Business

Overview

This is a round-table session, gathering those who are interested in collaborating on a Drupal Certification program.
As Drupal grows, the need for Drupal training grows as well, and so - more companies offer Drupal training and courses.
Training people to Drupal, has many benefits:

• It helps customers make a better use of their websites or Drupal-based web applications
• It increases the offer of Drupal savvys in the jobs market, whether as webmasters, developers or designers
• It creates another channel for people to get to know Drupal, and as such... (see next bullet)
• It helps the community grow

It is important therefore, that all those who are involved in this area, collaborate, in order to achieve a coherent, collaborative Drupal training curriculum. There is an ongoing effort to achieve that on g.d.o, but it doesn't prove to be the right platform. In this round table we will try to find the best way for us to collaborate and share over this matter.

Agenda

Some key issues that will be discussed (not necessarily in this order):

• What is a Drupal certification at all? Can there be ONE certification?
• Who is allowed to certify anyone to Drupal?
• What are the implications of not collaborating over a certification program?
• Does the Drupal association have to take the control over certifications?
• What impact will Acquia's certification program have on other Drupal training programs? (see this discussion on g.d.o.)
• How should the collaborative platform look like? How should it behave?

See this g.d.o. wiki page for more background (feel free to participate): Associations, ideas, and possible questions, that comes to your mind, when talking about...

Goals

At the end of the session we should have a clearer picture about the Drupal's certification program, and about the ways to achieve collaboration from all those who are involved in the area.

Resources

Here (Szeged 2008 related sessions)

• The Alexandria Project (seems to have dropped)

Groups.Drupal.Org

• Curriculum and Training group
• A brainstorming wiki page in preparation on this session
• Drupal training syllabus
• What impact Acquia new Training and Certification project will have on Drupal community ? (comments are interesting)

Acquia.com

• Yellow Jersey
• A skeptic plans a certification program
• A Certification Success Story

Overview

This session will show off the results of Drupal's Google Summer of Code 2008 projects. Students who make it to Drupalcon will be demoing their own projects, and we'll also show off projects from the students who can't be there.

Agenda
The following projects will be shown during the course of the session, as time permits.

• Apache Solr Improvements
• New Aggregator for Drupal core
• Bookings API
• Charts module Views integration
• Color module improvements
• Document Import Module
• Embed Widgets
• Revamped Help system
• Icon module
• Image manipulation GUI
• Memetracker
• New nodequeue sub-modules
• OAuth/Services module integration
• Open ID Attribute Exchange
• PluginManager
• Core search improvements
• Security scanner
• Usability Suite
• Validation API
• Version Control API / Project module integration
• Views datasources

Goals

This session will allow Summer of Code students to show off their hard work, and for the Drupal community to get a first-hand look at all the cool stuff that was produced over the summer. Summer of Code students typically make excellent employees as well, for those looking to hire. ;)

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NOTE TO ORGANIZERS: I put down "90 minutes" because that'd be a much more comfortable time frame during which to show off 21 projects. But every other year we've managed to do it in 60, so if 90 minute slots are short, you can push the time allotment back.

This will just be an informal gathering of the women who make it to Drupalcon: the Drupalchix (also known as the "7% club" ;)).

We did this in Barcelona and Boston, and it was awesome. :D

Topics might include things like:
* What are our various backgrounds/experiences prior to coming to Drupal?
* What is it that we’re currently working on?
* What have our experiences in the community been like?
* What can we do to encourage more women in open source/Drupal specifically?

Overview

Drupal is often compared with other CMS products, but the true power of the platform is realised when you compare with web application development frameworks. Drupal, as a set of APIs, is a viable choice as a framework for developing powerful web apps.

Agenda

* Web Framework features overview
* Drupal APIs and Modules for Web Application development
* Case studies: present two web apps developed using Drupal

Goals

Explore Drupal as a framework for Web Application development with a couple of Case Studies.

Overview

The Knight Drupal Initiative (KDI) is an ongoing, open grant funding process for the Drupal open source project. We want to enable more people to enter the digital conversation by lowering the technical barriers to entry. We will provide powerful tools for digital publication, free and open to all. Our goal is to encourage people to improve their communities by supporting the free exchange of information and ideas.

Agenda

* Introduction to the KDI
* Program goals
* How to apply for a grant
* How you can help the KDI
* Project brainstorming and questions

Goals

We want everyone to participate in the KDI, in order to increase funding for the goals of the Drupal project. This session will let you know how you can get involved.

Resources

* KDI group
* Frequently asked questions
* KDI flyer [pdf]

Overview

With Boston state of Drupal introducing the future (Drupal 7 and beyond). It seems time that researchers get united to build an academic support for Drupal. What better way to do this than find grands that can support the initiative?

After some discussion and some investigation, the IAPP call of the EU-framework looks appropriate. The goal of the call is to bring research and industry closer together: to get SMEs (in EU) using Drupal together with research groups (in EU) working on Drupal. With a research focus on the semantic web and how to focus on data exchange. 

Agenda

* An overview of the AIPP call, incentives and goals
+ what can it do for the Drupal community (10 min)
* Round table: expressing once interest in the call (10 min)
* Putting it all together, finding a common ground (10 min)
* Working on the draft (20 min)
* rounding up and making the agenda for what should get done (10)

Goals

The intention of the BoF is to create a draft for the call. Who is involved and will do what?
The goal is to make the draft detailed enough so we can finish it by online collaboration.

Resources

The primary resource is the IAPP call . However it is expected to get more information along the way. The new resource may be posted here or in the research and academia group

or How To Build a Stock Exchange in Three Months With Zero Knowledge, 9,000 Euros, and a Big Supply of Slovak Beer, errrr, Motivation.

Fusu is the Domain Stock Exchange that allows domainers to trade derivative interests in premium, high value domains. At launch, the value of domains on the Exchange exceeded $1.5 million USD. The initial prototype was built in three months by three developers that had basically zero knowledge of Drupal.

Agenda

* From zero to hero - prototype in 3 months
- Drupal as RAD framework
- Drupal as framework
- Closed beta with invites made easy
* Overview of a complex system:
Custom modules: financial backend, accounting, auctions, notifications, graphs, management
Modules used: invite (get users), affiliates (get paying users), dhtmlmenu (oh), cronplus (why not core?), buddylist (everything is social), cacheclear (ah the pain with cache), glossary (nice), faq (also nice), casetracker (for bugs)
* Challenges and lessons learned:
Deployment and development cycles
Scalability
Core hacking
Module hacking
Menu and caching
Drupal 6.x

Goals

We present how we built a relatively complex application in Drupal, describe the challenges we faced or are still struggling with. The goal is to show to the audience that using Drupal can be an efficient solution to create applications and not just content sites.