Thanks to sponsorship from OpenBand (see Boris' post on some of the other work we've done with OpenBand over the years), I will be heading off to Minneapolis during the second weekend in May (May 8-11) for what promises to be an intense, interesting, productive weekend. Robert Douglass has been hard at work in organizing the Drupal Search Design sprint that is taking place there. The goal of the sprint is to extend or redesign the Drupal search framework to support integrating engines such as SOLR, frameworks/strategies such as faceted search, distributed search and other services or agents involved in the production, consumption, or intermediation of information indexing and retrieval... in other words, everything imaginable to do with search.

The groups.drupal.org search group is an informative starting point for reading about many of the issues and new ideas that have emerged around indexing, search, and information retrieval in Drupal.

So far, it looks like the following are all confirmed:

• Aaron Stewart (Workhabit)
• Chad Fennell (University of Minessota)
• David Lesieur (UQAM)
• Djun Kim (RainCity Studios)
• Doug Green (CivicActions)
• Earnest Berry III (Workhabit)
• Michael Hess (Universtiy of Michigan)
• Robert Douglass (Acquia)

W00t!

Interestingly, my last visit to Minneapolis was to attend a conference on System Administration sponsored by the pioneering Geometry Centre at the U. Minn. And one of the big topics we discussed there was search.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose!