@FIRST_LIGHT

Together with Liza Kindred of Lullabot and Jim Edgett of Achieve Internet, we’ve now selected all 16 sessions for the Marketing and Business Track at Drupalcon Boston 2008.

• 1-2-3: A Step-By-Step Guide to the PROFITABLE Web Development Process by Neil Giarratana
• Communication, Cooperation, Collaboration: Can Drupal Shops Work Together by Gregory Heller

There is an important post on Drupal.org about deadlines for hotel reservations and for session registration.

Check it out here

All the votes are in and the organizing committee has made their choice. The winner of the Drupalcon Boston 2008 Logo Contest is Jason Poole of Acro Media, with his rendition of the Boston skyline behind the Druplicon running in the Boston Marathon (or at least that’s my interpretation!).

This logo will appear on the conference website, on all conference materials, and on the conference t-shirt.

Congratulations to Acro Media and a huge thanks to all the submitters and voters who participated in the contest. It has been incredible to witness the vitality and creativity of the community first hand through this contest. The Drupal community really rocks!

While I have your attention, we have a whole set of graphic design tasks related to the conference that we desperately need volunteers for. Dressing up the conference web site in a few areas, designing a few printed pieces for the conference, creating advertisements for use by media partners, etc. It’s all relatively minor stuff, but not something you want people like me doing :-). So I’m hoping we can get a couple of designers to step up.

If you are interested and available, give us a shout at drupalconBoston08Team at acquia dot com and let us know what your skills are and exactly how many hours you’re willing to commit over the next two weeks.

The Drupalcon Boston 2008 Logo Design Contest ends today. If you haven’t done so already, get your vote in ASAP. The organizing committee will be making the selection over the weekend.

REMEMBER: the best logo will be one that works not just on a t-shirt, but also on banners, signage, printed materials, projected screens, etc.

Drupalcon Boston 2008 preparations are reaching a fever pitch. Session slots are starting to fill, sponsors are signing up, registrations are streaming in. But we need more - lots more. So if you haven’t submitted your session, purchased your sponsorship, or paid your registration, stop reading now and get over the drupalcon.org and get it done.

The Boston organizing team is busily working the myriad details that need to be nailed down in order to have a great event. I think few people in the Drupal community realize how much goes into a large scale event like this. It’s a HUGE task. Fortunately for us, we’ve got Sooz on it full time and she’s doing a great job wrangling quotes and contracts.

The logo contest is shutting down on Friday and there are some really great entries. I’m a little worried that some of them will work on a t-shirt but not so much on printed materials, the web site, and screens. But we’ll figure something out.

If you have not voted yet or put your submission in, be sure to do it soon.

Here are a few of the current vote leaders.

As Dries said over on his blog, we’re really starting to ramp things up at Acquia. Everyone except Gabor was in town last week to do some planning and we made some great progress.

Here’s a photo of everyone around the conference table.

We had just wrapped up a full day in fact-finding discussions with Drupal companies and were synthesizing what we heard. It was very useful, and a good validation of where we’re headed. But a lot of hard work remains to get things in shape.

We’re simultaneously shopping for office space, refining our corporate identity, working on our company web site, defining our product roadmap, hiring the team, tuning budgets, and working to put on a major conference. We’re all wearing many hats each day and putting in long hours. But it’s invigorating and fun.

Drupalcon planning is coming together nicely. We’ve had a few of the inevitable bumps in the road, but people in the community are really stepping up. The logo contest has had quite a few submissions already and they are looking fun. Sponsorship commitments are rolling in and the speaking program is coming together. Registration is now open, so get over to the conference web site and sign up today.

As you may have heard, I recently joined Acquia as vice president of marketing. It’s wonderful to be part of such a strong team and to be able to work with such an incredible open source community. We’re going to do great things together.

So who am I? Well, first the important stuff: I’m a father of four great kids and an aspiring amateur photographer (a Nikon guy just like Dries). I also recently started blogging, and managed to get things running on Drupal last week.

I spent almost eight years leading software businesses at Adobe, Macromedia, and Allaire. See my LinkedIn profile for the gory details. During that time, I learned how to grow and work productively with the strong communities around our Flex, Flash, and ColdFusion product lines.

At Adobe I was part of the team that released Flex under an open source license and made the Tamarin ECMAScript virtual machine a joint open source project with Mozilla. It was exhilarating to help guide the company toward the open source strategy and then help the press and analyst community come to understand and accept our commitment to openness. This experience really prepared me to answer the call from Acquia when they contacted me last fall. It’s great to be on board.

We have LOT of great stuff on our Acquia marketing to do list this year. We need to build a world-class team of product marketers, product managers, and technical evangelists. We’ve committed to helping the Drupalcon Boston 2008 organizing team deliver a conference that absolutely rocks. We’ve got to work with the community to dramatically increase the industry profile of Drupal. And of course we need to successfully launch the initial set of Acquia products. It should be fun.

Beyond the Acquia to-do list, I also want to actively engage in the existing community initiatives focused on marketing Drupal. I’ve been tracking the Drupal Marketing group on Drupal.org for a while now and I look forward to participating more actively there, starting today.

Be sure to let me know if you have any suggestions or feedback. You can either leave a comment here, shoot me an email at jeff at acquia dot com or find me on groups.drupal.org as “jwhatcott”. I really look forward to hearing from you and working with you in the years ahead. And be sure to track me down at Drupalcon Boston 2008. You are going to be there, right?