Community

The Colorado Library Birds of a Feather Gathering was a great success. About 28 people attended and mostly everyone presented about their past and future projects. I am pleased to see that so many libraries are embracing Drupal with great success. Drupal continues to be a perfect match for many library needs by providing strong content management system capabilities and acting as a rapid development platform for more in-dept projects.

Drupal Camp Colorado 2011 was extremely successful. I was very honored to fulfill the role of venue coordinator for the second year running. I extend a special thank you to the Auraria Campus and King Center venue managers and the local Drupal Camp Colorado volunteers who made our camp extra special. Our camp was one hundred percent organized and run by volunteers. Financially, the camp was supported by many great sponsors for whom we are eternally grateful.

San Francisco was an awesome place to have a Drupalcon and visit in the Spring. The technology presence of California and the Bay Area is world renouned. This produced a very large Drupalcon and I found myself lost among the crowd of the largest Drupalcon yet. The Moscone Center and surrounding area was rich in Architecture and the garden area was very scenic.

Traveling to Denmark was a great experience and attending Drupalcon made it all that much more enjoyable. I really valued experiencing Copenhagen with my friends in Drupal community. Kudos to everyone for being so friendly, adventurous and generous. The social gatherings, conference sessions and overall planning were excellent. The Drupalcon Copenhagen team really did an outstanding job of organizing this event.

I had a wonderful time meeting Library folks, answering questions about Drupal and participating in the interesting conversations which included, performance, library system integrations, theme design and multi-site implementations just to name a few.

Drupal Camp Colorado 2010 was huge. More than 340 people attended and the sessions were outstanding. This year I stepped up my involvement by helping to arrange the venue. I worked with the Information Systems and Management school at the Metropolitan State College of Denver, the local AITP chapter student group and the Auraria campus to hold the camp in the North Classroom Building.

This was my first Drupal Camp and at the time it was the third Drupal event I had attended. By that time I had been developing sites using Drupal as a full time occupation for about a year and I wanted to give back to the community. This is where I discovered how large and awesome the Colorado Drupal community is in Colorado. Around 230 people attended not just from Colorado but from around the county. It was really more like a convention than a traditional camp. Local vendors supported the event, which unlike many other camps had a well organized, dedicated web site and planned structured sessions.

Drupalcon in Washington DC was my second Drupalcon experience and first North American Drupalcon. It was about three times larger than the Drupalcon Szeged Hungary that I attended in the summer of 2008. It was awesome to meet the people who I look up to so much and who I have been working remotely with for so many hours and months.

Drupalcon Szeged was my first Drupal convention and community experience. I really enjoyed meeting and experiencing the community. This is where I fell in love with everything Drupal. I really felt accepted by the community and after having created a few Drupal sites that year, I was ready for some serious learning. Like a sponge I not only soaked up what I did not know but I learned where to get the information and the support I would need begin my path to becoming a Drupal ninja. I learned which books to purchase, which theme frameworks to learn, the cool APIs to study and I got a feel for the direction that Drupal was heading and how to utilize the CMS framework for what I do best, build web sites.