Pacific Northwest Drupal Summit Update - June 2010

Posted by dale42 on June 11, 2010 at 12:23am

Greetings Drupal Community!

It’s exciting times for Drupal in the Pacific Northwest. Planning for the October 2010 Pacific Northwest Drupal Summit in Vancouver, Canada is progressing nicely. Want to find out more, keep on reading!

Background

The process started in earnest last year with a call for participation. From there we established an Organizing Committee and starting laying down the foundation for the conference. Although I was the one that kicked things off I’m extremely pleased to announce that Vanessa Turke of ImageX Media took on the role of Organizing Committee chair and is doing a wonderful job. The Organizing Committee would also like to acknowledge the support we’re getting from last year’s Seattle organizing committee.

Contacts

Sponsorship:	Phillip Djwa, Phillip [at] agentic DOT ca
Volunteers:	Vanessa Turke, Vanessa [at] imagexmedia DOT com
Presenters/Keynotes:	Chris Geoghegan, chris [at] imagexmedia DOT com
Training:	Dale McGladdery, dale.mcgladdery [at] gmail DOT com
General Inquires:	Vanessa Turke, Vanessa [at] imagexmedia DOT com

The Conference

Here’s what we’ve nailed down about the conference so far:

Date:	October 2 & 3, 2010
Venue:	UBC Robson Square, Vancouver, BC
Tracks:	Developer Design & Theme Site Architecture & Administration Business & Project Management Birds of a Feather
Financing:	The conference is primarily financed from sponsorship, with a small contribution coming from ticket sales.
Organizing:	There are no paid organizing positions. We’re all volunteer.

Sponsorship

Phillip Djwa of Agentic is heading up sponsorship. He’s happy to report there’s been solid interest and we’re on tract for getting the sponsorship we need to run the conference.

Please pass along your kudos to the following companies for their early support: Affinity Bridge, Agentic, Appnovation, DrupalSN, Venture Web Design, ImageX Media, and North Studio!

Sponsorship opportunities are still available. If you’re interested please contact Phillip [at] agentic DOT ca. In addition to paid sponsorships we’re considering special items and events. If you’d like to sponsor a code sprint, special training events, or have an idea for a fun adjunct to the conference, please let us know!

Vancouver PNWDS 2010 Website

The website subcommittee is working hard on the 2010 website and expects to launch in June. Alex Ventpap, ImageX Media, has created a beautiful new design. Katy Laan, Seascape Web Design, is leading the implementation team which includes Steve Liu and Scott Morgan, Webzoa.com.

We'd like to extend our thanks to Affinity Bridge for their work archiving last years site and logistic support preparing it for 2010, and to CanTrust Hosting Coop for providing hosting.

Speaker Submissions

Are you interested in speaking at the Pacific Northwest Drupal Summit? Start thinking about your presentation. Speaker submissions will open when our new website goes live. In the meantime if you have any questions, please contact Chris Geoghegan (chris [at] imagexmedia [dot] com)

Pre-Conference Drupal Training Events

The Drupal Summit isn’t aimed at folks just starting with Drupal, but we don’t want to forget them. We’re planning a number of training events based on Seattle’s Drupal Clinic model. These are one day training sessions for Drupal beginners. If you’re interested in more information, please contact Dale McGladdery (dale.mcgladdery [at] gmail DOT com).

Volunteers Needed!

We are looking for volunteers to help with preparations and also to help out on the 2 days of the Summit. If you’re interested in volunteering, please drop an email to Vanessa [at] imagexmedia DOT com with your availability and what you’re interested in working on. The Organizing Committee is maintaining a volunteer list to draw names from when help is needed.

Staying Informed

The Summit website, when it’s up and running, will be our primary means of keeping you informed.
Groups.Drupal.Org (GDO) is better suited for some types of discussions, so we’ll utilize it as appropriate.
We have a twitter account at http://twitter.com/drupalsummit and will be posting updates
Our hashtag is #drupalsummit, feel free to start the tweets now
Many of the Organizing Committee hang around on IRC in the #drupal-pnw and #drupal-vancouver channels.

Comments

bc or washington?

Posted by datarazor on June 11, 2010 at 4:42am

Hello torelad, is this in Canada or Washington? "Vancouver" is never really that specific in these parts... :-)

--
Fountain City Inc
Creative-Technical solutions
Beautiful websites built with Drupal
http://fountaincity.tech

Vancouver, Canada

Posted by dale42 on June 11, 2010 at 6:17am

Good point! Will have to remember to make it more explicit. I've updated the text. Thanks for the feedback.

Old site info is confusing

Posted by Boris Mann on June 17, 2010 at 9:52am

I went to add the banner to a new promote section on my site, and it still lists Seattle and the wrong dates on the banner graphic. In my opinion, keeping the current site up is super confusing.

Might be best to archive the current site at 2009.pnwdrupalsummit.com and just have a landing page until the new site is up. I made a quick landing page (URL can be changed) with Unbounce here: http://unbouncepages.com/pnwds2010

Landing Page

Posted by vcreatrix on June 17, 2010 at 3:21pm

Thanks Boris, great idea!
Getting this year's summit website up is top priority for us right now, and we're nearly there. I'll ask the website committee gang about the landing page today.
~V

boris, what do you mean "it

Posted by arianek on June 18, 2010 at 4:06am

boris, what do you mean "it still lists Seattle and the wrong dates on the banner graphic" - the graphic on the homepage is updated with the vancouver info (which you've pulled onto the unbounce page) unless i'm missing what you're looking at...

as soon as the theme is ready to switch, the old homepage will be tossed, and old theme will only show on 2009 session and sponsor pages. we're kind of treating it like a community site that also hosts annual conference info. (if that makes sense)

Promote

Posted by Boris Mann on June 20, 2010 at 1:21am

If you click on the "promote" tab, the banners have all the info and dates from last year, which is what I was looking for since I wanted to link to it from my site.

as soon as the theme is ready to switch, the old homepage will be tossed, and old theme will only show on 2009 session and sponsor pages. we're kind of treating it like a community site that also hosts annual conference info. (if that makes sense)

No, doesn't really make sense. It just makes it confusing for people visiting. There is a reason that people start fresh every year, since conference / event sites need to be highly focused.

ohhhhhh i see, the badges on

Posted by arianek on June 20, 2010 at 2:29am

ohhhhhh i see, the badges on http://pnwdrupalsummit.org/promote gotcha. i know people from the web team are watching this, so hopefully they'll catch this if they weren't already making new ones.

re: managing years within one site, i guess what we were thinking was that it would be a good way to manage keeping the old content accessible using /2009/ or /2010/ etc to filter content from the different years. if it really doesn't end up working for people, things can always be revised next time!

Regarding the conference site

Posted by Chet Woodside on June 20, 2010 at 2:31am

I agree with Boris, having info for this years conference and primarily last years conference blended together is confusing. Distinctly breaking off '2009' and '2010' would be easier to understand.

Ping ping

Posted by Boris Mann on June 23, 2010 at 6:25pm

Confusing old site still up. Want to map this to the landing page I set up? Who do I talk to help?

I think the web team's having

Posted by arianek on June 23, 2010 at 6:49pm

I think the web team's having a big status meeting this afternoon and were going to decide whether to link to that page (since the site is sounding like it's not far off from being done). Vanessa from ImageX is the head Summit wrangler this round, but you could probably go straight to Anne (or one of the Shane's) from NorthStudio, as they've just stepped in to help complete the site development, if you want to get that put up.

2010 PNW Site Launching soon...

Posted by Annabella on June 24, 2010 at 6:31pm

Yo Boris,

We are just about to launch the site - we are aiming for Friday, but it might be Monday or Tuesday based on some final content entry and tweaks.

I would be happy to work with you to get the temp site up if we don't get launched tomorrow. I will ping ya tomorrow morning if we see launching early next week is more realistic.

Thanks for the ping!
:)

Anne Stefanyk
Solution Architect
northStudio.com
anne@northStudio.com