Results from our brainstorming BOF at Drupalcon

Posted by kvantomme on September 25, 2007 at 2:37pm

At Drupalcon we had a brainstorming BOF with Alberto to learn as much as possible from the experiences of the Barcelona team. During that meeting I made a mindmap, I reorganised the concepts that we discussed and added some things I thought were missing. The .mm file can be downloaded from my company's server (.mm files not allowed as attachments):
http://pronovix.com/drupalcon/Drupalcon_2008_brainstorm.mm

For people that do not yet have Freemind (available from sourceforge.net) I exported the mindmap in XHTML with Javascript, it is available via the following link: http://pronovix.com/drupalcon/Drupalcon_2008_brainstorm.html

Comments

My notes from BOF at DrupalCon Barcelona 2007

Posted by pips1 on September 26, 2007 at 6:29pm

Hi Kristof,

Nice Mindmap!

I'm adding my personal notes from the discussion at the BOF in Barcelona. Please be aware that the notes are only a partial record of what was said...

Ideally we can distill the information into a joint wiki page. I hope the other BOF attendees will add their notes too.

DrupalCon Barcelona 2007 - BOF: Next Drupal Conference?

Introductions

1. Cary Gordon

The Cherry Hill Company
Motion picture producer
ICANN is one of the big clients
Conference in Los Angeles
Ideas about Organisation
Need to get buy-in from local LA people first

2. Gabor Holtsy

Involved with Hungarian local conferences, 100 attendees
Years of experience of single day conferences with 400 people
Sponsorship possible from Microsoft

Q: [Cary] Is 4 days a good length?

Pre-conference workshops?
1 day for half-day workshops?

3. ? Kaefer

Would like to have a conference in Germany, preferably Berlin

4. Kristof Tomme

From City 'Szeged', in Hungary
Support from Local government possible

5. Prodosh Banerjee

Zurich, Switzerland
Excellent facilities in the city (Airport, public transport)
Local technology organisations: Google Research Center Europe, IBM Research Lab, ETH, (Geneva: CERN)
Sponsors: big corporations like UBS, CS, Nestlé
Critique: Switzerland is expensive... well, Euro is currently very high, costs are comparably high now

6. Philipp Schroeder

From Zurich
Several years experience with open source community conferences (Europython, Ubuntu)
Willing to advise and help

7. Nicolas Amado, Barcelona

Experience organising 3'000 people congress
Just here to listen, pitch in ideas

8. Robert Garrigos

DrupalCon Barcelona Co-organiser
Advice for the next conference
Community process from Open Office Conference (currently held in Barcelona): voting for next location

Association's Conference Process

Association should schedule the conference
Until now: Spring event in US, Fall event in Europe
Dries asks for short proposals

Experiences / Advice from R.Garrigos

Association should set a date, then vote

Plan ahead 1 year minimum
You need to estimate the number of attendees for booking the venue
Call speakers early
How to set the attendence fee?

Q: [Kristof] Perhaps best to split up into separate Developer and Evaluator conferences?
[Prodosh] No, the mixture is great!

Costs discussion

[Gabor] Total cost for a student / startup participant is and should possibly stay:
- Conference fee: ca. 50.- EUR
- Travel + Accomodation: ca. 400.- EUR
[Robert] Registration fee covers catering and t-shirts, the Citilab venue was free!
[Robert] We did reach break even point

Crucial requirements

Local drupal community - passionate working free for days
Publish schedule well in advance so people can make up their mind about coming and can then still book inexpensive flights
Website / marketing (promote the side benefits of the location)
Introduce quality feedback for conference/sessions