One of the more exhilarating and valuable Drupalcon San Francisco experiences for me was participating in a self-organized BoF (birds of a feather) session convened around the topic of Learning Drupal.

Drupal learning, training, curriculum development, certification -- these were hot topics buzzing both inside sessions and out. Even before the conference proper began, 495 people participated in 20 full-day training workshop. The need for Drupal education and knowledge sharing is strong and growing. As a community it is critical for us to come together to share strategic thinking around how to address this need.

About 50 people showed up on the last day of the conference to do just that.

At the brilliant suggestion of Heather James, we utilized the Open Space Technology method to organize the session. This optimized the small amount of time we had and enabled substantive simultaneous discussions on 6 important topic areas defined by the participants.

After being introduced to the "rules" of Open Space, every participant wrote down and spoke aloud the topic they wished to discuss. Heather and I then combined like topics into 6 groups:

• Long Term Training and Training Developers
• Marketing & Selling Training
• Developing curriculum
• Methods for training
• Finding and Improving Teaching and Learning Materials and Programs
• Higher-ed training

Scribes were designated for each group to capture discussion notes and people chose a group to join for the next 45 minutes of discussion. Everyone was encouraged to drift as they felt inspired from one discussion to another -- such is one of the Open Space principles.

At the end of the hour, each group's scribe took two minutes to summarize the main outcomes of their discussion to the full room.

I encourage you to at least skim the session's notes. The ideas were flowing freely and set an inspirational framework for continuing as a community of Drupal educators and learners to collaborate on training strategy.

I also encourage trainers and meeting organizers explore the concept and methods of Open Space Technology as an alternative to the traditional one-track lecture/discussion format for conducting successful meetings. It certainly beats the all-introduction no-room-for-fruitful-discussion sessions we've all experienced far too often.