A summary for the Drupal community

Let me place the conclusion at the top: Despite the fact that I did not manage to get Drupal t-shirts and that the Drupal poster wasn't printed the way I expected it, LinuxTag was a success for the Drupal project and a very interesting experience for myself.

I already gave a short account of the first and second day at LinuxTag. I only stayed till 12:30h on Friday. The morning was not very busy and I heared I did not miss that much on the afternoon.

Saturday was a very different day. There where a lot more visitors and consequently I spoke to a lot more people about our project. I was quite exhausted at the end of the day.

Those talks where usually accompagnied by a demonstration and tour of Drupal sites and lasted between five and fourtyfive minutes. The interests of visitors were about evenly split between Drupal as a website management tool and Drupal as a CMS. (Reminder: We were sharing a booth that had Content Management as its header.)

Visitors had a varying background: From webmasters of a variety of organisations, to freelance programmers, businessmen, and people from government organisations. In total I spoke to about 35 people about Drupal. This may sound disappointing but considering the depth of interest shown it is in my opinion not. I gave each person I had given a talk my business card. I'll let you know if I get any feedback. I even met some Drupal users who ususally remarked how well they like the software.

There were also some people only collecting leaflets. I hope those will read them at home. Since I had grossly overestimated the number of visitor to LinuxTag I had also overestimated the number of people picking leaflets up and have now about 800 leaflets left. Everybody who is willing to pay the postage can get some sent. I also do have the poster taken home with me. I don't want to keep it, so it is up for grabs, too.

I also spoke to my colleagues at the booth about Drupal, their projects and Content Management in general. This too was a very interesting aspect of LinuxTag. On Saturday I attended the founding talk of OSCOM Germany given by Sandro Zic. The attendance wasn't really huge (about 15 people) but I still think the idea has potential.

During LinuxTag I tried to be present in #drupal, too. But since I often was busy with people, and the main activity there is in the evening there wasn't much of conversation.

Martin Bähr's idea of having several CMSes presented in one booth was certainly a good one and should be taken up again on next LinuxTag.

Some improvements would be to have a poster which lists all present CMSes and maybe list their requirements (programming language, server). We should also try to focus on CMSes, neither Pike nor Caudium are CMSes.

Let me thank Martin Bähr from the Open sTeam team for getting the booth and organizing the projector, Susanne and Hilko for hospitality, and my VDSt Karlsruhe for after hours fun.