DrupalCon Boston 2008

I'm glad I ran into the birds of a feather session. I just wanted to start a thread so we could continue the discussion started there.

I'll start by saying that you should probably update the group's description to make it clear that mostly people would know PEG as Public Access Television.

This is the 5-minute "video from the future" demo presented by Dries in his State of Drupal keynote presentation at Drupalcon Boston 2008. The video demonstrates some of the mashup capabilities of an RDF and SPARQL-enabled Drupal as envisioned by Dries for the upcoming Drupal 7.x release. The version of the demo below includes the original narration by Ben Lavender (the audio from Dries's actual presentation is also available - the RDF material starts after the 52m:30s marker).

Some of you may have seen Kieran Lal's pitch to the Drupal community to help get Derek Wright (dww) and Chad Phillips (hunmonk) to DrupalCon Boston to work on the crucial Project* modules, and many of you chipped in to help Derek and Chad reach their goals. But the project* team can still use your help!

Adam Light (aclight on Drupal.org) is also trying to get to DrupalCon to work on Project*, and trust me, it will be worth ten times whatever you can give. I have only had limited interactions with Adam, who I don't know personally, but even those limited interactions have blown my socks off. Adam was a tireless volunteer for the GHOP program, and his work with these students was truly out of this world (take a look at any of the GHOP issues that Adam helped out with and you'll see what I'm referring to). As Webchick noted on her blog post asking for help for Adam and Jimmy "boombatower" Berry: "Adam was the one primarily carrying the torch during the latter half of the GHOP program, and was critical to ensuring its success."

I happened upon a blog post Adam wrote in which he requested assistance on the DrupalCon Boston feed, and I think that Adam is a bit too modest to post his request here, so that's why I'm writing this. Here's how Adam describes his contributions to Drupal:

Hello,

We are looking for speakers for the upcoming DrupalCon in Boston. Since you are subscribed to a business and marketing related group, you might be especially interested in the "Business and Marketing" track (see http://boston2008.drupalcon.org/business-and-marketing-track-descriptions ).

This track covers the following topics:

• The Drupal ecosystem
• Businesses learning to use Drupal
• Case studies
• Showcases: NPO, Education, News, Media, Government, Healthcare

I just submitted a proposal for a Drupal in Education Birds of a Feather session.

If you are attending the DrupalCon, come on over and read through the proposals, rate the existing proposals, and/or write one of your own.

If you would like to attend the BoF, I have started a list of possible topics to cover in the session description. As I say in the description, given Drupal's flexibility and the differing needs of people working within education, there will be plenty to talk about.

See http://boston2008.drupalcon.org/session/rdf-and-semantic-web-drupal -- please vote for the session, and I hope to see you all attending.

As you've no doubt heard, Drupalcon Boston 2008 is on the way March 3 - 6, 2008. I've been contacted by the folks organizing the Community and Core track, and they're very interested in a session at Drupalcon about GHOP. :)

I figure we can have an agenda something like:

• What the heck is GHOP?
• What were the final outcomes of the contest? (statistics)
• GHOP students in attendance get up and show off their cool work
• Show off some other cool work done by students who couldn't attend
• GHOP students and administrators talk a bit about their experiences, what worked/didn't work, and how to continue the "GHOP spirit" post-GHOP.
• Q/A

So...

1. Are you a GHOP student (or admin) planning on attending? If so, leave a comment!
2. Does that agenda sound ok? Too boring? Missing stuff? What do you think?

Let's try and get a proposal together by next Friday, so I can get it into the folks.

Coming

• add1sun (GHOP admin)
• Bevan (GHOP mentor - usability tasks)
• birdmanx35 (GHOP student)
• chx (GHOP mentor - simpletest/benchmarking tasks, plus everything else ;))
• cwgordon7 (GHOP student)
• dmitrig01 (GHOP mentor/general helper-outer/awesome person :))
• EclipseGc (GHOP mentor - theming/UI tasks)
• webchick (GHOP admin)

Not sure

• aclight (GHOP admin)
• boombatower (GHOP student)

Not coming :(
* Corni (GHOP student)
* Corsix (GHOP student)
* kourge (GHOP student)

Hello, all.

Anybody from Portland going to Boston for the DrupalCon?

For details, see http://drupal.org/node/205685 and http://boston2008.drupalcon.org/

Cheers, and see you here/there!

Bill