Drupalcamp Boston Wrap-up
The Drupal Design Camp in Boston this past weekend was fantastic. Having the event at the MIT Stata Center, a building that looks like it's right our of a Dr. Seuss book, was a perfect place for a design event. With well over 150 people, loads of fantastic sessions, and ideas for improving the tools and community designers and themers have the camp was a roaring success.
The People
There weren't just people attending from the east coast or midwest and Morten wasn't the person who traveled the furthest. There were people from Texas, the Bay Area, and Europe. From the looks of things the event was 1/4 women. Has there ever been a drupal event with this high percentage of women? There were new people and people with 2 digit drupal.org user ids. There were developers and there were a whole lot of people with the creative art gene.
The Sessions
More than one attendee said they thought the sessions here were better than at drupalcon. With keynotes by Jeff Robbins and Jay Batson and huge sessions like the one on the 960 grid by Nathan Smith, the creator of 960, and Todd Nienkerk it's hard not to feel this way.
The 40 session covered topics ranging from the basics of drupal to themeing techniques to radical new ideas in how to theme like skinr.
The New Ideas
In Jay Batson's keynote many of the back room chatter started to turn into things we can act on as a community. Some ideas that came out were to start a site for designers and themers, to have a way to deal with snippets (something themers seem to do well), to have a showcase of hot drupal sites (giving credit where due). These are just the tip of the ice berg.
The Stata Center
The Stata Center was the perfect place for an event like this. Every direction you look there's something inspiring and artistic about the building.
I want to give a special thanks to Susan MacPhee for organizing the event and MIT for hosting the event. It was fantastic.
