Drupalcon North American Regional Organizing Group
As a result of community feedback on the last several Drupalcons, the Association will be changing the Drupalcon selection, planning and organizing process to build a new module for DrupalCons. To support this new, more sustainable model for Drupalcons, the Board has preemptively made a decision on the location and team for the 2011 North American Drupalcon, tapping Chicago for Drupalcon 2011. The Association is also creating standing regional organizing groups for each Drupalcon region, to be responsible for shaping the direction of Drupalcons to come.
Those of you who want to be involved in shaping NA Drupalcons into regional events so we don't find ourselves in this situation again, please sign up for this regional group.
This group will be responsible for:
- working with the Drupalcon professional event management team from Groundswell
- making recommendations to the Board for the location of Drupalcon NA 2012 and beyond.
- organizing and coordinating all non-logistical details for Drupalcon NA starting with Chicago 2011. This includes: programming, speaker selection, social activities, the conference Web site.
Towards a proposal for DrupalCon Montreal 2012
Montreal would be a great place to hold a DrupalCon. Not only is it a great city that people actually want to visit, being outside of the US avoids participants having to worry about crossing the US-border, which is a widely recognised as a limiting factor for international events that take place in the US.
RE: Draft Post-Drupalcon Survey
Rather than clutter up the Wiki post with self-signed comments, I'm starting this thread to discuss the survey.
First, Thank you, Ms Amye, for moving this topic along.
Draft Post-Drupalcon Survey
A lot of this is open sourced from OpenSourceBridge's survey last year.
Question 16 will need to be revamped to speak to all of the depth in the Drupal community, but I left it as we had it to get an idea of the breadth of topics we had there.
Page: About you
1. As of today how many years old are you:
18 to 25
26 to 35
36 to 45
46 to 55
56 +
-
With what gender do you identify?
Female
Male
Other -
What is the highest level of education you have achieved?
Some High School
High school Diploma or GED
Some Undergraduate College
Associate/Junior College
Post-Session Audience Evaluation (Draft)
I tried to keep this pretty short since I think most people won’t want to fill out anything too involved after every Drupalcon session. While I agree with gdemet’s thought that passing out evaluation cards and pencils would result in higher participation, sadly it’s probably not practical. My suggestion would be to include a short form on each session page. Most folks have laptops at these conferences, so there could be a few minutes at the end of each session to allow attendees to fill out the evaluation online.
Please rate the quality of the speaker:
1 - Poor
2 - Okay
IRC Mtg - Drupalcon Programming: Tracks and Session selection
We'll be discussing: Programming: Tracks and Session selection in #drupalcon.
Programming: BOFs, Pre-conference content
- Should there be some free content (could be N00b sessions, author talks) available in an exhibition hall to registered free passes?
- What content, if any, should be pre-Conference: core developer conference, code sprint, paid workshops, etc?
- BOF: how many rooms should be allocated?
- Should BOF content be free?
- Should some BOFs be pre-scheduled?
- Should room(s) be allocated for an unconference to differentiate unscheduled presentations from traditional BOFs (roundtable discussions)?
The group will discuss these topics after we have reached a consensus on the Programming Tracks and Session selection.
Programming: Tracks and Session selection
This thread is for all throughts about tracks and session selection. The group came up with the following questions to get the ball rolling:
- How many tracks and sessions?
- What is the right ratio of presentations and BOFs offerings to conference attendees? How do we determine more sessions vs larger rooms for sessions.
- What should the tracks be?
- Should there be track chairs and, if so, what are their responsibilities?
- When should the call for submissions be opened? For how long should it be open?
- How far out from the conference should the schedule be announced?
- What is the right balance between offering popular (e.g. voted) sessions and curated cohesive conference program?
We'll be discussing this topic and the responses listed in this thread as a group at our next IRC meeting, October 1, 2009 from 11am-noon Central time.
Kick-off Meeting recap
The Drupalcon NA Regional Organizing Committee had its first meeting in IRC today. Our initial goal was to wrap our arms around the topics that we want to consider as a group: programming, speakers, sponsors, dates, logistics and location recommendations.
The plan moving forward is to set up individual threads for topic clusters in this g.d.o group. All are welcome and encouraged to comment. The group will continue to meet in IRC for an hour every couple of weeks to drive to consensus on these topics. Our draft findings and recommendations will then be published for comment here in this group for further comment before we vote on them as a group.
IRC Meeting
This will be an IRC meeting in #drupalcon to identify those who want to participate in this group and lay out an agenda and timetable in which we can start to reshape how Drupalcons are handled moving forward.
Refining the Drupalcon Process
The old way of selecting and planning Drupalcons sites hasn't been working. Turns out we didn't really allot enough time for the necessary infrastructure ground work to be done.
But, we've learned a lot:
- We learned that organizers needed more then a year to schedule, reserve space, and get contracts signed, especially with the continued amazing growth in attendance at each successive conference.
- We learned that we needed professional assistance to help with things like better communications with the community, sponsors, vendors, organizers.
- We learned that focusing just on programming, scheduling and speakers is a large enough task to warrant its own dedicated team
As a result, the Association will be changing our process to build a new module for DrupalCons. Hence this group.
If you want to get involved, please subscribe.
