Drupalcon Wrap Up
I have not written for a couple of days because I needed to think about all that happened before I could write about it. The last day of DrupalCon was filled with learning, making connections for Denver DataMan and making friends in the community.
Drupal truly is a community. It is a community of people from all over this world who communicate in many native languages and bring a passion for making a tool that not only works for their business case but for others. We believe that the software at the base should be free and vetted by as many talented programmers, testers, documenters and artists as possible. The customizations for a given client are the places where businesses can use the tool to increase ROI.
For example, I truly believe that the community can build a CRM product that is better than what Denver DataMan would create on its own. It is also better than what just one company or another will create. We can partner through the Drupal community with other firms to create something that will be better because we came together. Denver DataMan will then be able to offer customization services for this new CRM.
One of the best uses for Twitter is at conventions. Twitter allows you to tag posts with a # and a decided on term. For example #DrupalCon. This lets people know about sessions, room changes, comments and, of course, social gatherings after the day of meeting. It also works very well for getting questions together for a keynote. Just Tweet #dckeynote and the moderator sees the questions. TweetDeck is the best tool for doing this.
The Keynote on Thursday was amazing. Jeremy Keith, a renowned designer and author of HTML5 For Web Designers spoke about the importance of having principals of design, what they are for the new version of HTML and what that means for web developers. I don’t buy many books without seeing them first but I bought this book sight unseen at the event.
On Friday the community got together to work on getting Drupal 7.0 released. We did a lot of great work. I am working on documentation for Drupal 7. I got a lot done at the sprint and will get even more done in the weeks to come. Drupal 7 is going to open many great features to the Drupal community. I will write a blog post on why I am excited for Drupal 7 soon.
After the conference was over and the sprinting was done I took the weekend to explore Copenhagen. This is a wonderful city;a place that you should try and to come visit.
*The original photo of Jeremy Keith can be found at http://www.flickr.com/photos/nidhug/4931961152/lightbox/ and is attributable to Morten Wulff.
