Drupalcon Szeged Blog

Drupalcon Szeged was great, but as usual, we are looking forward to an even more awesome Drupalcon coming up this time in Washington DC, March 4-7, 2009.

The first hundred tickets were sold out in the first ten minutes, and the next hundred flew out on a per-minute basis. Amazing! You can still buy tickets for $175, but they are selling damn quick, so make sure to grab yours as soon as possible.

We'd like to hereby congratulate the team for the great website, their outstanding work on getting sponsors and collecting some session submissions way ahead of the website launch, so that you can see some of the topics which will most probably be covered this time around. Meet at Drupalcon DC!

As we have reported almost a month ago, we got some notices of missing, mislabeled and badly encoded videos from presenters and would be viewers. This happens when you need to encode dozens of videos to get on the net by the end of a five day event. We are keeping track of our reports and status of each in a publicly viewable Google Spreadsheet at http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pHr6m7zVvdN_506My300MKg

If you find a video missing or broken and it is not listed there, please do report it to us. If you find the broken video on the list, and it is not yet resolved, please allow us some time. Our volunteers are of course back to their daywork and have less time to coordinate video re-encoding and uploading. Thanks for your patience!

Thanks to multiple reports from you, we are aware that a few of the published Drupalcon Szeged 2008 videos are tagged and titled improperly. Our volunteers are back at their regular work schedule, so it takes a little bit more time to figure out and fix the issues. Thanks for your patience, and please keep reporting issues, so we know about any new mislabeled videos you might find.

As we announced at the closing keynote at Drupalcon Szeged, Jacob Redding composed and posted a survey on Drupalcon Szeged on Drupal.org. We'd love to hear your feedback if you came to Szeged or not. It is valuable to know what you liked here, or why did you decide not to come. The feedback from this form will be used to make the future Drupalcons better, so please take the time to respond.

Drupalcon Szeged is almost over, we have the code/docs sprint going on and it is running great. In good spirit of sharing, we decided to put the slides for this session out as soon as possible.

Before this keynote, you might have had the pleasure to view the Flickr slideshow for the conference. If you'd like to see all the photos people uploaded (ordered by interestingness this time) just go to http://flickr.com/search/show/?q=drupalconszeged2008&s=int There was also some nice music going on while the photos were playing, and it was from one band from Hungary called "Jamie Winchester and Hrutka Róbert". You can find the music videos on Youtube of course: Sand in My Eyes, It's Your Life, Take Me Home, Better and One of Us.

There is of course videos of all the sessions going up for download now, and we are about to reach full coverage on all sessions really soon now.

In case you are wondering where are the different areas in the venue, or need some help which we talked about in the opening presentation, you'll find the PDF of the opening notes useful.

As a lot of you are probably in the process of preparing/putting the last hand to your presentation material, we got some feedback that we should provide a write up on the available infrastructure.

On this conference we'll have four session rooms and 3 BoF rooms, both room types have:

-projectors
-microphones (only in session rooms)
-ethernet cable with internet for presenters

BoF sessions that are scheduled for the openBoF space will take place on the 3rd floor where we'll have tables in semi-closed cubicle style.

Every exhibitor will have 2 tables at their disposal. Every "booth" has chairs, electricity, and a poster holder. You should have received a booth number as part of the exhibition registration process (please contact us if this is not the case).

There is an exhibition on every day of the conference:

• Job fair (day 1)
• Service providers (day 2)
• Regional companies (day 3)
• Designer exhibition (day 4)

At Drupalcon we'll have a CAcert event organized by the people from erdfish. If you need some assuring you'll find them every day of the conference from 12:45 to 13:15 on the ground floor in the sitting corner near the registration desk.

We thought that now as the Drupalcon comes so close (OMG just 4 days and 20 hours as of this writing), you'd make use of a checklist for your best Drupalcon experience! Here are some things we thought would be important to think about.

1. Make sure your registration status page (in your profile area) says you paid your fees, and (if you bought a room on our site) you know your hotel location and exact booking dates (checkin and checkout).
2. Pack according to expected weather. http://koponyeg.hu/ has a nice two week lookahead graph, which as of this writing shows 15-28 degrees celsius expected for the conference days, with a little bit rain possible at the end of the week. Our website has a weather block showing current conditions and two day forecast.
3. Know how you will get to Szeged. If you bought a shuttle bus ticket, check when your departure time is (you should have received an email about this earlier). If you are going by train or car, check out our travel page. We have detailed information on how to get to the train from both airport terminals and where to buy train tickets.
4. Make sure to have Hungarian forints (local currency) by the time you need them. If you take the train, you'll need them to buy tickets. If you take the shuttle, you'll only need forints in Szeged most probably. Read the corresponding entry in our FAQ for more info.
5. For local communications, make sure your phone is compatible, or you are prepared to buy a cheap prepaid phone in Hungary. Read the corresponding entry in our FAQ for more info.
6. Check that you have the right power plug converters for your mobile charger and laptop. Again, we have more information on this in our FAQ.
7. Finally, although in Szeged lots of the places are in walking distance, we published a public transportation city map for you in the FAQ, and given that there are some detours around the conference venue area, we translated the detour map for you for better understanding. The most important information is that you'll find a 1V tram supplement bus instead of tram 1 at the train station, if you'd take public transport there.

We wish you safe travels, and hope that this little checklist helps ensure your happy Drupalcon experience. See you real soon now in Szeged!