Ecosystem

Start DrupalCon off right with jam and Robert, two Drupal(Con) veterans who will get you fired up while passing on helpful tips about getting the most from your experience. This session is an entertaining and informative way to get your Drupal(Con) bearings (and grab a great seat for the keynote that follows). We welcome Drupal(Con) veterans and n00bs to join us, and begin the conference with a huge dose of Drupal Kool-Aid.

Intended audience

Everyone here, first, second or 8th DrupalCon. Coders, developers, designers, decision makers, themers, PMs, marketers, and everyone else.

Questions answered by this session

I am at a tech conference, why do I keep hearing about a "community"?

Value and values: How can I pay the rent AND change the world?

How do I get the most out of Drupal(Con)?

Where do I ... ? How can I ... ? Who ... ?

Why should I be excited (again) about being here?

The Drupal Association is a not-for-profit trade organization that tasks itself with fostering and supporting the Drupal software project, the community and its growth. Created in 2006 by a group of volunteers the Association, like the Drupal community, has grown rapidly. In 2010 the Drupal Association helped form the U.S non-profit DrupalCon Inc., which hired the first full-time employees dedicated to organizing DrupalCon and supporting the growth of the Drupal community.

Intended audience

Members of the Drupal community that are curious about the Drupal Association, want to get involved in the Association, or have questions on how best to support the Drupal project and its community.

Questions answered by this session

What is the Drupal Association?

Why does Drupal need an Association?

Who pays for the Drupal.org infrastructure?

How can I get involved in the Drupal Association?

Since the Prairie Initiative was kicked off at the Chicago Drupalcon earlier this year, a small but active group have been working on achieving our goals of:

1. Improving the collaboration tools on Drupal.org so that we can do more and better work together and make Drupal better, faster.
2. Growing the pool of contributors by making Drupal.org a better and easier place to become a contributor - to make it less intimidating to people who want to get started contributing.

Intended audience

Anyone who contributes to Drupal today or who is interested in contributing in the future.

Questions answered by this session

What is the Prairie Initiative and what are you trying to achieve?

What are you working on?

What parts of Drupal.org are you touching?

What is Social Architecture?

How can I get involved?

madskills-london.pdf

Are you a themer or developer who wants to work on bigger, more complicated projects? Do you want to send your resume to top Drupal shops and get hired? Do you want to assess and approve your skills?

If so, come to this session and create your plan. You will leave with you a take-home list of essential traitz and skillz. You'll also find out what a few top Drupal shops and in-house Drupal team leaders say are the "Most Important Skillz" their best developers possess.

We'll focus on three essential questions:

1. What specific skillz do I need to build?

Intended audience

Drupal development professionals who want to beef up their mad skillz and want a clear, researched answer to the question, "what skills are essential to have in the Drupal talent marketplace"? Team builders who want an outline of what to look for in potential developers.

Questions answered by this session

What technical skills are foundationally necessary for a Drupal themer or developer?

What technical skills are Drupal shops and clients looking for?

What non-technical skills are Drupal shops and clients looking for?

What are some essential traitz of top developers?

What are effective ways to prove my skills?

product-framework-drupal.pdf

As Drupal's popularity has grown, its core audience of hobbyist developers has exploded into an international community of businesses, nonprofits, independent developers, startups, and governments. Bubbling under the surface is a recurring debate: Is 'Drupal' a product for people who build web sites, a framework for web developers, or a platform that other products are built on?

Intended audience

Core developers and decision makers looking to understand the history and motivations of the 'smallcore' movement; developers looking to shape or participate in the development of Drupal's APIs; business stakeholders considering the future of Drupal for their web applications and web projects.

Questions answered by this session

What's the difference between a product and a framework?

How has Drupal's evolving community shaped the software's priorities?

What parts of Drupal are hot spots for this debate today?

Is it possible for Drupal to be both at once?

How can we answer these questions and build a stronger, more resilient ecosystem?

DrupalCert-FinalPresentation.pdf

As Drupal grows, so do the challenges of identifying and developing Drupal talent. Gone are the days that a look at the issue queues of various projects could identify all the key talent available let alone all the talent needed. It's not even clear what the different Drupal roles are, what different organizations need, and how a Drupal newbie becomes a Drupal rockstar. And at the same time, it is becoming increasingly important to assess Drupal skills of and provide training for those for whom Drupal is a 9-5 job rather than a passion.

Intended audience

Drupal trainers, Companies hiring Drupal talent, Consulting companies

Questions answered by this session

How to identify Drupal talent

How to train Drupal talent

What skills are required for Drupal

What do companies need to look for when hiring

What should the Drupal curriculum look like

Drupalcon_Community_Session_London.pdf

The Drupal community landscape is changing. A host of new events is springing up: Design Camps, Dev Days, Business Days, Gov Days, CxO summits, and more. The success of these events in bringing together new communities of experts and professionals to facilitate growth and exchange in their areas of common interest is key to Drupal's continuing success.

This session will discuss how Drupal communities–local-, interest-, or vertical-based–are growing and changing. We are looking for insights into what is working, what needs more work and what best-practices are emerging.

Intended audience

Community Members, Community Leaders, Media, Analysts, Business Leaders

Questions answered by this session

Why organize events?

What kind of Drupal events are happening? How do they differ?

What motivates people to join or leave the (local) Drupal community? Why are some more active than others?

What kinds of goals and objectives can communities set for ourselves? How do we measure our success against those goals?

Why do connections with other Drupal user groups, open source projects, and local communities matter? How can we better evangelize Drupal in all these areas?

OpenRel.pdf

You love Drupal. You love Linux. You have a pet penguin and you recompile your kernel daily. So what, at the end of the day, you've got to pay your mortgage, and last time I checked, the bank doesn't take patches.

Like many of us, we have to balance the real needs to earning a living and spending time with our families (or going out drinking) with our desire to be contributors in the Drupal community.

Intended audience

Developers and Site builders Project managers

Questions answered by this session

How do I make a name for myself in Drupal community?

How can I convince my clients to pay for open source contributions?

What is the value (monetary) of contributing to Drupal?

The Drupal ecosystem is changing ... a lot. We have venture financed startups, we're powering 2% of the interwebs, and our community has already seen exponential growth–in 5 years Drupal.org has gone from ~25,000 to ~1,000,000 members–and it can be baffling (and a little terrifying) to think of the community growing bigger still. And yet, the community of contributors is what drives Drupal, and so in order to grow Drupal, we must also grow ourselves.

Intended audience

Sounds cliché, I know, but hopefully everyone. Those outside the Drupal community wondering "How does that all work?" those within the Drupal community who are passionate about continuing the awesome, those within the community who are pissed off and looking for answers, and those "formerly" of the Drupal community who are skeptical about the whole hippie open source love thing. Hopefully even someone without any familiarity with the Drupal community who is interested in general information about how a website filled with opinionated, perfectionistic, multi-cultural people holds itself together.

Questions answered by this session

What is the history of the Drupal project and some demographics about its community?

When disagreements in the community arise, what are some good and bad ways to handle that?

How has the Drupal community sustained such massive, massive growth without splintering and forking?

What are some major "mine fields" we've encountered as a community, and how have we/are we working around those?

If I implement Drupal for a Fortune 500 company's intranet am I still changing the world?

Free_Software_garfield_wolanin_london2011.pdf

So you've taken the plunge into Drupal and you know that it's open source. But what does that mean in practice?

Free and Open Source Software means more than just no licensing costs. In fact, it doesn't technically even mean that. Open Source is both a development philosophy and a social philosophy that work together to build better software and better communities.

Intended audience

This session is for themers, developers, consultants and anyone else in the Drupal community.

Questions answered by this session

What is the GPL and how is is diffent from some other licenses you may commonly see used in open source projects.