Drupalcon 2007 - Thoughts and Reactions

Drupalcon 2007 is complete.  I have some thoughts and reactions.
First off, thanks to the organizers of this conference.  This was the first time I have attended a Drupalcon--I was introduced to Drupal in August of 2006 and only recently began working for pingVision heavily in Drupal--and I thought that it was pretty well organized for the first one to break 200, 300, 400 attendees.
My thoughts come from a Management/PM mind set--not from a Development or Theme mind set.  I think this is appropriate as Drupal is "growing up" and becoming more of a norm in the business world.  It seems that at every turn, more mid-sized organizations are opting for a Drupal solution.
First some details on what I thought worked and didn't work.
A)  The venue was perfect with two notable exceptions:

  1. Location--Citilab was fabulous, but quite a distance out.  That said, the metro was very good.
  2. End times--it would have be fabulous if there had been a cash bar immediately after the sessions ended.  It was hard to arrange for evening social activities when we were, essentially, kicked out of the venue.

B)  The wifi was almost flawless.  Thanks for the great connectivity.  
C)  We need three session tracks:

  1. Development
  2. Design and Theming
  3. Business and Management

It would be terrific if each track was clearly marked as one of the three.  As Drupal continues to become more mature and slips into its own place in the online community, more business and management sharing will need to grow.
D)  The Drupal Association has the potential to provide a significant positive force in the Drupal community.  There is obviously a strong commitment amongst the current board of directors to the Drupal community and to the wider open source community.  I have tons of nonprofit management experience and managing proposals and funding of proposals.  I'd like to be of service.
E)  Barcelona--great city for the event.  Lets try and continue to have events in hub cities with excellent infrastructure.  I appreciated being in a city with a great metro system.
F)  Drupal.org conducted a survey on the state of Drupal.  Dries Buytaert did a great job of summing it up.  I am only going touch on the highest points--in general it was quite positive.  Some things, like the revelation on test driven development are concerning.

  1. There were over 1000 respondents.
  2. Act out of self-interest, but try to look for overlap to SOLVE community problems.
  3. Open source is not incompatible with business.
  4. Users want to know the quality/popularity of contributed modules.
  5. The top five desires of Drupal.org users have to do with improving finding information on the site.
  6. The community think one new major release per year is a good number.
  7. There is a need for experience from the community in usability and IA.  "If it needs instructions, there is room for improvement".  And a SATISFIED customer tells three others, a DIS-SATISFIED customer tells 11 others.  Usability is key.
  8. Joomla has far more users than Drupal--and yet it is still in Beta--how do we close the gap?
  9. Drupal was downloaded 600,000 times last year.
  10. Drupal usage grew by 200% last year
  11. MANY of our community manage/have multiple Drupal sites.
  12. Test driven development is not popular.
  13. More database backends are not a popular concept.
  14. The number one most wanted developer feature for core is better performance for authenticated users.
  15. The number one desired end-user feature for core is better media handling.
  16. As "Drupalers" we are really bad at flash.
  17. Finally--we are good at module development, we are bad at module development, and we want to get better at module development.  Eh???

Thanks for making me feel like a part of the community.  I hope my contributions back to the community are useful.
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