DrupalCampWisconsin was held all day on Saturday, January 19th, 2008 at MSOE in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. I’d like to thank everyone who showed up and took part, and all of the sponsors for the care and feeding during the 12+ hour event. Thanks to Web414 for organizing the thing, Fresh Coast Ventures and 2XL Networks for providing beverages, and Cruiskeen Consulting LLC, EC Connection, and Palantir for keeping our bellies full so we could concentrate on Drupal.
This was the first real BarCamp-type event we’ve done which was not really a BarCamp. Since it was a smaller event, and just one day, and focused on one thing (Drupal!) it was a bit different. We had planned to settle in between 9AM and 10AM, and then kick right into it, but due to a few issues, we really got started closer to 11AM, and Larry from Palantir started with a good overview of the Drupal Ecosystem, and what makes Drupal what it is, not just code, but a community of good people doing good things. My note during this time was that you can’t just look at the code of an open source project you plan to invest in, you need to look at the people that make up the community. No matter how good a piece of software is, I don’t want to have to deal with jerks every time I use it. Drupal has a serious lack of jerks… What they don’t have is a lack of female involvement. Larry mentioned that the percentage of women involved in open source is typically low, and is lower than the percentage involved in just software development in general, but in the Drupal community, the number is pretty high. (KarenS was there, and I can tell you, she really knew her stuff! We had a handful of “Drupal Ninjas” and she was definitely near the top of that list.)
Like I said, slow start… After we asked the group for session ideas, we wrote them down and built a rough schedule. We then just talked generally about the Drupal Community until noon when lunch arrived, and then ate our subs and launched into the sessions. We ended up having two rooms, one for Beginner sessions, and one for Advanced sessions. We covered a lot of stuff including CCK, Views, Ubercart, and more… until it was time for dinner. Oh, we also put up a “who needs work/who needs to hire someone” board. After dinner we ended up combining the Beginner and Advanced groups into one and covered theming.
After the event ended, we headed over to Bucketworks for a party sponsored by Social Helix and The Fireseed Group. There was drink and merriment until we were too tired and went home to sleep.
Will we do it again? Definitely…
6 replies on “DrupalCampWisconsin Recap”
DrupalCampWI was a great time ^_^ So glad I got to be a part of it and can’t wait for next year’s!
Thanks Ashe for all your hard work! And if I was not a total dork I would have also thanked by name Blake, Jeramey, Gabe, KeVroN, 4braham, Rohde, and everyone else who helped get this thing in motion. In fact, it’s probably deserving of it’s own post.
There was definitely less of a BarCamp vibe at this event, but I think that’s largely because of the awesome quality of our presenters (myself excluded).
Consider this: We essentially had a keynote speaker who was a technical adviser to the upcoming book on Drupal 6. You can’t get a better speaker than that for a tech*camp, in my mind.
Huge Props to Crell for his contributions, not only as a speaker, but also as a food sponsor. This was *Camp at it’s best, I think.
bummer i missed it. i really wanted to go since the minion army website runs drupal. we just ended up being triple booked that day. hopefully i can make the next one.
Thanks Pete for all your work in helping to organize this event! I had a blast at my first ever Barcamp/Drupalcamp event! Ashe said something in her comment above about “can’t wait to do it next year”… That troubles me because, what will I do over the next year?! I crave interaction. I say we do this event 3-4 times a year and split the hosting between Milwaukee, Chicago, Madison (and maybe another town). How does that strike you?
Jake, we’re just getting the ball rolling on *Camp and *Camp-like events… We try to space the big ones (BarCampMilwaukee and BarCampMadison) about 6 months apart, and Drupal camp was pretty much right in the middle of those. We’re also working on MilwaukeeDevHouse, which should be every 4 to 6 weeks. Don’t worry, we’ll keep you busy. ;)