News and announcements

The nominations for the 13th Annual Webby Awards were recently announced, and they include a number of sites built in Drupal! Presented by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, the Webby Award is the leading international award honoring excellence on the Internet. It’s like the Oscars for websites.

In addition to the juried awards, which are decided by a 650-person judging academy whose members include Internet co-inventor Vinton Cerf, R/GA’s Chief Bob Greenberg, “Simpsons” creator Matt Groening, Arianna Huffington, and Harvey Weinstein, all nominees are also eligible to win a Webby People’s Voice Award, which is voted online by the global Web community.

This is where you come in! From now until April 30th, you can cast your vote at http://pv.webbyawards.com – this is a great opportunity for the community to come out, show their support, and get out the word that some of the best sites in the world are powered by Drupal. We’ve created a list of all the known Drupal sites sorted by the category in which they were nominated below; please let us know in the comments if we’ve missed any.

Winners will be announced on May 5th, 2009 and honored at a star-studded ceremony in New York City on June 8th hosted by Seth Meyers.

We're stacking up karma points during this recession: over the weekend more than sixty people gathered at the DERI Institute in Galway, Ireland to talk, learn, and exchange ideas about Drupal. Various experts in web design attended coming from all over Ireland and as far as Scotland, England and the US. The best turn out was in absolute newbies - over half of the group who had traveled from all over Ireland.

As an incentive to push the learning curves we worked together to provide 3 Irish charities: Zikomo, Rural Science Association and Shadowbox Theatre with brand spanking new websites!

The plan was conceived 5 months ago when Alan Burke (alanburke) and Stéphane Corlosquet (scor) were brainstorming what to do for the next Irish Drupal event to bring it home to Galway. They wanted to do something different and make it over 2 days to take advantage of the presentation style of a BarCamp and to include a site-building challenge. Realizing they would need a great deal of help they recruited Stella Power (stella), Heather James (heather) for their expertise from organizing the previous DrupalCamp in Dublin.

We, the organizers, were impressed by the number of people who turned up as we expected 40-50. The rooms filled up fast and we had barely enough food for everybody. Alan had the insight to have a giant kettle available to provide plenty of tea and coffee with "loads of biccies" to all the attendees.