I've all but finished my "live blogging," such as it was: DrupalCon Copenhagen actually ended a week ago, so "live" is stretching it a bit. But I had a fantastic time, and a large part of that was attending the self-organising and friendly "Birds of a Feather" sessions that are planned by attendees on parallel tracks to the more formal, session-based conference.
It's worth mentioning two of them here, because the attendees made them both such a tremendous success. The first was a "Drupal for NGOs" session that I put onto the schedule, to try to get people from NGOs, not-for profits and charities---the majority of our clients at Torchbox---to be able to share problems, solutions and stories from the trenches in a receptive environment.
I helped facilitate the discussion but really there were a lot of people there with brilliant ideas and lots of ideas to share, so it wasn't exactly hard. We made a few notes here if anyone's interested in finding out what happened, or getting in touch with any of the other attendees.
The other event was the Drupal CRM BoF. Plans are afoot to build a native CRM in Drupal, possibly as a mega-feature or a distribution, and Chris and Joachim helped put together a really dynamic and productive meeting on how we might move to a full CRM in Drupal, being very clear-eyed and critical on the way: even the question of "do we need a native CRM?" was considered. I think this really strengthened the final outcomes of the meeting, and the Drupal CRM project is now on a firm footing for future development.
Chris wrote up the meeting itself; I believe Joachim had further discussions during the Friday code sprint with other stakeholders, and has begun to document the architecture arising from that. Meanwhile Steve is keeping track of documentation generally so the CRM group can keep focussed.
All in all the BoFs, more than the sessions in a way, showed that the community is one of the real strengths of Drupal. When a loose collection of contributors are unleashed on a subject, there's no limit to what they can accomplish. When Joachim first told me that he had come to Copenhagen largely to network rather than attend sessions, I thought he was mad. In retrospect, I'm starting to see his point.
