The talks
The first talk I attended was about Apache Solr. Solr is hot, everywhere. Search has been a 'done deal' for a number of years but with the advent of Solar, it's back on the agenda of many developers, since it brings a featureset to the open source community (such as faceted search) that would normally require expensive proprietary search engines. The presentation, done by Acquia's Robert Douglass, did a great job explaining the features of Solr. What was a little unclear was the relationship between Drupal/Solr and what he refered to as 'Acquia Search', a commercial Acquia plugin that basically implements Solr. In the Q&A someone asked about the differences and Robert mentioned that Aquia Search was easier, and 'more enterprise production ready'. Added value by packaging and preconfiguring is a common open source business strategy, however I would be careful with the 'more enterprise production ready' argument especially if it's not carefully explained why it's more 'enterprise'. Zend has a similar challenge with providing an 'enterprise friendly' environment for PHP in their Zend Server stack, and it's not an easy sale since a proprietary vendor specific disstribution is difficult to make more 'enterprise' than the underlying open source components.

There were a number of talks showing off Drupal 7 features. We've seen an increase in demand for Drupal projects, and it's nice to see that Drupal 7 will be another big step forward, so I can only imagine that with Drupal 7, the use of Drupal will explode even more.

I attended a showcase about a Drupal based site for a Dutch popular talk show, but it was light on actual implementation details, I would've liked to see not only what challenges they faced but also how they solved them.

My favourite talk of the day was by Bèr Kessels and Erik Stielstra, who did a 'state of the Drupal community in the netherlands' style talk. The first half of the presentation presented their findings (with a nice SWOT analysis of Drupal), the second half was an open discussion with the audience about the state of Drupal and how people could help the community grow (not only in size but also in maturity). The talk definitely managed to make people enthousiastic; at the end contact details were collected of people who would like to help think up ideas to grow the community. Joni, our marketing manager, got inspired by the talk and volunteered to help out as well.

The final presentation I attended was from Kristof van Roy and Kristof van Tomme, about OpenAtrium. OpenAtrium looks like a very interesting collaboration tool for projects. The two Kristofs both explained how they used OpenAtrium and what features they have added and I'm definitely inclined to take a closer look at it. The only downside was that the presentation was more about technical project management (tickets, svn integration, development checklists etc) than about the more process side of things (project budgets, progress tracking etc). I'm not sure if this is simply not OpenAtrium's focus or if it just wasn't covered in the presentation; I will have to take a look at that.

Since at that time the main room presentation by Morten Heide about Drupal 7 theming hadn't finished yet I managed to catch the end of that talk. But as many people on Twitter had already warned, it was hard to follow mainly because Morten decided not to ditch his chewing gum before he started the talk. From what I heard from the attendees however the contents of the talk made up for the presentation and was actually great.

The venue
I think Drupaljam has outgrown a venue such as the Stayokay. The room setup was such that a large portion of the main screen was hidden by the attendees sitting in front of you, and the side screens were covered by the pillars holding the roof of the venue. The exhibition area was very small and easily crowded by just the booth people, which meant that not a lot of people found their way to the booths of the sponsors. As one of the sponsors tweeted, at the end of the day, the sponsors all knew eachother very well but more interaction with the audience would have been nice. It didn't help that the coffee & tea facilities were inside the main presentation room, causing many of the attendees to not find their way to the exhibition at all. As a sponsor, this is something I would recommend changing in the next Drupaljam.

The organisation
The organizers did a great job managing a conference of this size. It's a community driven event and not run by a professional conference agency, but that was hardly noticeable as everything went very smooth. (ok, as in most usergroup conferences the schedule started late because of the urge to wait for more people to come through registration, but apart from that it was a smooth event for attendees and sponsors). A suggestion for improvement would be to have the schedule printed out or on the wall, since the only way to look at it was online, but there was no conference wifi and 3G reception was poor, so it was difficult keeping track of where to go. Oh, and of course, the absence of proper wifi or mobile connectivity is something that should be considered for the next Drupaljam venue, it's something people have come to expect at tech conferences.

Oh, one thing I do need to say. Both in the opening and closing attention was drawn to the fact that there were so few women in the audience, requesting the women even to raise their hands. I think this is a wrong way to stimulate women to be more active in a male-dominated industry. I have been around the phpwomen organization enough to have learned that women should be encouraged and should be welcomed, accepted and most importantly, treated as equals. They should not be singled out during an opening to draw attention to the fact that they are such a minority showing up.

The Drupal and PHP communities
One thing I noticed was that there is such a big difference between the Drupal community and the PHP community. I had expected a larger overlap, considering Drupal is written in PHP so should contain at least a subset of the same people. However, it was as if it was a completely different community. The 'PHP' in the Ibuildings logo was about the most PHP I've seen all day. Thinking about it, many Drupal users/developers see Drupal as a tool, and don't really care about the language it's written in. I'd say that based on the people I spoke with, only a small percentage of the audience consider themselves a 'PHP developer'. Maybe it was because the schedule didn't focus on module development a lot, or maybe in general most Drupal users just use Drupal and modules out of the box. At Ibuildings we see a lot of customization and bespoke module development, but maybe that's because we're a more technically oriented company and as such attract Drupal projects that require more customization. I don't know exactly, thoughts are welcome, but it was very clear that it's a 'different world'. Of course I had anticipated a large group of Drupal 'users' as opposed to 'developers'. It was just that the amount of developers was even lower than I had anticipated. Another hint that this was the case: we had a ticket to the Dutch PHP Conference to raffle at the end of the event and when the presenter asked who would be interested, there was only a small portion of poeple interested in PHP. I'd say that this is the most important lesson I took home from our first Drupaljam involvement.

Conclusion
Great day, well organized, nice speakers, many attendees. I can definitely recommend to attend a Drupaljam to anybody dealing with Drupal!