Two weeks ago I attended a joint Web 2.0 (conference) and Web2Open (unconference) two part session on building a social strategy for your business. Web 2.0 and social software luminaries Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff presented a session " how to have a successful social strategy" based on their extensive research and book "Groundswell".

Pragmatist

Yesterday the Drupal association added it's 500th paid member. 350 individuals paid 22 Euros for an individual membership and 150 organizations paid 73 Euros for an organizational membership. In total the association has received $21 448.45 from paid memberships.

First let me thank almost 500 people who've purchased a Drupal association membership. Your support makes it possible to hold Drupal events like Drupalcon North America, Europe, and soon hopefully a Drupalcon Asia. It's also allowing us to purchase the hardware we need to run Drupal.org and help prepare for a redesign.

There's been a backlog in processing memberships and we are working to fix this problem. Let me give you a bit of a technical explanation and then explain what we are doing to fix this.

Coming out of Drupalcon in Boston, there's a lot of buzz in the community about RDF and Drupal's future. RDF was a prominent theme in Dries' keynote address. Boris Mann and I were chatting at Drupalcon about RDF and Drupal and I thought I'd jot down these notes while they're fresh in my mind.

From the start, Drupal has focused on enabling collaboration. The quintessential Drupal website is not based on a single central authority; it's a collective enterprise.

If you run a popular Drupal site, you'll sometimes find more queries in your MySQL server's slow query log than you really want to.

Sometimes the unruly queries can be eliminated easily by adding an index or two. Sometimes, they can be avoided alltogether (for example, the query in theme_forum_topic_navigation can be avoided by overriding the function with an empty one in your theme).

Aspiring Drupalcon organizers may be interested in understanding what went into organizing the conference content and coordinating volunteers. We've stripped the emails and private information from the Boston 2008 group so you can now take a look at one part of the organizing effort.

Hello, one of the many improvements to this Drupalcon was the coordinated effort to capture sessions on video. The conference organizers purchased tapes for all the sessions in advance and kept a library of all 90 hours on MiniDV tapes.

The video recording team managed to capture all the sessions on video with some level of audio. They also managed to capture a separate audio channel on volunteer's laptops from the audio system. That audio is being uploaded to archive.org.

Drupalcon registration has now closed. Many people are asking if they can see the sessions by video, or if the sessions will be streamed live. Due to having 800 people on the community wireless, we don't believe we can stream 5-6 sessions simultaneously in a reliable way.

We are now requesting volunteers who can help video record sessions, and who can do video post production each night. If you are willing to learn and commit to helping one day or one night, please let me know.

In September 2007, we had approximate 430 registrations from Drupalcon Barcelona. For Drupalcon Boston we aimed to provide a conference facility that could accommodate anyone who wanted to attend. As recently as two weeks ago, we had anticipated that we would reach a total of 650. We are now over 700 registered attendees. Based on current projections, we will need to close registrations before Drupalcon starts next week.

For Drupalcon we've set an explicit goal of trying to raise the quality of the conference. But like all goals, you've got to adjust based on feedback.