Drupal has seven principles, in case you didn't know. I've screwed up in the past and forgot to read them, or thought that my particular personal situation or business situation was an excuse to not follow those. When I've gotten enough distance from those mistakes, I've been able to look back and understand that the reason why the Drupal community didn't support a particular action I had taken, was because I had deviated from those principles.
The Drupal community shares no common gender, race, sexual orientation, nationality, or religious belief. Yet we are bound tightly to work together and achieve something greater than the sum of our individual contributions. What we have in common are that our actions are consistent with these seven principles.
As we experience growth and contractions in our community, it's important that we keep those principles in mind. They've served us well, and will continue to do so for the triumphs and challenges we will face in the coming months.
For Drupalcon Boston, the over 60 volunteers and organizers are faced with both a triumph and a challenge. We've got 171 sessions submitted but just about 60 available main session slots to accommodate the demand. In many ways that's an incredible triumph, but it's also a great challenge as we are going to have to say no to too many good sessions.
To face this challenge, I suggest we return to the principle of collaboration and see if we can work through this together. We are already off to a great start. I've asked 5 complete strangers to come together and present on the topic of "Best practices in development environments, staging, build management, and production environments". Despite their busy schedules and the fact they don't know each other, they've stepped forward collaborated and produced what will be one of the cornerstone sessions of the Drupal site building track. There's 8-9 people working on a joint session on performance tuning where each person is addressing one level in tuning the system stack from operating system to CSS.
Our track co-chairs have been reaching out to other session presenters to see if there's room for collaboration in other areas. If you've proposed a session, take a look at other sessions in your track and see if they are similar. If so, consider reaching out and joining two sessions into one.
We are also going to apply one more principle to session selection: quality coding. If you've got a great topic, and you are working really hard to get it done in time, but nobody from the community is using your code yet, then we are going to pass on offering you a session in one of the tracks. We encourage you to hold a BoF. Since there's dozens and dozens of other sessions that do have working code that's being actively used by other community members we are going to prioritize them.
If you are working on Drupal 7 core changes, we obviously wouldn't expect the code to be complete. If you are porting modules to Drupal 6 we understand that you might not be completely done and will make an exception if your project is tied directly to the Drupal 6 life cycle.
