drupalcamp

I gave my first Drupal talk at the first BarCampMilwaukee, then again at BarCampMadison. By the time BarCampMilwaukee2 rolled around we had 17 participants who tagged themselves with drupal, and two more sessions. In Milwaukee we decided that we might just have the critical mass to have a *Camp dedicated to drupal, and DrupalCampWisconsin was born.

Now we're ten days away, and have 41 folks signed up on the wiki, sponsors to cover the food costs (thanks again Web414, Fresh Coast Ventures, 2XL Networks, Palantir, Cruiskeen Consulting LLC, and EC Connection), and some great sessions lined up. As far as I'm concerned the 19th can't get here fast enough.

So what's next?

I gave a talk at the Madison PHP Meetup Group in November on drupal which drew a good sized crowd. After the talk several folks expressed interest in having a regular Madison-based Drupal User Group (or meetup). I figured it wouldn't be too hard to organize a drupal-related talk once a month, so we're going to give it a shot. The first official gathering of this new group will be another joint-meeting with the PHP group (January meeting info on meetup.com). Hopefully by February, after a successful DrupalCamp we'll be able to spin off and start separate meetings. If you're interested in the group shoot me an email (blake # blakehall * org), or leave a comment.

And don't forget to Sign up for DrupalCampWisconsin if you haven't already!!!

The drop is (finally!) coming to Wisconsin. We've got space secured for a DrupalCamp in Milwaukee on January 19th, 2008. While I've been batting the idea around for quite awhile, I've also done a fair amount of foot-dragging. There were a lot of questions to be answered:

• Can we find space?
• Can we find sponsors?
• Can we find enough people willing to lead sessions?
• Will people show up?

There's definitely some work to be done on some of these fronts, but so far things look pretty encouraging. We've got great space (and wifi) at Milwaukee School of Engineering.

If you're a Drupal ninja, or just wanting to learn more about using Drupal to maintain your web site, I'm sure DrupalCamp will be a good time. You can sign-up here, and since it's free you don't have much reason not to!