Three months ago, I posted a request for people to take over some of my modules, so I can concentrate on supporting the set I am actively developing and using better, and the other modules get proper maintenance going forward from other fine folks in the community. Nearly all of the modules found their maintainers, but I am still searching for a new maintainer for filebrowser module.

At DrupalCon Barcelona, I decided to volunteer to fix the "event organization and promotion problem" around Drupal. We had a great "next DrupalCon" BoF where we discussed a lot of bigger and smaller details, and it was decided that we should retain this knowledge. Robert Garrigos announced the BoF initially to hand over the knowledge they learned while organizing the event, so we needed to find a permanent place to write up these notes.

This was also a good opportunity for me to step a bit ahead from the "internationalization and localization guy" stereotype. Now that we are growing the Drupal system to support local and international communities of all sorts, we should improve our infrastructure to help our own communities grow and promote themselfs. That is the next step for world domination, I thought.

I am back home again from DrupalCon Barcelona 2007. I must say that it was a very exciting event. It was fantastic to meet people with whom I last met in person in 2005 in Antwerp (on the first famous meet-in-person developer meeting which was in a hotel basement). The Drupal community grew a lot since then. Dries mentions that last years Brussels conference had 150 people while this years Barcelona event had 450, which means the conference is three times bigger.

FrOSCon was a great conference. Lots of interesting people, lots of new information shared and discussions participated in. Although I did not have time to process and upload the photos yet, I found Bonn, Cologne and Sankt Augustin to be perfect places to stay in.

With the support of the Drupal Association, I traveled to Bonn this Thursday and played the tourist around the city that day. I have been to Cologne yesterday (have seen fantastic sights in both cities), and we ended the day with a nice dinner with people here for the conference and guys from the local user group. See some of Morten's pictures which are already up.

We also ended up at our hotel for some night drinks, and I actually met with some of the nice people I know well from the PHP community (from my previous deeper involvement with the PHP project). It turned out that I switched from the Drupal guys table to the eZ Publish table (lots of people staying in the same hotel). All-in all everybody is very nice, we mixed up quite well.

The conference is also going well, although there are lots of German talks, which some of us can't understand unfortunately. But this means we are progressing with core patches in the meantime, so if you have some pet issues, be sure to continue work on them.

Again, thanks for the Drupal Association for sponsoring the event, I would not be able to make it without their support! And special thanks to Robert Douglass, who had a very good sense of flawlessly organizing the Drupal presence so far.