Catching up with DrupalCon Denver

I can't believe that I haven't blogged about Drupalcon Denver since November 13. Let me catch you up and tell you what I had meant to blog about.

November 17 was the culmination of months of preparation, work, organization and negotiation as we published the first wave of selected Drupalcon Denver sessions. The flurry of activity was crazy. Our chat room conversations were stepping all over one another. Invariably, the folks who were selected to speak thought the track chairs were brilliant and those who were not selected thought we had our head up our.... sleeves.

Potential blog post title: Adding bacon makes everything better, even Drupalcon Denver session selection.

I could not ask for a more conscientious group of volunteer track chairs. They were making extremely difficult decisions with the best interests of the community in mind. In some meetings, some people asked for a reason that their session wasn't selected. Thankfully, Jacob Redding explained that the track chairs were just volunteers and to pile on the burden of responding to every track submission would simply make any future track chair volunteers scarce.

Potential blog post title: Volunteer to be a DrupalCon track chair; it won't hurt that badly.

There was a natural let-down, more like a deep breath, after the sessions were selected. Things got quiet as all these volunteers tried to catch up on their day jobs after being yanked away in IRC discussions, pm's, Skype calls and emails. At the same time, we all knew that our jobs are not yet complete. Some tracks still have open session slots to be selected by January 11.

Potential blog post title: On second thought, you do want to be a Drupalcon track chair.

Part of the reason that I volunteered to be the content manager of Drupalcon Denver and that I excessively document our meeting agendas and minutes is to let future DrupalCon volunteers to know what worked and what didn't work for us. All of this documentation is in an Open Atrium site. I had the pleasure of giving the team lead of Drupalcon Munich, Florian Loretan, and his content manager, Jos Doekbrijder, an introduction to our process in a Skype call along with access to our Open Atrium site.

Potential blog post title: DrupalCon Denver -> an even better DrupalCon Munich.

I've had long discussions with Rick Manelius, who is leading the Drupal Means Business event for general business types and CXO's on the Thursday of DrupalCon Denver. "Rick M" (versus "Rick N", i.e. me) have discussed how there are more and more opportunities to plug in volunteers who have a general business background. These opportunities are often not as easy to find and can be rather intimidating to volunteer for. If you are an English major (er, I mean project manager) and Drupal has been good to you, take a deep breath and give back using your unique set of skills.

Potential blog post title: DrupalCon and Drupal itself continues to grow up.

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