"Share and enjoy" BoF workshop room

We will cover the current state of the Semantic Web in Drupal, what can be done and how this can all be used to make a difference in climate change.

What are you waiting for? Hack Climate Change

The BoF is in the Main Floor. If you don't know where it is contact me.

• A quick overview of the existing modules
• How to use them
• Cover strategy for integrating semantic tech into Drupal
• A little semantics goes a long way
• Yahoo Searchmonkey as a platoform to deliver rich search and rich semantic experiences for your websites
• Hack Climate Change - a social and tech movement to "Do the right thing"

So come one and come all... Bring your ideas and your brilliance. I plan on talking little and listening a lot!

Useful links
Here are some links to wet your appetite (shameless plug!)
* http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2008/03/05/drupal-7-a-living-breathing-se...


* http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2008/03/16/why-rdfa-is-the-only-web-scale...


* http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2008/02/22/one-small-step-for-yahoo-one-g...


* http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2008/03/14/preparing-your-sites-for-the-d...

Bios

David Peterson has been a Semantic Web believer for a few years now. He is based in Queensland Australia and works with BoaB interactive (a science communication and knowledge management company). I have a wonderful wife and 2 (soon to be 3) children and want the world to be a better place for them.

Hack Climate Change is a personal passion of his and he believes the Semantic Web is the perfect vehicle to make this happen.

I blog for Sitepoint and cover Semantic Web and Drupal topics: http://www.sitepoint.com/articlelist/497.

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Nicholas Roberts is a producer/project manager from Sydney Australia who works with BoaB interactive - a science and sustainability web company - in tropical north Queensland near the Great Barrier Reef.

He has 10 years of experience in internet, IT & media including a few years in newspapers for News Corp. Has worked for left-leaning think-tanks, an oil conglomerate, a university, a global multi-media empire, advertising firms and community arts. His most intense work experience was working as webmaster for News Corp in Australia from 2000-2003 during Sept 11 and the invasions of Afghanistan & Iraq.

Lately his focus has been on the intersection of internet, sustainability, media and democracy. He is in Europe for September to attend Drupalcon and the European Social Forum in Malmo in Sweden, September 17-21. He is also researching organising the Australian Social Forum to be held late 2009 and a multi-platform media cooperative.

He is a sucker for punishment.

Building a website for Drupalcon.org is a challenging matter. There are lots of features to work with, the site should adapt to the needs at any time and of course should show that when Drupal is used to build its own conference website, it should do cool stuff for its attendees and other interested parties.

There were lots of design decisions made on the site given the needs we specified based on our look at previous Drupalcons and our own expectations. Sometimes existing modules fit well into our plans, quite a few times we needed glue code or our own code to do the work. Sometimes our own code resulted in superb end results but then also sometimes made mistakes. It also turned out that some of our design choices were not perfect and in some cases our implementation was not adaptive as we wished.

I hope to tell stories about these experience, dive into some details about the implementation, glue code, own code. You will most probably not get clear recipes, and definitely not ready to use code.

Ps. (If we have time and interest, we can get into the making of do.drupaltown.org - our management website for this event and lessons we learned using and sometimes not using that).

Discussion about organizing a DrupalCon in Germany in fall 2009.

(Session language will probably be German)

Overview

Apache Solr is a search server built on top of Lucene which offers an HTTP interface, faceted search, caching and replication. Drupal has already a module (ApacheSolr) which does a very good job but which doesn't use some of the more advanced features. This talk will introduce them to you and will show you how you could use them to build cool stuff with Drupal.

Agenda

* Introduction to Solr
* The ApacheSolr module
* Schema
* Request handlers
* Input parameters
* Cache warming
* Geolocation: Localsolr and C-Squares

Goals

The goals of this BoF is to introduce people to Apache Solr and show them how they can use it in Drupal.

Resources
http://lucene.apache.org/solr/
http://drupal.org/project/apachesolr

Overview

The demo will show ajax tooling technology from ArtwareSoft.
We will show how you can take your existing drupal components such as views and data types and empower them with specialized interactive javascript UI.
The demo will focus on building the components with no coding, using both simple WYSIWYG approach for the simple cases and a rich specialized DSL with ajax IDE for the more complex cases.

Agenda

* Demonstration
* Discussion about the best ways to facilitate and exploit such a technology in the Drupal community.

Goals

Participants will meet and like the new technique, use it for their needs and contribute more styles, repository controls and drupal adapters for it.

Resources

Attendees are welcome to bring sample Xml's from which we will generate together the desired interactive views.

Overview

CVS is complicated. Learning how to use it is a challenge. However, it is a necessary tool for anyone wanting to contribute a module or theme to Drupal. Fortunately, there's a lot of documentation on how to use CVS. Unfortunately, there's a lot of documentation on how to use CVS. This session will try to condense all of that down into something we can wrap our heads around.

Agenda

* Quick overview of the basic ideas of version control.
* Walk through the steps to contribute a module.
* Describe the cycle of updating and committing changes.
* Tagging: make an official release!
* Branching, or "Which files am I using now?"

Goals

By the time we're done, everybody should have a higher level of confidence in using CVS. Some people might even have become first-time contributers.

Resources

A CVS account for Drupal's repository will let you participate, but it's not necessary for learnin'.

Overview

Since the drupal world is constantly growing with more and more (non-)commercially oriented projects and people starting off, I thought it was time to come up with a platform that tries to connect projects (as well as staffing requests), people (drupalists) and knowledge. As of now I am in the final stage of launching this non-commercial platform, called drupaleo, as a beta version.

Agenda

Goals

Resources

clear mind required

Overview

The panel will discuss their experiences producing the last several Drupalcon conferences (Boston, Szeged).

Topics include

* Effort level description
* Budgeting
* Venue selection & infrastructure logistics
* Attendee travel logistics
* Event website; registrations / commerce
* Session proposal management
* And other topics

Resources

The presenters will likely need a projector for showing PPT/Keynote presentations.

Overview

Come up with a plan how to encourage and perform constant user testing in Drupal. The BoF continues on what has been said in the Session "User Testing in Drupal".

Agenda

• User testing is tedious, what can we do to make it more fun?
• The main problem is that in a test, you question your own work. This is unpleasant, because you might find out it has issues. Or is this no issue?
• One needs testing persons. How can one make it easy for them so they may participate in testing Drupal again? Who are the people we need for that?
• Generally two ways of testing can be done: completely remote, or with you directly watching the Tester. Which one is better?
• There is also the "big solution" (formal Studies like in Minnesota and Baltimore. We also need those. What role do they play, and what role play smaller ones?
• How can we utilize existing Infrastructure to minimize redundant work? Maybe the DROP program can be used and extended? Do the issue queues help?

Resources

Usability Testing Suite
In dev state,
maintained by boombatower