Linux World Expo 2005, 5th - 6th October

Day 1

Easy set up - Dikini (Vladimir Zlatanov) brought his laptop, pre-installed with Drupal 4.6 and HEAD, so we could do demonstrations. Thanks to Multiman (Peter Brownell) we had a projector, and we were able to draw quite a lot of attention with a rolling screen-shot slide show of prominent Drupal sites.

There were a lot of visitors through out the day, mostly a mixture of people asking what Drupal was (intrigued by the logo on the poster and the slideshow), asking how it differed from Mambo, or telling us they used Drupal and how much it rocks!

The editor of Linux User and Developer magazine wants to do a 3 page article on Drupal, to be written by the Drupal documentation team, and I'll send more info on this to the documentation mailing list on Friday.

A Dalek was wandering around the show most of the day, presumably sent by a proprietary software company to "exterminate" open source software. Luckily it's operating system kept crashing, and it was unable to perform it's mission.

In the afternoon we had a nice visit from some of the guys from the Joomla stand (the CMS formerly known as Mambo). No, they didn't throw the towel in and decide to switch to Drupal (yet!), but they did have good things to say about Drupal, and it was an interesting discussion.

After the show we all retired to a nice pub in Notting Hill, no Hugh Grant, no Julia Roberts, but lots of open source enthusiasts.

Day 2

A bit less busy than the previous day, but there were more Drupal people today, so it gave us a chance to talk with each other.

In the afternoon we managed to commandeer a Dalek to stand guard over the Drupal stand. Daleks + Drupal = World Domination!

At the end of the show we had one t-shirt left, so we decided to give it to the Joomla (Mambo) guys ;-)

Being good sports, they offered to swap t-shirts with us.

On went the t-shirts.... a very weird sight, Andrew Eddie (Joomla Project Leader) wearing a Drupal t-shirt and Dikini (Vladinir Zlatanov) in a Joomla! t-shirt - almost as unlikely as seeing Killes wearing an "I Love Windows" t-shirt.

All in all a great show, very enjoyable, and we raised the profile of Drupal with users, developers and other Open Source projects.