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…
