Drupalcon New Orleans

Drupalcon 2016 was an amazing event that deserves a summary here. This year, I was invited to be a facilitator for the the Drupalcon Higher-Ed Summit. I was not planning to attend the event based on my experience at Drupalcon Los Angeles in 2015, but I accepted the invitation and was really happy I made the trip.

The Venue

The New Orleans convention center is the largest convention center I have ever been to. It sprawls across 6 blocks and easily held the 3,100 attendees. Drupalcon didn't even take up half of the convention center space. The keynote had more than enough room, and the exhibit hall/cafeteria had ample space. A few sessions had rooms packed beyond capacity, but as long as you were five minutes early, you always got a seat. One of the best parts about the convention center was the fact that we had coffee all day every day!

Higher-Ed Summit

The Summit was my favorite thing about Drupalcon Los Angeles and Drupalcon New Orleans did not disappoint. The Higher-Ed Summit is one of a variety of summits offered at Drupalcon.

It consisted of a panel discussion, three table discussion breakout sessions, a keynote during the lunch hour, and a networking/bar hour. There were about 150 attendees at the summit, and if they had left the registration open, there easily would have been more. During the table discussions we talked about various topics involving the Higher-Ed community and discussed the projects we were working on, the problems we were having, and the future we would like to build. You can find the notes on the discussions here thanks to our wonderful note takers.

Dartmouth and OHO are working on a great project to share information within a university or any company for that matter. The site acts as a central repository of articles that other sites contribute to and pull from. There is obviously a lot more to this project, so if you are interested in content sharing and centralization, you can find the notes here.

The Sessions and Birds of a Feather(BOFs)

If I could summarize the sessions in one word it would be inspiring! I could take the information learned in several sessions and apply it directly to what I am doing now. A few of the sessions even inspired me to try using D8 on some projects where I was planning to use Laravel. I’m looking at you paragraphs. The BOFs were equally great. The informal setting allowed you to learn about specialized topics on a more personal level, sometimes directly with the project maintainers.

On more than one occasion, I felt myself being torn between two sessions or a BOF and another session. Thanks to the Drupal Association, I didn't have to worry about missing anything. All of the sessions were recorded and put on YouTube.

Drupalcon 2017

Lucky for us East Coast residents, Drupalcon is coming to Baltimore! Penn State should be well represented since more than a few of us are happy to drive the short distance. Assuming the conference will be at the Baltimore convention center, Inner Harbor should be a great venue for social events and I am already looking forward to some Maryland Crab Cakes!

TLDR;

Drupalcon New Orleans was an amazing experience that you can learn from even if you couldn’t attend. Next year’s Drupalcon will be in Baltimore and I highly recommend going if you are within driving distance like the Penn State Drupal community.

Session videos: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLpeDXSh4nHjTY67K6N8RZHEiJhQL-dnUf

Pictures: https://www.flickr.com/search/?text=drupalcon%20new%20orleans&sort=date-taken-asc

Higher-Ed Summit Notes: http://bit.ly/2016drupalconhigheredsummit