Just announced from the DrupalCon stage:

The Knight Drupal (an open source content management system) Initiative’s winners (background on this project), announced at the DrupalCon DC Conference, will receive a total of 485,380ドル to:

* Create concise, up-to-date instructions for Drupal software packages so that tech novices can use the tools; (Winner: Programmer Addison Berry/ add1sun)
*Create a free publishing system to make it easier for several geographic communities to share local news with each other; (Winner: Oregon-based funnymonkey.com (billfitzgerald)

Hey Folks,
Just to document our intent, we are planning to have a BoF Session about DrupalCon SouthAmerica.

Anyone is welcome ;)

More info, take a look at:
http://groups.drupal.org/drupalcon-southamerica
http://dc2009.drupalcon.org/node/4214
http://groups.drupal.org/node/19460
http://groups.drupal.org/node/19404

UPDATE: Open Media Camp planning, session proposals, conversations, rsvp, etc have all been moved to the new camp site at: http://www.openmediacamp.org

[Edit April 10th, 2009]

Dates and Location
Sessions: September 1st-4th, 2009
Sprint day: September 5th, 2009
Paris, France
At Maison Internationale de Paris

See : http://paris2009.drupalcon.org/

[end of edit]

The official announcement is there : http://drupal.org/node/374199

Now that the decision has been taken, we are in the process of confirming and finalizing some important elements. As soon as we will have more information, you will be updated on this group.

In the meantime, you can follow us on twitter : @drupalcon (EDIT)

And thanks again for your support.
Alex.

The Paris sprint will happen at http://www.rentals.chsparis.com/mnt/mnt.htm. Joeri is the local project manager, Gabor is the technical lead, and Dries is the lead organizer.

Agenda

Day 1, Feb. 3: Scope and queue clearing

• Introductions
• Set goals for sprint: identify development priorities
• Discuss and plan each of the selected new development focuses
• Divide up patch responsibility

Core committer session with Angie after 03:00 GMT, 1 hr.

• Review bug fixes in patch queue, work through remaining issues with fixes.

Day 2, Feb. 4:

• Continue work in small teams on major development priorities.
• Fix identified issues in bug fixes and tweaks.

Core committer session, 2 hrs

While Google hasn't officially announced anything to my knowledge, word on the street is that the Summer of Code program will be running again in 2009. If it runs as it did in 2008, then it would be publicly announced next month, and applications from mentoring organizations (that's us - Drupal) to participate will be due the first week of March (just in time for everyone to be distracted by Drupalcon! ;)).

Traditionally, I've sort of headed up the administrative, getting-the-ball-rolling process at the beginning of SoC, and making-sure-things-are-chugging-along during the middle, with the help of Drupal's tremendous mentoring team. There is one BIG snag this year though -- last fall I got named Drupal 7 core maintainer, and have had to cut all other "extra-curricular" duties, and that includes SoC. :\ We therefore urgently need to look at a sustainable way to spread this responsibility across the mentoring team so it doesn't create a "single point of failure" in our organization.

So let's pre-preemptively start talking strategy about how to tackle managing SoC moving forward. Here's a brain-dump of everything related to managing SoC that will need to be looked after, preferably by a team of former mentors, students, and ardent summer of code fans.

Want to help? Sign yourself up!

Last night I (finally) updated my (ultra-simple) personal website to 6.0, and while I was at it I decided to try out some caching ideas that had been brewing in the back of my mind for a while.

Though all caching strategies have their pitfalls and drawbacks, the idea I wanted to try -- combining Boost and Memcache -- seems like a real live-wire. However, if it can be made to work, I think it might offer some significant advantages.

This post is an open discussion on the future of Drupalcon management. After Drupalcon Boston held in March, 2008 it became clear that Drupalcon was (is) growing at a rapid rate and that the underlying management infrastructure needs an upgrade. Changes were made for Drupalcon Europe as well as for Drupalcon D.C (2009) and these have proven to be successful. The process still needs to evolve such that we not only meet the demands of the attendees (expected to be 1,200 strong at D.C) but give these attendees the high quality conference they expect. In short, we can and should do more.