Making it Official

For over a decade* the Drupal community has gathered in volunteer-led “camps”, based on the BarCamp model, to follow in that camp’s initial goals:

• Introduce web developers to the Drupal platform.
• Skill sharing among established Drupal developers
• Give back to the Drupal project (e.g. fix bugs, documentation, lesson materials)

The scope of Drupal Camps has expanded as our community has grown and matured, and camps now serve everyone in the community, not just developers. They serve as an on-ramp for new developers, a networking opportunity for clients and agencies, a marketing opportunity for service providers, and much more.

The Drupal Event Organizers have documentation of over 50 volunteer-led events with over 10,000 attendees worldwide in the past year, and we know there are almost double this number that we don’t have good data for. These events have evolved organically, with little central organization, and are estimated to comprise more than one million dollars in sponsorship and ticket sales worldwide, yearly.

The Event Organizers have organized in various forms over that time… from various documentation efforts to our current monthly meeting format. With Kaleem’s instigation, the group started toward a more formal organization in late 2018, and that process is almost a reality. 

We’ve established a formation board composed of organizers from across the globe and have been collaborating on a charter for the Event Organizers Working Group over the past few months. We’re looking forward to presenting it soon and beginning the next chapter of the Drupal Event Organizers.

Thanks to the following folks who have contributed to the effort thus far.

Our Formation Board members:

• Kaleem Clarkson - DrupalCamp Atlanta
• Baddy Sonja Breidert - Drupal Europe, DrupalCamp Iceland, DrupalCamp Germany, DrupalCon Amsterdam 2019
• Leslie Glynn - Design 4 Drupal Boston, NEDCamp
• Avi Schwab - MidCamp, Midwest Open Source Alliance
• Camilo Bravo - DrupalCamp Quito
• Shadab Ashraf - DrupalCamp Delhi, DrupalCamp Goa, DrupalCamp Chennai
• Chris Skene - DrupalSouth

And our trusted advisers:

• Matthew Saunders - DrupalCamp Colorado
• Suzanne Dergacheva - Drupal North
• Rachel Lawson - Drupal Association

* Possibly starting at Drupal Camp Toronto, 2006? If you know of an earlier camp, please let us know in the comments.