How to do DrupalCon - from the CEO to the Intern

In the Drupal community, it’s all about showing up.

Join in on your local user's group, contribute code, participate in conferences, present sessions - be involved. That’s what we did this past week at "DrupalCon Portland":https://portland2013.drupal.org. In the spirit of "Always Evolving" we sent sixteen team members, from our CEO Glenn to our intern Colin, to take part in the learning festivities of the biggest DrupalCon yet.

Before we departed we contemplated the opportunity at hand. Doing DrupalCon is one thing but _how_ do we want to do DrupalCon? To come up with the answer our leadership team sat down and devised the conference goals.

Goal setting at ImageX starts at the top with big corporate goals and from there they’re trickled down to team and finally individual goals. Each team member needs a nugget to chase after and achieve so that they contribute to our overarching company objectives. With one of the corporate objectives being to attract top talent and top clients, we made sure to show off our company re-branding with a polished look. We wanted to make a splash.

Our booth, our people, and our swag created success, and above all, it earned us hype. It made our people proud to wear it and sent a clear message about who we are. Our “Make Code Not War” t-shirts were all gone within 2 hours! It even got to the point where people were offering lucky t-shirt owners money for the shirt off their back. Awesome.

We also wanted to learn. Learning is a fundamental staple in all that we do at ImageX. Before we took off to Portland, Hank, our Director of Technology, worked with our development team to ensure that we had a presence at all the best sessions. The strategic session selections weren’t only for our development group. Our Project Managers to our HR Coordinator all were asked to choose sessions to attend. The key thing we wanted to do at DrupalCon was to have fun. So we threw a party.

We teamed up with "Mediacurrent":http://www.mediacurrent.com to host the Tuesday DrupalCon afterparty. It was a success. After an hour we exceeded capacity and capped off at 250 people (sorry to those who were turned away at the door!).

Now that we’re back in Vancouver the next step is probably the most critical: knowledge sharing. This week the whole team is getting together to share what they learned at DrupalCon and what ideas they picked up on that they think ImageX should implement right away.

If we’re going to be Always Evolving then we better help each other, along the way.