for four sessions across the first two days so that took up some of my slots. Manning the Duo booth proved to be a conversation piece. A few times I found myself deep in conversation and realizing there was little point in showing up late to a session. Fortunately the videos are already out!This being my 3rd DrupalCon I have to say that it was well run. The 6 tracks were logically separated into disciplines that insured something for everyone at every session slot. I saw people frantically changing from room to room in between sessions. This suggests to me that while many people came for many reasons. Some individuals came for multiple reasons as well.
This year's keynotes were particularly energizing. Project founders Dries Buytaert gave his perennial State of Drupal address. Some of the interesting things to come from this talk was the results of the Acquia market-share study. Acquia determined that when you look at the Alexa.com top 2 Million websites, ONE PERCENT of them are Drupal sites. This received much applause. When Dries went on to say that WordPress and Joomla have far better numbers, I heard some laughter. I don't knoe what the numbers mean, BUT I do know that I'm on the right track for getting my goals accomplished.
Other popular Keynotes were Tim O'Reilly of O'Reilly Publishing. He spoke of what he coined as the "internet operating system" that is developing around us. Tim sees the cloud evolving and perceives a platform war; the likes of which has never been seen before. Watch and listen here http://sf2010.drupal.org/conference/sessions/open-source-cloud-era as Tim name drops some popular and not so well known OpenSource apps and explains how we can use the patterns and practices of the Drupal and Linux communities to make the outcome better for us all.
By now some are sick of Drupal waiving the the WhiteHouse.gov flag around. Yes the Drupal Community is very proud of its accomplishment and for good reason. Wednesday's keynote treated the audience to two of the people involved in bringing Drupal into the US Government. Dave Cole is Senior Advisor to the CIO of the Executive Office of the President. He was an integral part of the efforts that launched whitehouse.gov on Drupal. Another celebrated Drupal Government site is NYSenate.gov which was spoken of by Andrew Hoppin. Andrew was appointed as the first ever Chief Information Officer for the New York State Senate in February 2009 with a mission to dramatically improve government transparency, citizen participation, and operational efficiency for the Senate through technology. Catch all the OpenSource In Government keynote over at http://sf2010.drupal.org/conference/sessions/open-source-government
For me, the biggest blast of all was playing the Drupal Song at the closing session. [see the pic associated with this blog!] By way of breif explanation I will tell you that the entire gig was conceived by young, 14 yr old Dmitri Gaskin. He caught me in IRC one night and was chatting with me about singing the song at DrupalCon. I agreed then he asked the song's author, Jeff Robbins to join us. Jeff agreed and the trio was formed. I'm certainly glad that Dmitri had the reckless abandon to take his accordion and stand onstage between two guys nearly 3 times his age and rock out to the anthemic jingle that is the Drupal Song!
Looking ahead, Chicago will host next year's DrupalCon and plans are already made to purchase an entire hotel for a week surrounding March 8th thru 10th 2011. The 3000+ that we saw in San Francisco should easily be upped by Chicago's central local. I will admit that the DrupalCons of yesteryear were smaller and more easy to navigate but if we're going to scale this community we have to accept that we're going to be elbow to elbow. Even then we can still experiencing those casual encounters with familiar faces. Regardless of the crowds, etc.... DRUPALCON ROCKED!
See a COMPLETE list of all videos at http://sf2010.drupal.org/conference/schedule