Planet Drupal

We are just in the final hours to have the list of selected sessions built up for the conference, and I bet you will all have your tastes filled nicely in our program. In the meantime, some people approached us that it would be much better for them to decide once the program is out there, so we decided to extend the 120 EUR ticket pricing for a week! This mens you can still register for this great price for one more week. And we will have the exact program list published soon, after we cleared out all the panels we set up based on similar proposals and we see the presenters are fine with that. Check back soon!

Now that the program timetable is getting along, it was time to announce our two keynote speakers with great honour: Drupal project lead Dries Buytaert and PHP creator Rasmus Lerdorf. Those who might not know them for some reason (although it is hard to believe) would find the introductions on our homepage useful.

Dries Buytaert is passionate about the web, open source and photography. He is the original creator and project lead of Drupal, co-founder and chief technology officer of Acquia, and is also working on Mollom.

Rasmus Lerdorf is known for having gotten the PHP project off the ground in 1995 and has contributed to a number of other open source projects over the years. He is currently an infrastructure architect at Yahoo!

We are delighted to have these great keynote speakers on board, and are sure you will love this Drupalcon's keynotes again. Are you not signed up for Drupalcon yet? Why hesitate? Go ahead and register.

Up to July 24th, we made it possible for you to sign up for Drupalcon Shuttle bus tickets, and specify your preferred times in your bios. Now since the signup is closed (and we got most of you to fill in your preferred times), we sat down to build a schedule based on your preferences. A few of you specified times before August 26th and after September 1st, but the numbers did not add up to buses we can order. Unless one of the spots in the now announced timetable is fine for these people, we will reimburse them at the registration desk.

The selected times will get some people wait a bit in Budapest, or take a bus a bit earlier in Szeged. The latter is designed so that nobody would miss their flights from Budapest. Some useful information about the shuttles:

• The shuttle buses will be recognizable by a Drupalcon logo on the windshield.
• Shuttles from Budapest will go from the Budapest airport terminal 2 and will stop by at terminal 1. These buses will get you to the exact hotel you have a booking at in Szeged.
• Shuttles from Szeged will go from the venue except the two early shuttles (5:00am and 6:30am), which will pick you up at your hotels.
• The journey time is approximately 1.5 hours, but this might be slightly less or more depending on highway traffic.
• Only those who bought shuttle tickets will be allowed on the buses.

To make it possible to pre-plan and order the buses, and for the buses to pick you up at the right place, make sure your preferred times are properly set and that you take the bus with the slot you signed up for. Otherwise the bus might be full and you might not be able to get on, also the bus will not go to your hotel then. Make sure you won't miss the bus by specifying your details properly.

As announced earlier, we are closing the room booking system on the Drupalcon Szeged 2008 site at the end of this week, so it will not be possibly to book rooms on our site after July 24th. This means that there is only three days left to take advantage of our room service and to specify roommates. After that, we will transfer the list of names and rooms to the accomodation providers. We will maintain a list of the locations and their contacts on the website, but from then on will not help you book a room. This frees up some of our resources to work on more important tasks to ensure a great program and service.

We are also closing on the session submission deadline quickly. Next monday (July 28th) will be your last chance to submit sessions for Drupalcon Szeged 2008. The unconference (BoF) submissions will be open until the conference ends, so anyone can submit BoFs on the spot, but sessions will be planned and put into a timetable next week. So next week we should have our program up on the website!

Together with our exclusive design partner Factory Creative Studio, we prepared a few buttons and banners for you to use on your websites to help proclaim that you are a Drupalcon attendee, or you are a supporter of our event. We also prepared banners in bigger sizes to put up on your sites if you would like to help get the word out even stronger. Thanks for your support!

Attendee badge (125x125):	Supporter badge (125x125):
Drupalcon banner (180x150):	Drupalcon banner in drupal.org size (200x221):
Drupalcon banner in standard size (468x60):

While taking to some people, we realized it is better to publicize more that due to our requirements to pay for rooms and the shuttle buses in advance, we need to know what is taken and we should give back the unoccupied rooms to the hotels. Otherwise we would need to pay for their reservation even if not taken, which would be a risk our budget is not ready to take.

So make sure that if you intend to take our help in finding a room, then register for Drupalcon (only €120 for a ticket) and book a room on our website within two weeks from today (by July 24th). Same applies for shuttle bus tickets. We are going to make up a shuttle bus schedule shortly based on the preferences of those who signed up for tickets, and will refund money for those, who found that the final shuttle schedule will not fit their needs.

Also, if you booked a room but would share with someone else, please ensure that you get your roommate in by the same deadline. We will send over the list of people taking rooms to the locations. Those not specifying roommates might have issues if they show up with roommates, so make sure you set this up properly. (Create an account for your roommate on the website and get her specify her name in her bio to be able to specify her as roommate, if not a registered Drupalcon attendee).

That we need to end the room service is not the end of the world though, since it means that several rooms we pre-booked will fall back on the locations, and we will keep up a page with contact information for the locations we had previously, although we cannot guarantee that they have the space for you or you can arrange your room with them. Those not going with the shuttle will find the train information handy on the travel page.

So far we collected our list of sponsors in the background, but it was about time to publish a list and give them the prime time they deserve for signing up early for our great offers. We prepared four sponsor packages: platinum, gold, silver and bronze with varying benefits for companies interested in supporting Drupalcon Szeged. And there is also a fifth option for individuals, that can buy a sponsor shirt as part of the registration.

We are pleased to announce that several companies and individuals already signed up. Acquia takes the first platinum spot (so there are still three more to take), Sun generously signed up for a gold sponsorship (still two more spots left there), while there are a handful of silver sponsors: Development Seed, Erdfisch, Factory Creative Studio, Madcap, Pronovix, Senza Limiti, and of course the University of Szeged. The John von Neumann Computer Society is our first marketing partner we want to acknowledge for the organization of the Szeged pre-Drupalcon event. Last but not least, our individual sponsor list has grown significantly since my last round of thanks to them: Erik Stielstra, Jürgen Brocke, Károly Négyesi, Mohamed Nanabhay, Roel De Meester and Vesa Palmu all bought a sponsor shirt.

Thanks to them all, and we are looking forward to having even more of you as sponsors. There is still plenty of floor space for your booths, so choose a package that fits you and contact us!

We just closed the "earliest bird" (80 EUR) pricing for Drupalcon Szeged tickets a few hours ago. Yesterday, we had more than a hundred new registrations, and lots of the bank transfers for those using wire transfer will only arrive in a few days, so we got a considerable backlog of transactions to process, so be patient with us please.

So the conference became 40 EUR more expensive, but don't worry if you missed the deadline with our cost cutting features that shouldn't matter all that much to you! There are plenty of ways that you can save more than 40 EUR:

Have a look at the top of our attendees page, we have several options to help you reduce costs. Our travel sharing pages are flying high with lots of people offering or looking to share cars, vans or just looking for mates to travel with on sleeping trains. If you come from Europe, this is a great option to travel cheap. If you come from outside of Europe it might also be a good idea to arrive in a major travel hub, and then share travel from there (or pick a European budget airline, see our travel page).

Once you are here, you will still need a place to sleep at. Well, our room sharing page caught up quite a bit recently. There is almost a dozen people who are looking to share their rooms, to cut on their costs and cut on yours; as well as have fun with community mates. You can also team up with people before booking a room and just share your room with them without advertising that publicly. We have nice automated means to do that.

It might happen that cost cutting is not enough to square your finances. In that case just fill in your bio with information on why are you looking for financial help to get here, and you will be featured on the page of people looking for financing. Feel free to cite your community contributions and link in your fundraising page if you have one (using the ChipIn service for example). That should help a lot for others in the community to contribute (smaller) amounts to your trip.

All in all there is a lot of scope for saving this Drupalcon if you follow up on all these features you should be able to save a lot more than 40 EUR.

We just opened voting for session and BoF submissions. We have lots of useful purposes for the votes, so we would love if you could participate in voting for your favorite submissions (and get your submissions in so you can get more votes!). Let's see where will we make use of the vote results:

• It is less then a month to go before we need to close session submission, and our track chairs will put sessions to place in our program. Your votes will help them decide on the sessions preferred by the community. So they will use the data to support their decisions.
• We have session rooms of different sizes. We need to have a reasonable idea of what sessions will be more attended to put those to bigger rooms. Trying to do our best, we can only execute this well based on data we get from you! We would like to ensure that no small room is overpacked, while bigger rooms are far from being filled up at the same time.
• First time this Drupalcon, we have three BoF workgroup rooms, which serve as bigger spaces for focus groups (additionally to the usual open spaces for BoFs). Some BoF organizers asked us to help them gather people around their BoFs, and we'd like to support them in using the bigger workgroup rooms if the interest for their topics is outstanding. Your votes count a lot in helping each of us know which BoFs would be more suitable for the bigger workshop rooms.

If this is not all convincing, all I can say is just go ahead and have your say for any of the submissions (vote on the individual session pages).

Ps. of course we have commenting open on all session and BoF submissions form the start!

We just passed 180 attendees today, which means we doubled in two weeks! We hope the signup rate keeps going since the 80 EUR discounted tickets will only last until Monday (inclusive) and we will switch to selling 120 EUR tickets from Tuesday. Those who decide soon get more benefits, since our room offers are also going fast, and it is less then a month before we need to close room bookings to avoid loosing money paying for rooms you will not take (we will sell conference tickets after that but not rooms or shuttle bus tickets).

So it is the time to wrap up your decision, choose a room (or tell us you will not book a room in our system at all) and pay for your choices. You get four days of conference, a bigger than ever unconference, lots of networking opportunities, a welcome party, a wine tasting, and the list just goes on...

We set out to help you come to this conference as affordably as possible, so we provide means for people to share travel to and from the conference and also to offer their rooms for cost-sharing.

Our sponsor offerings also continue to catch up, we are closing negotiations with several companies who offered sponsoring on all the different levels we announced. You will see the logos appearing on our website prominently soon! I'd like to give special thanks to the three attendees, who thought it is best to give back and buy a sponsor shirt: Erik Stielstra, Jürgen Brocke and Mohamed Nanabhay. We are looking forward to others contributing with this option as well.

If you already booked your ticket, and feel like helping out, there are a few (prospect) attendees, who are looking for financial help to come to Drupalcon Szeged. The list includes the Panels co-maintainer and a previous Drupalcon organizer. Helping out these fine folks would be money well spent for those supporting their Drupalcon attendance.