It's been a week since
DrupalCon Boston 2008. I started this post a week ago, but have been fighting a cold all week and am only now having the extra energy outside of work hours to write up this little summary.

The event was the largest in Drupal history (so far). We were honored to take part as Platinum Sponsors, but the event was a collaborative effort of so many companies and individuals, it was truly a community event.

Highlights:

Dries Buytaert's semi-annual State of Drupal presentation.

This is always interesting, but this time all the more so for his audacious RDF proposition, which pushes Drupal HEAD into the leading forces behind taking the web from "2.0" to the next step.

[Update: If you missed it, check out the video!]

The taking of the DrupalCon Photo.

It's the only time I talked to Scales, and the first time at the 'con I talked a bit with Dries. But the real fun was just enjoying the crowd of ourselves. We were a bigger crowd than ever before.

Walking the AIIM floor.

We thought that we, Drupal, were big, but we were hardly a blip on the AIIM radar. By my count, there was one company that spoke open source in any way. The rest? Corporations selling (expensive) proprietary systems, with hawkers promising the moon. (Some of them seemed to have interesting stuff, and I'd say to myself, "Hmmm, how can we do that in Drupal?") They have no idea how their world is going to be disrupted so soon.

Winning the Grand Prize at the Closing Plenary.

The energy at the closing event is always so joyous. The unexpected topper was when we won the grand prize in the website case study competition for PopSci.com. Through a mixup, the Sun representative making the announcement of the case study grand prize failed to mention the company who developed the site, meaning our guys who worked so hard on the site didn't get their brief moment of applause. (Kieran and everyone where very apologetic afterwards, and we did win a kick-ass screaming Sun server, which we can't wait to get online at our offices.) From a community full of so many rock stars, geniuses and talented achievers, getting their kudos means a lot to us. (Our PopSci case study is published on Drupal.org, and has received some great responses -- thanks to all!)

The Drupal Association Dinner.

Here, Kate and I had an enjoyable and fascinating with RainCity's Boris Mann, Acquia's Jeff Whatcott, NowPublic's Michael Meyers, Drupal founder Dries, Drupal.org's rockin' database administrator Narayan Newton (who has an unexpectedly dry, wry, delightful wit), and, later, Steven Peck (who apparently fled from a political discussion at the next table over). (Matthew was also there, but was seated at another table.) We talked about the business value of open source, the challenges of making any sort of Drupal "certification" credible, valuable and meaningful, expanding the open source biosphere, and (perhaps the most fun, if perhaps more whimsical) discussion of establishing a "BlogShares"-like rating system for Drupal modules and themes, using market forces rather than simple star ratings to convey value of projects to prospective users. (If anyone is interested in this kind of thing, maybe as a side project, let's talk.) I would have really enjoyed hanging with Robert Douglass, Kieran Lal, Jay Batson and Earl Miles, but they were at other tables.

Having so many people approach us, interested in us, what we do, what we've done....

A year ago, pingVision was largely invisible to the community. Of our company, I'm the one longest involved with Drupal, having joined (under my first UID) not quite four years ago, but as of a year ago I had not met anybody in the Drupal community outside of the greater Denver area. Since then we'd made a concerted effort to grow not just rapidly, but grow well, doing what we hope is regarded as some good work. Now in Boston we were seeing people happily adding pingVision stickers to their laptops. Wow!

Getting a first-hand tour of Harvard.

When everyone was at the code sprint, which happened to be just a couple blocks from our hotel, Kate took me on a tour of the business school (where we unexpectedly saw an exhibit about the first women to enter the Harvard business program) and led me around the campus of gorgeous architecture.

Having our people involved in new initiatives for Drupal core.

Thanks to the synergistic energy happening at the Code Sprint at MIT on Friday (which is unavoidable when you get a world-wide development community all in the same room), Kevin is now involved in developing testing for Drupal 7 core, and Greg is now involved in the same for JavaScript. And there's more, to be blogged about later.

Disappointments:

I could go on, but we're back in the office going full-out on everything. I did shoot some video, which we're planning to use to jump-start the re-activation of the video wing of pingVision, which once upon a time was the primary business (back when I was doing freelance). Stay tuned for that....

Big-time kudos and thanks go to Kieran Lal, whose seemingly limitless energy, hard work, ability to find great staffers like Sooz, and (from what I could tell) coolness under pressure made the DrupalCon happen. Props to you, dude!

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