What is a Drupal Camp?

Drupal camps are a derivative of BARcamp created by Drupal community members Chris Messina and Andy Smith in Palo Alto, CA in 2006. The event was in response to the closed, invitation only event held by Tim O'Reilly of O'Reilly Media for technical elites invited to collaborate at O'Reilly Headquarters over a weekend in Sebastapool, CA. The original camp was organized in less than one week and was held at the SocialText offices. The original intent was to share technical and social information with very loose organization. Attendance was open and attendees were encouraged to share their particular expertise. This principle of simple organization was a key driver for Drupal Camp San Francisco.

Why a Drupal specific camp?

From 2004-2006, Drupal events were small and it was assumed that attendees were new to Drupal. It was traditional to have introduction to Drupal sessions for new users. As the events grew in frequency and the capabilities of Drupal exploded, Introduction sessions frequently gave rise to demand for more popular sessions on popular topics. As part of a return to simplicity, we decided to return to our roots and target training new users. Therefore, we set aside half the capacity of the event to address the needs of new users.

The needs of Drupal users are as diverse as the audiences that use it. In order to meet the needs of these users, we wanted to provide a focused event that could address the various needs and still allow for interaction between new users, customers, consultants, professional users, and the Drupal creators. This in-person social networking helps with collaboration and helps grow the Drupal ecosystem by connecting users and service providers.

History of Drupal users groups

The oldest and strongest Drupal users group in the Bay Area is the Berkeley users group, led by Tao Starbow. The group has been meeting monthly since 2005. Recently the San Francisco user group hosted by AF83 has started to build a strong following with compelling presentations and marketing of events via meet-up. There is a South Bay group that meets less regularly but gets strong attendance. Most recently, the Santa Cruz group has started up again with some encouragement from other local groups.

Why was this camp held?

The local community was fortunate enough to have two prior DrupalCamp events, Bay Area Drupal Camp (BADCamp) 2007 and BADCamp 2008. These events were held at the University of Berkeley and were so popular that registration often filled up. In order to meet the demand for Drupal events, we decided to hold a second annual event. We knew that the New York City community was having as many as three events a year so we felt that we could support demand in the Bay Area. We also noted that due to financial pressures, many people who would normally travel to a regional event were no longer able to travel to a Drupal Camp in Seattle, San Diego, or even a Drupalcon in Paris, France.

As the fund raiser for the Drupal Association, I am often contacted by Drupal Camp organizers who need to raise funds. Camp organizers often find themselves under pressure to deliver higher and higher quality events which require both resources and funds. In the Drupal open source project, we are often under pressure to create complicated solutions for complex problems. But one of the keys of our scalability has been to focus on keeping solutions lightweight and simple. This camp was an effort to return to a simple and accessible event solution that was key to Drupal's early success.

One of the other incentives for this event was to build momentum for a Drupalcon San Francisco 2010 proposal. We wanted to create interest, awareness, and momentum in the Bay Area community for a large DrupalCon event. Awareness could lead to volunteers, marketing, and potential local sponsors.

Where was it held?

The search was on for a location. The Bay Area is known for its expensive real estate and high costs of doing business. We knew that from prior BADCamps we needed a facility that could hold approximately 300 people (and we could still risk not having enough capacity). Not only were facilities expensive and difficult to find, but if we did find one, we would also have to triple the workload by running a fund raising campaign and creating sponsor packages with benefits to afford such a facility. The decision was made to stick with a free or very low cost facility to keep the camp simple. We began a casual search for facilities at UC Berkeley, Stanford University, the University of California San Francisco, and San Francisco State University.

Part of our search for a facility was to find a fully equipped facility. Prior experience with Drupal camps had taught us how resource intensive catering, wireless, building a website, and sponsorships were. While we were flexible, we knew we didn't have the resources to address those needs. In order to keep the event focused, we set an internal budget of organizing the entire event in 10 hours or less.

In April, we were met with professor Sameer Verma from SFSU to evaluate holding Drupalcon San Francisco at the SFSU Campus. As part of our efforts to evangelize Drupal, I agreed to do a presentation on Drupal for one of his Management of Information Systems classes and the SFSU staff that were using Drupal. The presentation was done on May 12th, 2009. One of the outcomes of the event was an introduction to the students from the Information Management Students Association. The students used Drupal for their student association site and they agreed to help work with the SFSU administration to find a facility. Our initial investigations revealed that the facility would cost approximately $6000 for a single day. However, we were not deterred and we kept exploring the possibility that the costs could be lowered by collaborating with the student group and by targeting the event towards the needs of SFSU students and staff.

On May 13th, the outgoing and future presidents of the sponsoring student organizations met at the SFSU downtown campus to tour the facilities and meet with the operations staff. The camp budget had started. The tour of the facility took one hour. The facility had wireless and was located on the major public transportation routes connecting the East Bay and the San Francisco peninsula. Each room had free wireless and built-in projectors. The facility was located on the 5th floor of the largest shopping mall in San Francisco, which included 5 coffee shops, 5 restaurants and over 20 eateries.

Later that evening, I presented the idea of Drupal camp San Francisco for June 6th to the DrupalCon San Francisco 2010 organizing committee. Chris Bryant agreed to clone the BADCamp 2008 website for this event and the Drupalcon organizing committee agreed to do presentations at the camp in three weeks. We waited for a few days for the local members of the community to confirm they were available for June 6th.

On May 19th, we made the reservation for the facility. The next day, the facility was confirmed but only for a single day. We had wanted have the camp for two days but in keeping with trying to keep things simple, we were flexible and took what was available. Over the next three weeks we worked to overcome one last significant barrier: getting a 1 million dollar certificate of liability. We were fortunate to have a sponsor with corporate insurance, but in the event it was unavailable, we explored purchasing insurance. In the end, we had almost everything we needed for no cost. The sole exception was a $40 dollar rental for a microphone for the video camera which recorded the introduction to Drupal sessions.

Marketing campaign

On May 21, we announced the event the event in the Drupal Bay Area group. Immediately, we received feedback that there was not enough notice and there were complaints from community members that this event was not marketed well enough. We could have waited for the website to launch, but that was too risky as we only had 16 days. We posted the event to craigslist, upcoming.org, NTEN.org, eventful and contacted local non-profit mailing lists to get the word out. We contacted the four Drupal users groups in Berkeley, San Francisco, the South Bay, and Santa Cruz to ask them to notify their local groups via their meet-ups. We asked our contacts at each of the local universities to send messages to their internal mailing lists to notify their students, faculty, and staff about the event. Later that week, we used the blast feature on groups.drupal.org to send notices to almost 500 members of the Bay Area users group. On May 26th, with 11 days to go, we launched a cloned copy of the BADCamp 2008 site with no new features, and no new theme. We launched the site with only two proposals from one of the organizers. Registrations were dependent on having good content so we started a targeted mailing campaign to local Drupal shops, Drupal user group organizers, and previous presenters. On May 31st, with one week to go, we used the mass mailing functionality in the 2008 BADCamp site to send a notice out to previous registrants that the event was happening. While the marketing campaign was aggressive, it took less than 3 hours to do including answering less than two dozens responses.

Wordcamp and TwitterCamp

The weekend before Drupal Camp we saw some tweets about Wordcamp and Twittercamp. Wordcamp was conveniently located 2 blocks from my house and it was on the way to our local farmers market. I dropped in on the camp to see what they were doing. I got several good ideas from the camp including having a staffed Genius Bar to solve Wordpress problems, a job board, and nicely designed camp t-shirts. I talked to the organizers and learned that many of them were employees of Automattic, the company that runs WordPress.com. They had many sponsors and a very nice buffet set-up when I attended. I asked how many registered attendees they had, they told me they had 700. This was a fateful decision to visit Wordcamp because it raised the stakes in how much time I was willing to spend on Drupal Camp and I quickly found myself wanting to go over my 10 hour personal budget.

The participants

I was the main organizer. Chris Bryant provided technical support via the website as well as the CSV file for registration. Heidi DeChamps from Acquia helped with the certificate of liability. My wife Denise managed registration, staffed the information desk, and helped ensure the facilities were in good shape after we finished using them.

One of the biggest challenges with producing a camp on short notice was how many presenters were unavailable. Previous presenters who were unable to attend included: Tao Starbow, the lead organizer for BADCamp; Earl Miles, Author of Views and Panels; Dmitri Gaskin, JQuery master prolific presenter; Jared Bitner, author of Activity Steams; Ted Serbinski, co-founder of Mothersclick; Scott Reynolds, author of Solr Views; Mark Burdett, developer of mobile and media Drupal solutions; Neil Drumm, Drupal 5 maintainer, and many others. Fortunately, we still had a good pool of presenters who stepped forward.

One of the key goals of this event was to help new Drupal users. In particular, we wanted to forus on people who didn't have a lot of resources so we targeted non-profits, journalists, and people who were recently laid off. We asked the registrants from the 2008 BADCamp to help us identify those people in a mailing. We reserved almost half the facility to accommodate new users via a class room which held 120 people in a theater style set-up. This was not optimal for training, but we felt it was better to not run out of room and provide training to what ultimately would be 140 registrants for the all day tutorial.

The introduction to Drupal tutorial

People were appreciative of an all day tutorial. We started by recruiting five different presenters: John Faber, Chris Bryant, Jen Lampton, Matt Cheney, and myself. We started off with an outline I developed in the initial session proposal. The presenters met the Wednesday prior to the event, and reviewed a one day tutorial by Chapter Three which they had developed over four prior iterations. We talked about our goals for the tutorial and different ideas about when to cover different topics. One of the goals was to get everyone set-up with their own instance of Drupal. Unfortunately, without dedicated computers, we couldn't give everyone a standard install of Drupal. Some had their own Drupal sites, some had a local instance of Drupal, some had Acquia Drupal installed with the stack installer, and some had Drupal or Acquia Drupal installed on webenabled.com.

We struggled to meet the different needs of audience members. We felt it was important to get a solid grounding in concepts. Some users wanted demo's of what a Drupal site could do right away, and others wanted a step-by-step walk through. We knew that without consistent installations, desks for users, and different needs for what an introduction meant, we would struggle. We received 20 survey responses from attendees to the tutorial and 50% indicated that we did an excellent job with 85% indicating that we did an excellent or good job.

The after party

In order to keep our costs low we held the party at a large counter in the mall eatery. Attendance was pretty good, and there were a lot of vibrant conversations. There was plenty of space, tables, and it was not too noisy. Sun Microsystems was generous with their drinks and Acquia bought a few rounds for the presenters. We had a thirsty crowd and the drinks ran out pretty quickly. We probably should have secured more non-alcoholic drinks in advance which would have been cheaper and lasted longer. Due to the open location, it was hard for some people to get engaged socially. The party lasted about 90 minutes and many people had evening plans and obligations. It was a tough decision to choose a less than perfect location that was just an elevator ride away versus a more intimate, and probably more expensive, location that would result in us losing a lot of our crowd.

Budget

Total expenses including organizing travel, planning, and materials expenses were $412, which was covered by Acquia's Drupal camp kit.

We are pretty confident we will do more Drupal Camps in the Bay Area in the near future.