Ok, as MySQL Conference took place a little bit more than three weeks ago, it's about time to finally write a short report about it...
Rob and I have been at the .org pavilion, presenting Joomla! to the interested audience. We met on Sunday evening - that was the first time I ever got into contact with Rob in person. It's very nice to finally get to know the people who you work together with all the time but only know from Skype and mailing lists!
On Monday we prepared our booth (unfortunaltely, I forgot to take some pictures, sorry). Actually, we were the first project from the .org pavilion to arrive, and therefore we got to choose the place which fitted best for us. There were
twelve more projects in the .org pavilion, and I've have spoken to people from some of those projects during the next days. I wanted to check out the Drupal project on Wednesday (I've never worked with Drupal, thought I would take a look at their system), but they didn't return to their booth on Wednesday

Tuesday and Wednesday were the days when the exhibit hall opened it's doors for the public. We had many visitors, from very different backgrounds: people who had no idea what a CMS is, as well as people who were asking when 1.5 is to come out. Fortunately, that was the minority though - only a handful, I had expected many more of those questions. Overall feedback was really good, people really liked the new look of the 1.5 back-end. We also showed 1.0 to those who wanted to see it, or those who had specific questions about it. The nicest thing that happened was that one guy just stopped by to say "thanks, I really appreciate what you are doing". Interestingly, the question which I heard most often was about the business model of Joomla! - it usually took some time to explain to people that Joomla! is a non-profit project. Another question raised a few times was how Joomla! compared to Alfresco (an Enterprise Content Management System, they also had a booth at the MySQL Conf).
Rob and I also went to some of the sessions when there was time (especially in the morning, when the exhibit hall was not opened yet). Rob really wanted to see
Eben Moglen's session, and I enjoyed
Rasmus Lerdorf's session on security and profiling very much.
All in all, it was a really nice event, and it was good to meet Rob in person. I think that we have led some new people to Joomla!. Next time I'll not forget to take some pictures...