http://blog.athico.com/2009/03/drools-boot-camp-san-francisco-june.html (blog entry quoted below)

The Drools Boot Camp has the go ahead, a big thank you to Third Pillar for sponsoring the meeting room.

The Drools team meeting forms the basis of the week long event, but we make it open to the public, free of charge, to participate as an informal boot camp. You may attend as little or as much of the event as you wish, there is no commitment, just please give us notification of when you wish to attend as there are limited spaces ( mproctor at redhat d0t com ).

We will provide some dedicated seminars, including a Drools 5.0 primar on the first day for those that want to know what's new in Drools 5.0.

Location
The location is San Francisco, during the JavaOne period, at the Hilton Hotel (750 Kearny Street). Expedia have rooms from $103 per night, at the booking time for my team and I.

Dates and Times
Start : Monday 1st of June 09.30
End : Saturday 7th of June 17.00

Time Tabled Sessions
We plan to do a few time tabled sessions. The current proposals are subject to change, and suggestions are welcome - we don't plan to do a "getting started" or "best practice" session. Other than the primer the sessions will be in BOF casual discussion style seminar with an emphasis on audience particitation for Q&A and suggestions, not dedicated slides with pre-made material, beyond useful illustrations, so expect lots of walking through code and white board use :) It can also be a great time to give feedback and suggestions for those topics.

Drools 5.0 Primer : Monday 1st of June 10.00 to 13.00

The new features in Drools 5.0 will be covered at an end user level. This includes all the drools projects, Guvnor, Flow, Fusion and Expert. This is suitable for anyone with minimal previous Drools experience who just want to know "what's new".

Drools 5.0 Guvnor Internals : Tuesday 10.00 to 12.00

The internals of Guvnor will be discussed and how all the parts come together and current issues and directions we wish to take the project. This is suitable for anyone with minimal previous Drools experience, but ideally you should be aware of GWT, JCR and Guvnor in general. This is targetted at people who wish to extend Guvnor with new features or re-use/embed existing aspects of Guvnor.

Drools 5.0 Advanced Engine : Wednesday 10.00 to 13.00

This will be a deep dive for the technical on Rete enhancements. We will cover the asymmetrical Rete implementation, as compared to the traditional symmetrical approach, and how we enhanced it for event processing and workflow. This is targetted at experienced people, who already have an understanding of Rete and wish to understand the latest research and innovations - not for the feint hearted.

Drools 5.0 Domain Specific Workflow : Thuresday 10.00 to 12.00

We will show how Drools Flow can be extended for domain specific workflow, with a focus on the pluggable Work Items and Eclipse. We will also cover the pluggable workflow framework for customised execution behaviour, such as is used to provide OSWorkflow compatability. This is suitable for anyone with a java and eclipse background, ideally you should have some understanding of what Drools and especially Drools Flow is.

If you are using Drools in a novel or interesting way and wish to do a short presentation, that is very much welcome, just please email me for confirmation so we can make sure we are prepared and even promote that. If a few people wish to do this, we can make a dedicated end-user speaking session.

Agenda and what goes on
While we have the time tabled sessions, there is no formal agenda beyond that. The Drools team will be there planning their next road map, hacking on new features and fixing some bugs - this will be a continous process throughout the week. We encourage you to participate and ideally contribute and we will provide lots of hand holding and mentoring. Outside of the time tabled sessions you'll probably feel out of place if you aren't coding away on a laptop.

Ideally, but not essential, you will already have ideas on areas you wish to improve and we'll assist. Last year we got great contributions to Guvnor from Joe at Recondo Technologies and Michael at Franklin American, neither had any prior experience on hacking Drools, although both turned up knowing what it was they needed added to Drools for their companies.

Limited time will be given to those just wishing to discuss how to use Drools in their applications and best practices, but not looking to do any coding. The basis of this time will be on how interesting it is to the Drools team, and whether their is a knowledge exchange that is useful to us - i.e. interesting and uncommon use cases. This event really is summarised as "Don't ask what it is Drools can do for me, but what I can do for Drools" :)

Here are two pictures from last year, where we fitted everyone out with Drools T-Shirts :)