DrupalCON 2008
So here is the second batch of photos from Saturday in Szeged.
Nik LePage, too cool to pose.
Bonnie Bogle of Development Seed
Eric Gundersen of Development Seed
Andrew Morton (drewish) and Jakob Petsovits (jpetso)
Adam Kalsey of WorkHabit (correctly captioned this time)
Alex Barth of Development Seed
Barry Jaspan of Acquia
Leslie Hawthorn of Google (Summer of Code)
I took a fair number of photos on Saturday, and will post them in groups. Here's the first batch -- in order of time taken, not favoritism.
Nat and Kris (catch and EclipseGC)
Christina Szrama (Mrs. Ubercart)
Adam Kalsey from WorkHabit, pretending to be annoyed.
Dave Cohen
Laura, Heather and Ju, charter Drupalgangers.
Sam Boyer of Palantir and parts unknown
George DeMet and Tiffany Farriss, founders of Palantir.net
Prodosh and Dave
Doug Green of CivicActions
Stella Power
Gerhard (killes)
That's enough bandwidth for now. More to come.
One of the amazing feats of DrupalCON Szeged is that now, less than 48 hours after the conference, the presentation videos are all online.
I did two presentations this time, so if you want to see them, here are the links:
-- Using Node Access (with Moshe Weitzman)
-- The Knight Drupal Initiative (with Dave Cohen)
Enjoy!
And I mean that in a good way.
I am sitting in a hotel room in Budapest, recovering a bit from a long week at DrupalCON Szeged. For me, he highlights of DrupalCON are always the chance to meet people that I only know by handle and reputation. Sure, I attend a few sessions (two per day, usually), but I spend more time doing things like having impromptu meetings with Swedish newspaper programming teams (see below).
I have a whole bunch of photos from the last day of DrupalCON, below are a few highlights.
The Dom, the most famous building in Szeged.
Hungary is history-rich. This is a detail from World War I memorial carvings on a gate near the venue.
The venue at Szeged; I thought this was the best venue yet, and it had the best wireless I have ever used at any conference.
The team from Swedish newspaper Dagens Industri, who, I think, tried to find me all week for a chat about Drupal, which we finally had on Saturday.
The Drupal crowd during lunch. Notice all the conversation groups.
The King of Denmark, showing "Sex, Drupal and Rock and Roll."
Alex Barth (Development Seed) and I make fun of each other for taking pictures.
Gabor (standing) and Kristof at the closing, where Kristof is playing the "Drupal Song" on a traditional Hungarian instrument. hats off to both for an excellent conference.
My wife, on the right, with Paula and baby Johan. We met Paula and husband Phillipp at DrupalCON Barcelona, when she was pregnant. The best part of Szeged was reconnecting with the friends we had made last year. The non-attending partners even started a Drupal group to coordinate events for future DrupalCONs.
Yes, we are actually in Hungary. Here's a photo from the top of Buda Castle to "prove" it.
Well, that week just flew by. This is the most time I've spent in front of my computer all week.
Aside from the three panels I participated in, I spent most of the week out in the hallway, trying to connect people. I spent most of the week asking WWBMD -- What Would Boris Mann Do? Boris would introduce people to each other; so I did.
I also went to a hockey game on Thursday night -- absolute disaster, that, Toronto 8, Bruins 2. After the game, I went up to one of the Drupalers and apologized. Andre said, "What do mean? I'm from Toronto; that was a great game!"
The sessions all went very well, especially the Knight Foundation Q&A and the following BoF discussion. There is some more work to do here, and I'll talk about that in a separate post.
Big thanks to the following folks for hospitality, logistics, and generally making it a great week: Kieran Lal, Jeff Whatcott, Robert Douglas and Jay Batson from Acquia; Gary, Jose, Al, and Robertson from the Knight Foundation; Leslie Hawthorne -- the source of all good Summer of Code things; Moshe, Jamie and the rest of the local volunteers; Matt Cheney and Neil Drumm; Tobby, Jonathan and Nik (MDW); Morten, the King of Denmark; D Mak; Christefano and Lee; Cary and the rest of the hockey posse; the Lucky's Lounge mob; Mike Meyers; Eric Gunderson, Alex Barth and the absent Bonnie Bogle from Development Seed; Pierre from the World Bank (I don't hate the bank); Lisa Williams and Ben Melançon; and, of course, the all-powerful Sooz.
There are many more names that should be on this list. Including Bob, for approving the whole trip.
So the session is over, and I think it went well. Neil Drumm and Matt Cheney showed me that I'm a little behind, actually. They've been doing more active work on data import. Kieran was smart to put us all together, and the panel was stronger than an individual presentation.
There is video -- link to come -- of the session. And I am posting the slides that I used. These slides are, as usual, just talking points. You should really take a look at the sample modules in the API.
Download the presentation [2.4 MB pdf].
[Update: the corrupted PDF file should be working now.]
We had a very successful BoF on Wednesday. The goal was to discusss how the Drupal community would manage our relationship with the Knight Foundation.
For those who were not at DrupalCON, here are the basics:
-- The Knight Foundation (KF) provides funding for open-source development, products and innovations that are in line with their core goal: improving communities through the free exchange of news and information.
-- KF needs help from the community to review proposals that are specific to Drupal.
-- The program will be ongoing, with the deadlines and length of projects to vary on a case-by-case basis.
-- KF handles all the project management and grant management issues for accepted proposals.
-- The Drupal community will try a two-step process for applications.
1) Submit an idea for community consideration.
2) Ideas that get community support will become project issues in a special project queue. These proposals will get serious review from the community in preparation for passing to the KF for final evaluation.
Let me stress that this is not a contest; it is an ongoing program that is an extension of work that KF is already doing. They are looking to the community to help, since we agree that Drupal and KF share some common goals, particularly about the purpose of open-source software and the desire to enable open communications.
There will be some additional detail forthcoming over on g.d.o in the KF group. For now, you can see the meeting minutes from the BoF.
In summary, here is where we stand on the process:
-- Moshe and Josh are working on some CCK and voting widgets for use in submitting proposals via g.d.o.
-- Gary Kebbel and his team are working on some language so that we all know exactly what types of projects they wish to fund.
-- I will be creating a project page on drupal.org.
We are going to have a check-in on or about March 21st, to make sure that we are on track with the work to be done. At that checkpoint, we will create the next round of tasks -- which will be focused on three aspects:
-- Defining and communicating the goals of the program.
-- Marketing the program to the community.
-- Lining up volunteers to help manage the process.
I have to say that I am very excited about the potential here. And I think that the members of the KF who participated in the BoF were equally excited to see how the community responded and began to self-organize.
As a final note, let me stress that this will be an open process. We are striving for complete transparency regarding the proposals and the process for recommending them to the KF. If you were not at DrupalCON and want to participate, come on over and join the KF group. Everyone is welcome.
Alright. It's DrupalCON time.
At each of the last two DrupalCONs, I gave a short talk about methods for using Drupal with external data. Specifically, I focus on using external APIs, secondary databases, and "lazy instantiation" to import large data sets into Drupal. I think it's a good talk, and an important subject for understanding the power of Drupal as a platform. (In fact, the original title was "XML, Mashups, and Drupal-as-platform" back in Sunnyvale last year.)
This year, with a nod towards the spirit of collaboration across the Drupal community, the talk has mutated into a 90-minute session, covering a wider range of topics, and featuring some people smarter than me in a panel discussion.
Neil Drumm of Advomatic, a longtime Drupal contributor, will be discussing batch import scheduling, command-line import processing, and a host of automation techniques that he's developed for dealing with legacy data.
Matt Cheney of Chapter Three will be discussing data scraping, parsing, and auditing; plus enhancing data by using job queues to process batch data.
We're all excited to be presenting, and expect the session to introduce attendees to new ideas for dealing with legacy and external data sets.
For more information, see the official conference page.
Thursday March 6th, 7:00 | Boston Bruins v. Toronto Maple Leafs
Come on out to the game with the folks from Morris DigitalWorks, and the King of Denmark!
I reached out to the Boston Bruins ticket office. They have set aside seats for us to buy (individually) at the following quantities. (And the B's are fighting for the playoffs, so this should be a great game.)
We have reserved the right to purchase tickets together. The ticket office has reserved the following price tiers for us. You should order by February 29th, but can probably get tickets through Tuesday.
- 25 seats @ $80 per person
- 90 seats @ $40 per person
- 45 seats @ $28 per person
$28 is the lowest price for game seats. I personally bought 5 $40 seats to reserve the tickets.
We are not obligated to buy anything else. You may buy single or multiple tickets.
To attend, call Charlie Karoly* at the Bruins ticket office.
+1 617-624-1808
More information available in the flyer Charlie made for us. You can see the seating map online.
* Yes, chx, he’s Hungarian-American. I asked.
