Update on the Drupalcon Szeged 2008 program

We are working hard in parallel to start the conference registration system (which will have several goodies no Drupalcon had before) and the session registration system. While the session registration system proves to be a much easier technical task, we found Drupalcon Boston's notion of track chairs very useful, since it helped distribute the volunteer work and put the power in the hands of people, who know more about their field of expertise.

Therefore the organization team has been brainstorming and came down to a skeleton for Drupalcon Szeged, for which we are in the progress for some time now to recruit track chairs from the community. Not later then when we have the track chairs joining our conference management system, and they defined their track focus more specifically, we will announce our call for presentations.

Drupalcon Szeged is going to be focused towards the site builder, design, user experience and developer community, with an eye on growing the ecosystem and our horizon in different directions. We defined the following four tracks (working titles):

• Drupal core, contributions and trends which will focus on Drupal 6 and 7, as well as killer and upcoming contributed modules with some spice added on trends we follow (like the semantic web effort).
• Showcases, user experience and design will focus on the site builders, themers and those interested in delivering a killer user experience both for Drupal itself and for their own sites.
• Code development is our hardcore developer track on topics like simpletests, coding practices, scalability, deployment and so on.
• Growing Drupal communities and businesses will be our business and marketing oriented track with a good amount of local community building and focus on efforts such as the Knight Drupal Initiative, Google Summer of Code and GHOP.

Although we are still gathering the track chairs for these topics, I thought it would be important to provide you with an update on what are our plans with Drupalcon Szeged, so that all of us can get the best out of this event.

Not to forget, this Drupalcon will also have its full fledged (unmoderated) unconference in the form of BoFs, which you'll be able to submit and schedule online all by yourself as well. We are going to have the usual round table open spaces to collaborate and will also have bigger workshop rooms for people to schedule bigger impromptu (or pre-planned) meetings and discussions.

And at last, but not least, we are also going to host a code sprint day right after the conference, where like-minded Drupal developers will meet and code together to fix issues and develop new and exciting features.

I bet you agree this is all something you should not miss!