I am very excited to announce that the Drupal Association and DrupalCon have hired two great folks to work on our worldwide team; Paul Suway and Isabell Schulz. These two amazing folks will help our growing team continue to refine the DrupalCon and Drupal Association member experience and put in the solid foundation for a strong Association. The Drupal project is growing and we're building out a great team to support this amazing community!

Please help me welcome Paul to the Drupal Association and Isabell to the DrupalCon team!

Back in April, after DrupalCon San Francisco, Kieran Lal wrote a post for this blog with some ideas for how to effectively grow DrupalCons without losing our soul as a community. One of the key items he focused on was improving session quality. As Kieran put it,

"In order to grow Drupalcon, we need to focus on the quality of the main program. Drupal sessions are still wildly hit or miss, both in session quality and session attendance. As a community, we need to take a hard look in the mirror and raise consistency and quality of every Drupalcon session."

These thoughts have been echoed by many other folks within the community, including Mike Anello, Heather James, and Larry Garfield.

As one of the co-chairs of the upcoming DrupalCon Chicago 2011 and a permanent member of the Drupal Association, I’m writing this follow-up post to talk a little bit more about the things that we’re doing that will hopefully help improve session quality, provide more support to DrupalCon presenters, increase attendee satisfaction, and make for an overall better DrupalCon experience for long-time members of the community and newcomers alike.

But first, a little background:
Back in April, after DrupalCon San Francisco, Kieran Lal wrote a post for this blog with some ideas for how to effectively grow DrupalCons without losing our soul as a community. One of the key items he focused on was improving session quality. As Kieran put it,

"In order to grow Drupalcon, we need to focus on the quality of the main program. Drupal sessions are still wildly hit or miss, both in session quality and session attendance. As a community, we need to take a hard look in the mirror and raise consistency and quality of every Drupalcon session."

These thoughts have been echoed by many other folks within the community, including Mike Anello, Heather James, and Larry Garfield.

As one of the co-chairs of the upcoming DrupalCon Chicago 2011 and a permanent member of the Drupal Association, I’m writing this follow-up post to talk a little bit more about the things that we’re doing that will hopefully help improve session quality, provide more support to DrupalCon presenters, increase attendee satisfaction, and make for an overall better DrupalCon experience for long-time members of the community and newcomers alike.

But first, a little background:

If you are like me, you probably weren't planning to show up at DrupalCon before Dries' keynote.

Here's a reason you might want to set your alarm clock early if you are attending DrupalCon Copenhagen.

We have managed at the last minute to get Scott MacVicar from Facebook to come to Copenhagen to talk about the HIPHPOP PHP compiler.

Maybe they don't but they have realized that their spam profiles on drupal.org are too short-lived to get them much traffic. As a result of this, the number of new spam profiles seems to be down.

As a side note: In part due to the spam profiles and the google traffic that they generated drupal.org served more than 30 Mio pages in March. This is an increase of about 38% compared to February with 22 Mio viewed pages.

The bigger part of this surge can probably be attributed to DrupalCon at the beginning of March.

Here's a table of the number of 403 pages by month: