Posted by zchandler on April 13, 2013 at 7:38pm
Hi everybody, it looks like there isn't going to be an unconference happening at DrupalCon this year. It has always been put together by bonobo's awesome energy and commitment (and we should all thank him for those events), but since we won't have a landmark all day event this time, we are going to have to work just a little harder to network with .edu folks.
I propose that we all join a BoF at the very beginning, do introductions, talk about what we're working on, and come up with a conference attendance strategy. We can of course hang out all week as catch can, but I would also suggest another BoF at the end to do a retrospective as a group.
Who all would be into that?
~Zach Chandler
Stanford University
Comments
Sounds good to me.
Sounds good to me.
I'll be there from NC State, and i know my friends from Appalachian State are attending too... so we'll be on the lookout for EDU discussions/sessions.
+1
I would be very interested in talking/discussing issues relevant to higher education. Several folks from http://wwu.edu will be at the Con.
One topic of interest would be how different universities/colleges are managing the maintenance of content on the Drupal sites they manage. Does anyone monitor the health of content in any manner, such as using the radioactivity module? http://drupal.org/project/radioactivity
+1 to the BOF
Hello, all,
Zach - thanks for starting this thread. We'll definitely be at DrupalCon,and would love to hook up with people working in/with open content, oers, and multilingual content within the education space.
FunnyMonkey
Dang
This is extremely disappointing and also very frustrating since it drastically impacts my cross-country travel plans. I've also been hoping to attend or even host a BOF (on DrupalCommons), but then DrupalCon didn't open it up on April as they had said they would do. How do we ensure this education BOF gets scheduled promptly?
I work at http://HASTAC.org which is a community for educators and activists interested in how learning is changing so was really looking forward to the unconference!
BoFs and Unconferences
Hello, Ruby,
RE the BoFs - They will definitely be happening. It's an approach I've personally been a part of since DrupalCon Boston in 2008, and it has worked pretty well in every DrupalCon since then. On the first day, we get a BoF room where people meet, and we identify who is interested in what. Then, we schedule followup BoFs throughout the rest of DrupalCon.
And, despite the fact that we are not putting on the unconference, we will definitely be at DrupalCon (both presenting, and helping organize/participate in BoFs).
WRT cancelling the unconference, that was entirely my call, and I apologize for any inconvenience. I reached out to a few people to see if they had the bandwidth to take it over, and no one had the spare cycles to make it work. It came down to a quality of life issue - we (FunnyMonkey) have been putting on open content authoring events throughout the winter/spring that required a fair amount of travel, and between that community development volunteer work and our regular client work, there were not enough hours in the day to attend to do it all well.
But, if you are looking to talk about/have a BoF about informal learning/self-paced learning within learning communities (and some of those activities could possibly be supported within something Like Commons), I'd be glad to talk.
FunnyMonkey
BOFs it is
Thanks so much for the reply. I'll be sure not to miss the BOF organizing session as soon as I learn when that will be.
Although the community I work for is all about learning, I'm not responsible for using Drupal in direct education settings. But I'm interested in seeing what people are doing. For my own benefit, I hope to connect with some other users of DrupalCommons.
= Ruby
unfortunately won't be able
unfortunately won't be able to attend Portland but from my past experience from the education side of the community, you can essentially knit together your own unconference if you play the BOFs correctly. Boston really kicked things off as Bill mentioned. At DC in '09 I more or less sat in a BoF room helping string together different edu related topics for 5 hours. Denver I believe I went to 5 BoFs that were education related in some way and only 2 presentations.
Especially if you are not responsible for using Drupal directly I would recommend this course of action. Connect with people on here and on the conference site and start to more or less put together an unconference schedule out of BoF topics you are interested. I'm sure there's going to be a lot of Commons stuff put on by Acquia but it might also be cool to post a "Commons in EDU" BoF to just see how other people are using Drupal.
Too often in the past it seems like people are waiting for someone to organize these big over the top BoF sessions when really the best ones I've been to are "hey everyone that does something with education and topic X come to room Y"
Ex Uno Plures
http://elmsln.org/
http://btopro.com/
http://drupal.psu.edu/
There are several sessions too
Don't forget we do have a whole Nonprofit, Government, and Education track with a strong education component:
http://portland2013.drupal.org/session/collaborative-learning-systems-dr...
http://portland2013.drupal.org/session/drupal-based-learning-system-glob...
http://portland2013.drupal.org/session/empowering-oregon-k12-schools-thr...
http://portland2013.drupal.org/session/how-oregon-state-university-manag...
http://portland2013.drupal.org/session/unconsortium-next-phase-drupal-co...
My hope as the track chair is to link the sessions and the BoFs together to provide a busy week of relevant content for education folks. So yeah ... I'm planning on spending the week making sure there's tons of education-related stuff going on. :-)
-Greg
Thanks Greg!
I just added all these to my schedule, and I hope you can make the BoF(s) as well.
BOFs at DrupalCon
Hey all - just wanted to jump in real quick.
I see there's a bit of frustration about the BOF scheduling - which I totally understand - but don't worry too much! Even though we couldn't get the code working for online BOF scheduling, you'll still be able to schedule BOFs for the conference.
We'll be going old school and using whiteboards for BOF scheduling for Portland.
The boards will be up and available for scheduling on Tuesday May 21 of the conference.
We have 8 BOF rooms (2 with AV, capacity of 40), and they're small enough that groups won't have to share rooms. BOFs will run in parallel with sessions from Tuesday-Thursday, and also during lunch. All said and done, that's over 100 BOFs - not to mention the informal BOFs running in the hallways and the exhibit hall rounds.
The best thing you can do in the meantime is what Zach's proposed - start getting people interested early in the topics you want to see and wrangle the people you want to lead them, and when the time comes on Tuesday, have somebody ready to reserve your rooms.
The PM group is doing this very kind of planning, and Shannon is going to write a post announcing their known BOFs in advance of the conference to get the word out.
Hopefully this helps a bit!
Stephanie
The Plan
Thanks Stephanie! I am actually looking forward to rockin it old school, and who can turn down a whiteboard? I love me a whiteboard.
So gang, this is what I propose: The plan is the same. We kick it off with an Edu Uber-BoF for the purpose of introductions, and taking a shot at this whole cohort thing.
I will try to do this as early as possible, but it doesn't matter who does it really. Whoever gets there first can get it up on the board, just try not to overlap with an Edu session that most of us will be going to.
Do we need to do this at night? Who will be there Monday night?
Let's shoot for Tuesday at 3PM
Thanks Greg, for posting those key sessions, I just added them all to my schedule. Looks like we could fit in the BoF 3-4pm on Tuesday.
Informal Social/Meetup
Well, it's no BoF or unconference, but at least it's a bit of free food and drink during DrupalCon PDX...
http://groups.drupal.org/node/298818
Great, let's un conference and un-bof
Look forward to sharing what the UCLA Library is up to! Lot's of drupal activity over the last year. I will be in Portland on Monday. any monday night meetups?
- cheers.
- chris
Chris Cabrera Thompson
Web Services
Digital Initiatives and Information Technology
University Of California, Los Angeles
22484 Charles E. Young Research Library
Box 951575
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1575
Voice: 310.206.6638
Hey Chris!
Looking forward to catching up with you! I will be working on my presentation tonight, but maybe we can connect on Tuesday, and after...
We Have BoF
Tuesday (Today!) Room A 107, 3:15-4:15pm