JoomlaDay 2011
After the planning and craziness is over, I can happily say that JoomlaDay2011 was a tremendous success.
Friday the leadership team along with about 30 other attendees met to discuss where joomla should go in 2013. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to participate as I would have liked because I was setting up for the weekend. But, I heard lots of great discussions going on. It is excited to see where Joomla! will be going to in just a few years!
Friday night we invited the sponsors, speakers, volunteers to a party at the local bar, House of Brews. They really put on a great event! We had beer towers, appetizers, a great dinner, and of course dessert. It was a great time for me to mingle and meet with many of our international guests. What a way to start the weekend. The conversation went from politics to joomla to what is going on in your country at the moment. I am proud to say we had guests from Western Australia, Israel, Columbia, Germany, France, Canada and more...
Saturday morning started very early...and with a couple of head aches. Unfortunately the coffee wasn't brewing as it should have, so we need to get some boxes of Joe...but that didn't slow down the presenters or the workshops. Although, I must admin people seemed a little fuzzy before they finally got their coffee...with plenty of bagels, muffins, juice, and everything else at 8:45am the keynote began. Thanks to Ryan for creating a video for us that we were able to watch all together (you can see it online!). This video did need to be 'paused, to be continued', so we could start all of the sessions on time.
Each session on saturday was over 1 hour long. Some of the comments were that they were too long, others commented that they were just perfect, I guest you can't please everyone. We had sessions based on extensions and 3rd party developers and other sessions based on what you can do with joomla from a developer perspective, then other sessions focused on the 'business end' of Joomla!. Each session was well attended, and there was definately a huge variety of what people could learn about. The number one complaint that I have received so far was that they had too many to pick from. Well, I have a solution for that, we have posted the videos on the www.JoomladayNYC.com website so now you can see what you have missed!
Saturday ended again with another trip to the House of Brews. Thanks to a generous donation from Microsoft we were able to provide appetizers and beer for the attendees. I think everyone enjoyed another night out with the joomla folks. Some did ask why the same place, to be honest, we couldn't find another bar/restaurant that would host 10-70 people, since we had no idea how many would attend our event on saturday night. So instead of picking a place where we would have to wait on line, we decided to be better safe than sorry. A special shout out goes to Marian Konop of Gotham Informatics who planeed all of these parties...
Sunday began with another almost coffee drama...but we perservered by having the coffee ready for our guests by 8:30am...thank goodness, with the amount of work to be done Sunday we really needed the coffee! Elin gave a great keynote about Joomla and how to get involved, which we all need to do. We even added a 'bug squashing' session to that day. Rob Schley then gave the entire group a view into the Unified Content Model that he started creating at Ebay. We are looking forward to see what gets integrated and how all of this will work out. The sessions sunday were developer focused, we adjusted some tracks as needed to try to make as many participants as comfortable as possible.
We closed the day on Sunday with a stump the speaker one more time, and the questions and answers were varied as any JoomlaDay conference should be.
All in all, we, the organizers from this year are exhausted and energized. I know personally I am looking forward to attending other joomla days to have the experience from a 'guest' perspective and 'learn a little more'.
Thanks again to the sponsors, speakers and volunteers for following through with a great event!