Help Make the Site Building Track Memorable
Session Submissions for DrupalCon New Orleans are open, and we need you to send in sessions related to site building. A site building session was one of my best DrupalCon memories:
In 2009, I attended my first DrupalCon. I had heard about events happening all over the world where Drupal users would gather to share ideas, make connections and work out the future of the Drupal project, but this was my first official DrupalCon. Washington D.C. was a huge event with so much to see and do, but all these years later, a handful of sessions stick with me. A local company called DevelopmentSeed was showing off some tools they had built to help them keep several Drupal sites’ configuration in sync: Features.
My head is in the bottom left, just below the bright orange sign.
DrupalCon can indeed be a great place for the community to come together to generate and solidify totally new ideas, and it can also be a place for a group to bring an innovation they have hatched in the nest of the real world and share it with their peers.
To me, the Site Building track at any DrupalCon can often be the place where the next Features will make its metaphorical leap from the nest, and see if its wings can carry it.
As the chair of the Site Building track at DrupalCon New Orleans, I have a few goals for the sessions I am helping curate:
- Make Drupal site building and administration accessible to outsiders, and instill best practices in new or non-frequent Drupal users.
- Introduce people for whom Drupal 8 is a totally new system to the most common site building challenges.
- Provide real-world case studies from companies who have already completed several Drupal 8 projects, and come out with bumps and bruises.
- Maybe, just maybe, have the session that shares what could be the most memorable session 7 years from now. The session that changes the way you approach Drupal information architecture or site building.
I'm not saying the Features session stood out at the time, but I do remember several hallway conversations around the subject with DevelopmentSeed folks and my new Drupal friends. That kind of session is what I hope a first-time DrupalCon attendee can find in one of the Site Building rooms.
On the session submission page, you can read our list of the kinds of sessions that are expected in the Site Building track at DrupalCon New Orleans. We want to make sure you give a clear list of what will be covered in the session and what attendees will get out of this session, and what level of experience is required to understand the content.
If you have never given a session at DrupalCon before, we’d love to have you, anyone can do it. I recommend giving the same talk at a public space like a DrupalCamp or a meetup before May. Your talk doesn’t need to be the next “Features”, or part of our suggested topics list in order to be accepted. I encourage you to submit early rather than not at all, it is possible to revise your proposal once it’s submitted - I will reach out to you with suggestions if they are warranted.
Are there any sessions from your first DrupalCon you still remember? What about it was memorable? The topic, the style, the presenter, the people you met in the hallway after?
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Ryan Price
Site Building Track Chair
DrupalCon New Orleans
Photo by dudenhofer