DrupalGov and Canberra 2013

An event that can be as specific as an event for the use of Drupal within government demonstrates a growing interest in Drupal (and maybe openness generally) within government and its great that such an event can attract nearly 150 people.

Myself, Martin Schwall and Chris Dubrow ran our own session on using CRMs within government which went pretty smoothly and well, you can see slides here and we received good feedback.

My other highlights of the day were Martin Ollman’s talk on content workflows where I learnt about a bunch of very useful modules I had somehow never heard of including Maestro, Save Draft, Media Update.

I also found Mr Snow and Sean Moss’s talks on different sides of the big data ingest, marking, semantics, querying and displaying methods fascinating and again learnt about many modules and resources I had never heard of before such as biointel.org, GeoNames, Alchemy API and Drupal RDF.

Christopher Biggin’s very practical discussion on quick tools and tips for creating more accessible sites equally threw up some great discussion and tips such as CaptionTube and WAI Aria Roles.

At some point in the evening we decamped to Canberra’s infamous Wig and Pen, some of the best craft beer in Australia and an evening of many tales and antics.

The next day was blessed with unexpecdalty pleasant weather, so I naughtily skipped the code sprint for a day out and about, visiting the Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex. It was fascinating and it’s amazing how outdated space technology now looks despite where it took us and still takes us. Just think, the entire computing power behind the moon landings is now probably in your pocket, they were still running around with ticker tape readings.

The Gibraltar waterfalls were stunning and I had a great scramble around enjoying the invigorating sunshine.

As always Canberra, you’re great to visit. :-)

See more photos on my Flickr page.