We just got back from Chicago where we had an eventful CiviCon 2011 on Mon, Mar 7th. We had more than 100 participants (registration, attendance sheets and name badges managed with CiviEvent) from across various parts of the US and Canada. We also had a successful sponsorship program with 4 Gold Sponsors, 5 Silver Sponsors and 10 Bronze Sponsors (managed by CiviContribute and the CiviEvent discount module). A companion blog post highlights all the wonderful women and men (and organizations) who made this event possible. Some of my personal highlights of the trip:
- Parallel user and administrator training, developer training and code sprint for two days prior to CiviCon.
- A great keynote case study on designing, deploying and managing the New York State Senate install of CiviCRM by Craig Winkelman from Rayogram.
- A good mix of users, administrators, implementors and developers. There was a good distribution of attendees for sessions in each of our tracks.
- Having an incredible selection of sessions that covered a wide variety of topics. From deploying sites with Aegir / Drush, to scaling CiviMail, to Managing Grassroots events, to a new "CiviMobile" module using API v3, to Drupal 7 + CiviCRM. Slides from most of the presentations have already been posted!
- Seeing old and new faces at the various events.
- Meeting for the first time long time community members Stuart Gaston (Stoob), Allen Shaw (TwoMice) and Owen Barton (grugnog)
- Some good chats in the morning session with a Civi for Drupal Developers BoF led by Matt Chapman
- A really nice "after party" at Jefferson Bar, with a good upstairs room that enabled the conversation and connections to flow.
Plans are coming along for CiviCon 2011 Europe which will be in London in August (scheduled in conjunction with DrupalCon Europe). Stay tuned for date and venue announcements!
