The Drupal community is alive with meetups, user groups, and camps. However, there isn't a published formula on using Drupal to accomplish the needs of a large meetup, camp, or convention.
In heavy testing of the proposed update of the automated testing infrastructure, we decided it was not yet ready to deploy. However, the other code we wanted to upgrade was successfully installed and the database updates ran without error.
Code freeze begins September 1st. During this period, we fix bugs and when Drupal 7 is stable, we release. In the past, we have done manual testing. This time we have an automated testing framework and already a large number of tests.