Curious

Most people think of famine, war, disease, hopelessness and big bucketloads of sand when Africa is mentioned. That's a shame really because Africa is, in many respects, a continent on the move.

This talk will take us through a number of often cited problems which we really see as opportunities where Drupal can (and often already does) play a big remedying role: lack of formal education, illiteracy, unconnected rural regions, the Aid Industry Gone Wild (TM) and lack of transparency in governments and organizations. To name but a few.

First, a base definition and discussion will be had about the differences between an install profile for internal / multi-site use and a full blown Drupal distribution, and the shades of grey in between.

Then we'll dive into the business reasons and opportunities around building a Drupal product.

• Branding & marketing
• "Drupal inside" - the benefits of building on Drupal
• Product as loss leader
• Hosting?
• Revenue streams!

We all know that learning from mistakes is the best way to learn how not to do things. In this session I will pick some of the worst nightmares I have stumbled upon during my 5 years with Drupal theming (eventualy we will look into D7 possible nightmares, such as hook_alter). I am pretty sure that some of you have still sleepless nights while thinking about a ticking bomb in your theme. If not, you might not even be aware of such problems and/or wrong approaches.

-Drupal User Group
-Local group or linguistic group
-Industries related group
-Drupal association worldwide

Should we adopt a Drupal Code of Conduct (#DCOC) ?
How can can it works together ?
How can it help Drupal grow ?

This session is more a place holder to have a panel with representative of Drupal User Groups and DA to share experiences and see what works and doesn't works.

From Dries' original typo trying to register the Dutch word for community,
... to the adoption of Drupal by kerneltrap.org
... to the jump across the Atlantic and some of the first and still prominent Drupal-based companies coming out of the Howard Dean presidential campaign,
... to the weekend from hell and Drupal.org finally moving to dedicated servers,
... to the camps now being held on six continents,
we'll look at how has Drupal spread throughout the world and try to pinpoint turning points in the development of the Drupal community.

The light side: being fully engaged in the community as part of your business strategy
The dark side: making money by deploying Drupal without ever participating in the community

I will be holding an open discussion on how & why to contribute to Drupal, both on a contrib basis as well as to Drupal core.

Here are some of the questions that will be explored:
* how do you schedule contributions?
* do you charge clients for contributions? should you?
* how do you promote your community ethos to clients?
* will doing community contributions lead to more work for you?

Have you already studied to your heart's content the touristy attractions of Drupal 7 (Entity API, Fields, AJAX framework, etc.)? Looking to see something unexpected in Drupal 7? You're in luck.

Visit with me the semi-secret neighborhoods of Drupal 7, only known by some natives.

• Queues and Jobs: execute long-running jobs easily and reliably
• Pluggeable caches: do you love Cache Router, but hope it was properly maintained?
• Extensible database drivers: ever wanted to be able to alter the behavior of the database engine, to optimize your cluster?

Mid 2009, France Télévisions, the French public national television group, decided to switch to a new CMS that would be able to suit all their internet content publishing needs.

Since France Télévisions hosts more than 1000 sites, it was impossible to migrate all the sites at once. That's why a pilot site was chosen : the sports news site sport.francetv.fr. Of course, the CMS also had to be able to handle the others sites that would be migrated later.

What we want to tell you is the story of this successful Drupal project .

We will cover the following topics :

In this session, we'll look at why depending on Twitter and Facebook (or similar) has serious drawbacks; the network should be open and federated! We'll look at OStatus (http://ostatus.org/), the completely open protocol that we've been working to develop and promote at StatusNet (http://status.net/) for real-time, federated public messaging and we'll see why it's interesting (and important) for Drupal.

This session is for open protocol geeks, freedom fighters and anyone who is just trying figure out what it all means.

June 2010 we took a bold leap as a new company and decided to spend part our summer developing an Open-Source Internet Curriculum. We partnered with COSOLA-MACILE, a non-profit organization focused on K-12 education in less advantaged communities.

In July, we are travelling to Itabo, Dominican Republic to teach 6th-12th grade students and teachers about the Internet, Open-Source technology and Drupal, using Drupal Gardens as the primary teaching tool. The Pilot Program will run for approximately 2-weeks as an after school program open to interested MACILE participants.