Last week, I had the pleasure of attending DrupalCon Paris, held at a beautiful venue south of Paris city center. My attendance was made possible thanks to receiving one of the scholarships from the Drupal Association.

If you saw me there, I was one of those people running around in a red volunteer T-shirt. As a volunteer, duties varied but usually included the registration desk, and answering questions like 'Where is the Isobar room' or (in French) 'What is this conference?' Other duties included assembling bags and badges, tidying/restocking refreshment tables in the public areas, moving chairs and tables, as well as monitoring the session rooms.

As a room monitor, the main role is ensure the session runs smoothly, keep the attendees in some semblance of order, and making sure the talk doesn't exceed the allotted 50 minutes (the schedule was designed to allow 15 minutes between sessions, for the next speaker to set up as well as allow attendees to locate their next session). Things didn't always go as planned: Batteries on headsets went dead, superpopular sessions filled up so people had to sit on the floor and other surfaces, and several times I was the mean person who called time on the speaker for running on too long. Overall, it went fairly smoothly from my point of view.

DrupalCon Sessions

Thankfully there was enough flexibility that I could also attend sessions of interest to me.

• Sustainable Theming was presented by Colleen Carroll and John Wilkins. As someone new to Drupal theming, I chose this session because I've learned that you should start as you mean to go on, and theming efficiently makes sense.
• Communicating design - Sketching your way to understanding by Roy Scholten was super. I always enjoy hearing how other UX professionals structure their design process.
• Social + Media: What We Need Next presented by Chris Heuer, didn't agree with everyone, but I did think Chris made some good points.
• Architecture is for everyone presented by Jeff Eaton, was great. I think his message was clear, the visuals from the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, CA were spot-on.
• Functional Interactive Design was presented by Laura Scott of Boulder's PingVision. I especially liked the photograph of the toilet from D4D camp Boston, because while I was volunteering there, we warned people about the good and natural phenomenon of yellowness in the toilet bowl water.
• jQuery for designers and themers was presented by Bevan Rudge of CivicActions. The session was very popular and there were a lot of questions from the crowd.
• Welcome to the Jungle! Basic Drupal Recipes and Best Practices for Beginners was presented by Carl Wiedemann of Denver. I took a few notes and have some definite modifications to make to my site in development (like replacing the contact form module with the web form module instead).

It was cool to meet so many Coloradans (Carl, Laura, Al, Nate, Matt T & John F)! I grew up in Colorado, and a lot of my family still live there.

In addition to sessions, I also attended my first code sprint on day five. Given the prior late-night, it wasn't clear what time the other members of the Drupal.org design implementation team would be turning up, so I was instructed to sit, which happened to be opposite Dries. We chatted briefly and within a minute or so Angie (webchick) arrived and I was asked to move. Not a problem, but while waiting for the others, I tweeted about it. And got a reply:

Angie and I had a laugh about my tweet later that night as well (I had to make it clear that I wasn't actually blaming her).

I felt pretty knackered throughout the entire conference, which definitely dulled my energy levels. This would be partly due to the jet lag and partly due to the...

Evening Socializing

The evenings are an opportunity to mix with everyone and chat about everything. The alcohol doesn't hurt either. On different evenings, I went out with dinner with the awesome folks at Gravitek, conference organizers, and various members of the design (and non-design) community. Post-dinner gatherings usually ended up being in a designated bar somewhere. Coordinating meetups in a city the size of Paris is never easy and timings were never accurate. Regardless, there's a saying, "Everything works out in Drupal world" and I generally found this to be true.

If I could do it over, I would have stayed closer to the city center, rather than at the venue, because getting back to the venue in the wee hours of the morning was not easy, fun or cheap. Public transportation is always easier to negotiate in the clear light of day, even if it means getting up earlier. Ideally, the venue, bars, restaurants and hotels would all be in walking distance of each other.

I brought along my small, lame 'spare' camera that is slowly dying, and only got these shots of the conference & related activities: http://www.flickr.com/photos/lisarex/tags/drupalconparis/

So, When Can We Do This Again?

The next Drupalcon will be held in San Francisco April 18-20, 2010, but expect sprints and other activities either side of those dates.

I'm very glad I was able to attend. Over the course of six days I've met some incredible people, had some fun conversations, learned quite a bit, and caught up with the great people I had met previously at the Boston D4D camp. I would list everyone by name but it would take far too long, so please say hi to me anytime in comments, email, lisarex Twitter, LinkedIn etc.

Source: Flickr

Source: Flickr