Drupalcon Szeged Blog

Thanks to a month of logo submissions with almost 50 entries in our logo contest (check out the PDF matrix of all submissions), and then a week of voting with hundreds of votes cast, followed by a decision made by the organization team, we now have our logo. It happens that the preference of the community and the majority vote of the organization team was the same. The Drupalcon Szeged logo therefore is going to be:

It was not an easy choice, as we received so many great ideas and concepts. We'd like to thank all those, who contributed to this fun contest. You can review the final vote count on the logo contest entries page.

Drupalcon Szeged happens to be just at the same time as the SZIN Youth Music Festival, which takes place in "Új"-side of Szeged just across the river Tisza. This is Hungary's original youth music festival (outgrown by the Sziget Festival since then) with tenting students all around the bank of the river, stages with superb music and all kinds of other fun programs for all four days. This year, the program also includes a 0th day. While those attending the festival full time will go tenting, you can walk in and buy a daily ticket for 5000 HUF (around 20 EUR) at the gate or a ticket valid for all days for 12,500 HUF (around 50 EUR).

While the festival program mainly consists of Hungarian performers, there are great stars coming such as Within temptation (NL) (check them out on youtube), Morcheeba (UK) (some of their clips on youtube) and Phats and small (UK) (look for their videos on youtube). One of my favorite English singing Hungarian bands, Jamie Winchester and Róbert Hrutka will also perform (I featured them on my personal blog before). The detailed program table is available on szin.org.

The Drupalcon Szeged logo suggestion submission period is over, so we are open for voting. To give you enough time to decide, we are going to run the voting until the end of next Sunday, May 25th.

We got exactly 49 logo suggestions, and lots of them are very professional ones. The cues of sunshine, fish, paprika, Hungary, beautiful ornaments, love, and of course the inevitable Druplicon provided a wide playground for you to free your imaginations. Thanks for all these great suggestions, now choose your favorites! (Note: you need to be logged in on the site to be able to vote).

You can also download a PDF (3.5MB) with an overview of all the logos.

On Saturday the 24th and Tuesday the 27th of May, we hold the first presentations of our promotion roadtrip for Drupalcon. We're doing these events to raise awareness about Drupalcon Szeged and to convince people that this is the perfect time to take a deep Drupal plunge...

It is great to see all the 30 (yes, that's thirty) logo suggestions which already came in the past three weeks in our Drupalcon Szeged 2008 logo contest, as there are quite a few amazing logos there. I can only say it will be hard to choose from those both in the community voting and for the final decision. We only have one week left for submissions, so to those cooking up their ideas, I'd like to suggest to complete it sooner then later, so it would get in for community voting. And, again, thanks for all the entrants so far! Great job!

We just published a few image galleries, so you can familiarise yourself with the hosting city, our venue and (if this is going to be the first for you) the Drupalcon feeling. These are of course no substitute for being present at Drupalcon.

At Drupalcon Szeged we would like to have a couple of pre-conference workshops/trainings. These events would be independent from the conference and would have a separate pricing and organisation.

If you or your company want to hold such a workshop, please let us know before the 30th of April so that we can include a checkbox for your event into the registration form. That way you can get feedback from potential attendees.

Recently, we have received some contact mails from people, who are looking at cheap options to travel, especially from North America. We'd like to draw your attention to an update we made to the travel page lately:

For attendees coming from out of Europe, the option of coming to a major flight hub somewhere in Europe and transferring to a budget flight there might get you considerably cheaper flight prices.

This results in a bit longer travel time, but could dramatically cut down on flight costs. The travel page has links to explanations of European budget airlines and the search sites we recommend.

Another recent addition to our site is the travel sharing overview (accessible through a block on our travel page as well). This lists people, who indicated their interest in sharing some vehicle to travel to Szeged. We already have people coming from Romania, Germany and Hungary open to share their car, while others from Romania, Germany, Denmark and the Netherlands among others are looking to hop into a car. There are already a few possible matches there.

A few hours ago, we pushed out the user registration and the biography form we worked out based on feedback from the Boston Drupalcon and our own experience. This means that we are now welcoming your user registration, and providing possibilities to discuss travel, side-programs and anything else you might like to talk about. Congratulations to Peter Bartsch for being the first to register (not counting organizers and our little test user)! Feel free to use your OpenID account to log in for easier registration.

We love to continue on the tradition of asking you, dear designers and aspiring artists in the community to help us design the Drupalcon Szeged 2008 logo. The logo contest will run for a month and community voting will follow for a week, so that we can select the best incarnation of the Druplicon for this event.

Please note that this Drupalcon is again not a free to attend event, and your user registration is in itself not a valid entry for the conference. We will open conference registration later and will include accommodation reservation. C&T, the company we are working with already booked hundreds of rooms in different types of accommodations, to ensure that we put or hands on most of the capacity we need. You will have options ranging from deluxe hotel rooms through pensions to hostels.

Also of note that while we worked on all these, George Papadongonas kindly opened a Facebook group for Drupalcon Szeged 2008. Hang out there with like-minded Drupal folks and grow your network already.

We are happy to inform you that since Drupalcon Szeged was announced a few days ago, we enlisted more then 20 (mostly local) volunteers who are already discussing and planning restaurant reviews, plotting important and useful sites on the Szeged map, ensuring good WiFi coverage at the venue among other things. For the first time in Drupalcon history, we are using a project management website set up and fine-tuned exclusively for this event, separately from the Drupalcon public website. Thanks to the people and the technology, we worked on some exciting things since the announcement, so I figured I'd better let you know:

• Our team built up a Frequently Asked Questions page complete with location, date, visa requirement, language, accommodation, registration, price estimate and even power plug and mobile coverage information among other details. It contains very important tidbits, so please check it out.
• We also collected some valuable information for your traveling. When you organize your travels, please note that we plan on a code sprint day after the four session days.
• Drupalcon Planet is setup and includes each blog post from and near Drupal Planet that mentions Drupalcon. All automated.
• Follow us at twitter.com/drupalcon as we are already using this to spread more informal news on the event. Also mark your tweets with #drupalcon to appear at hashtags.org/tag/drupalcon/.
• We also got a hold of the #drupalcon IRC channel on freenode, which just means that we got the channel topic updated now. Feel free to hang out there and discuss. You might or might not find organizers there.

We'll keep the information pages up to date (and even included a "Last updated" mark at the top to let you know the freshness of the information at any time). If you have any questions not (adequately) answered in the FAQ, by all means contact the team. We would also love if you could help us get the word out about this event. Let's grow the Drupalcon Planet!

Ps. We are working on making it possible to register on this site, but we would like to save you from the hassle of going back and forth updating user profile details, so thanks for your patience in the meantime.