General/Overall Review of Conference

I looked around, but found no clear place to provide comments about the conference as a whole. I did very much appreciate the opportunity to provide feedback on specific sessions-- very cool, and hopefully very helpful in organizing next year.

If there's a better place to post this general feedback, please let me know.

Two observations:

1) This is my first DrupalCon, and I was very pleased. I learned a ton, and got a great deal of inspiration. And at some point, I drank just enough of the koolaid that I'm now motivated to find some way to give back over the next year... which is surprising as I'm not really that much of a joiner.

And so I would like to say thanks to the organizers and presenters. You've ruined my weekends for the next six months-- with all the things I now have to research and prototype-- but ultimately that's a good thing.

2) My only disappointment was that too many of the sessions I attended were light on either Drupal, light on how to use [subjectX] with Drupal, or both. Some presentations were obviously Drupal focused, but for those topics that focused on things tangential to Drupal (e.g. Jquery, accessibility), they tended to be too much about the general topic and not enough about how it fit with Drupal.

And these kinds of presentations can sometimes be good at conferences. Given how broad Drupal is becoming, I'm not sure that non-Drupal topics are advantageous to the community.

My suggestions have to do with labeling, and perhaps with the selection of presentations. Labeling: If the presentation is going to focus specifically on a non-Drupal topic (e.g. introduction to the basics of Web accessibility), there needs to be some way to get that at a glance.

Presentation Selection: My preference (and recommendation) would be that a threshold of Drupal-related content is required for a presentation to be included in the conference. I can see this being 50% or even 75% of the content of a presentation has to be about Drupal in order for it to be part of this conference. Start the presentation with a brief overview of the subject/technology-- and include resources for more learning-- but then focus on how the subject/technology intersects with Drupal; and then, if possible; some pragmatics as to how you might utilize/leverage said subject/technology.

That's my two cents. And just to be clear that this post isn't idle complaints from the sidelines, I'm already working up ideas that I can propose for presentations next year.

Thanks,
JK