South by Southwest (SXSW) is an annual festival and conference held every spring in Austin, Texas, dedicated to bringing together creative indviduals from around the world for a week-long celebration of music, film, and interactive technology. The interactive portion of the festival features over 150 panel discussions on cutting-edge topics in the new media industry and culture, as well as a trade show, Web Awards Competition, video game tournament, and some great after-parties.

There has been a lot of work going on in the Docs team lately and we want to share that with the larger community. The biggest news that will impact everyone is that we are in the process of creating a new top-level handbook to be added to drupal.org, called "Getting Involved." It will be listed along with the other handbooks on the main Documentation landing page as well as be the new target for the Contribute tab. We have also been working on other plans and ideas to collaborate on the docs. Here is a run down of the cool stuff we have to shout about.

I've been working with Gábor for almost 5 years. First as a contributor to Drupal, next as my Drupal 6 co-maintainer, and more recently as a co-worker at Acquia. Yesterday, Gábor got married, so needless to say, a number of us traveled to Hungary to attend his wedding. In the picture below, you can see some of the Drupal people that were present.

The Knight News Challenge Garage launched (beta) today. In the press release, the site is described:

Fifty coaches are standing by online to help innovative thinkers apply for the Knight News Challenge, a $5 million-a-year contest to move journalism into the 21st Century. The coaches — made up of past jurors and winners — will give News Challenge hopefuls a better chance of winning up to $5 million in prizes annually. They also hope to attract a more diverse range of ideas.

The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation has funded the contest with $25 million over five years. Its goal is to discover new ways of using digital technology to meet the information needs of geographic communities. Last year’s contest received 3,000 applications. It named 16 winners.

The new “Knight News Challenge “Garage” mentoring site can be accessed online at garage.newschallenge.org. “With this incubator site we are taking a page from technology companies,” says Gary Kebbel, Knight Foundation’s journalism program officer. “We hope that the Garage coaches will extend the contest’s reach beyond the journalism field. We want to attract more applicants from technical communities, such as the social media arena. Another goal is to improve the overall quality of applications.”

We have just published our draft session schedule for Drupalcon Szeged 2008 yesterday based on feedback from you, the track chair selections and available rooms and timeslots. While building up the program, we took great care to find enough time for attendees to network, discuss code and business.

The unconference never received so much attention at Drupalcons. We set aside three workshop rooms for bigger BoFs, and now allow you to schedule your BoFs yourselves way in advance. It was a popular request to be able to know the unconference program before the event for easier planning (even though this goes against the unconference definition a bit). While BoF speakers can modify their placement whenever they see appropriate (even on the day their BoF would be held), the pre-scheduling possibility might help you gauge the wealth of program available on this event. You will be able to submit and schedule new BoF proposals on the spot in Szeged, but submitting earlier will help you get more attention to your topic.

Some early quotes we have heard about our program include Peter Wolanin of Acquia saying yesterday: Hmm, I might have to cancel all my BoFs - too many sessions I want to see! and Mikkel Høgh of Peytz & Co tweeting just took a look at the tentative Drupalcon schedule [...] – so much to see, so little time. It's going to be hard to pick….

Now that the program is out and unconference sessions are put into place, we thought you might decide easier to attend Drupalcon. So to make it a trivial decision, we extended our discount on tickets until this Friday. You can still buy 120 EUR tickets for Drupalcon today and tomorrow. If you are still not among those registered, don't miss the opportunity now!

At last but not least, some sponsor spots are still available and we are now selling booths at the different exhibitions as well. If your company would like to reach the hundreds of Drupal people at the event, or would like the developers among them to resell your hosting or other services to their customers, you should sign up as soon as possible to get into our booklet and have maximum impact.

Drupal received high scores in a satisfaction report by NTEN, a major Non-profit Technology organization. Drupal was evaluated in five categories, and had the highest number of responses, and the highest number of respondents that indicated Drupal is their primary CMS. Drupal is clearly popular with the non-profit crowd and this satisfaction survey provides the Drupal community with focused areas for improvement.

Drupal received the following scores:

• Quality and reliability: A
• After sales support: B+
• Delivers on promises and deadlines: B+
• Usability: B+
• Value: A

The report is available to members of NTEN for free. It is available to non-members at a discount, $25, with the discount code: "Drupal". A sample format of the report is also available.