Planning for DrupalCon Denver's content schedule

DrupalCon Denver will have a preliminary schedule of official sessions published December 7th. That’s in one week! To avoid publishing a Google Spreadsheet we’ll need to decide how the schedule will look and build the necessary components. Let’s break it down and discuss.

Conference schedules

The goal is to make it easy to coordinate time and location with content so a person can find something to attend that’s relevant to him or her.

DrupalCon London did a great job of progressing the conference schedule:

<img src="https://img.skitch.com/20111127-pxi283uca5d597ycckimak2yxu.jpg" alt="Drupalcon London Session Schedule | DrupalCon London 2011">

Organized by day (limited to one day at a time), it provides a single-column list of content grouped by time with optional filters on track (session track, including core conversations and day stage) and skill level. The content shown is of types session, core conversation, and schedule item (coffee break, lunch, etc).

Questions

A few questions to start us off:

  1. What content should be shown, optionally or always, on the official schedule? Should all content be available for showing? Typical content includes sessions in tracks, breaks like lunch and coffee, trainings, evening events, side content like BoFs, sprints etc.
  2. How is it best to organize the schedule? Limited to one day at a time?
  3. How should content be differentiated and highlighted? Sessions have tracks, but there will be advanced secondary sessions known as “core conversations”. It would also be beneficial to further highlight BoFs and sprints.

Friendly with future mobiles

Is that right? We want the schedule to be useful and if we can, simple. The Denver team is discussing our overall mobile solution this week, but perhaps we take timely initiatives to heart and design for smaller screens first?

Issues

Discussion is welcome here, let me know what you think! But, the best way to move forward is in specific issues. Conference schedule content and organization is the first point of discussion.

While content and organization discussion is happening we can continue to work on the underlying components of the schedule, ideally being powered by views. The 2012 DrupalCon site is built off early ports of COD to Drupal 7 . Thanks to Chris Ruppel , Jerad Bitner and testers, there is patch available to upgrade the cod_session feature to Drupal 7 .

With some agreement on what to show and how to show it we can get started on the Design and usability test the schedule .

For more discussion about DrupalCon Denver read about our tools and processes