Several Drupal developers are meeting February 4-6, 2008 in Chicago to work on and re-design Drupal's core data architecture. Topics will include data APIs, object modeling, fields in core, and an overlapping swirl of related ideas. Our goal is to have a design proposal for presentation at DrupalCon Boston 2008.

Over in our meetup planning group, we welcome input on what we should try to cover and will blog here during the meetup to keep everyone informed on our progress. Note that we are only seven people meeting for three days; we need to stay very focused on a limited set of goals if we want to accomplish anything.

This Data Architecture Design Sprint is not an official event sanctioned by anybody. It is just a group of Drupal enthusiasts and, for some, their employers or clients who agree that this work is important and will benefit everyone. We'd like to recognize the individuals and companies that are donating their time and resources to make this event possible:

• Yves Chedemois. Publicis Modem France
• Larry Garfield. Palantir.net
• Barry Jaspan. Acquia
• Karoly Negyesi, NowPublic
• Nedjo Rogers
• Karen Stevenson
• Moshe Weitzman

Special thanks to Palantir.net for free use of their conference room and to CivicSpace for funding Nedjo Rogers' and Henrique Recidive's work on the Data API whitepapers.