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We're delighted to announce that the keynote speaker for DrupalSouth 2015 will be Angela "webchick" Byron.

If you're a Drupal enthusiast, Angie needs no introduction. For everyone else, her influence is there (whether you know it or not) every time you use a Drupal site, and it's been there for nearly 10 years.

Angie is a co-maintainer of Drupal Core, a Drupal educator, a community leader, and a passionate open source evangelist. She also manages to squeeze in a full-time job as Director of Community Development at Acquia.

Hey hey - a special call out to drupalchix in australia, new zealand and the asia pacific in general....

2 great conferences in Brisbane, Australia in January would LOVE to invite you to present.

The haecksen miniconf at LCA2011 is for women in free and open source software:

See the call for papers: http://haecksen.net/node/273
Or more info on what it's about: http://haecksen.net/node/6

LCA have asked if we want to have a stall at LCA Open Day on Saturday 23. Note this is the first day of DrupalSouth Wellington, but that the open day is only from 11-2 (setup/packup one hour before/after). I can't be in 2 places at once and don't have time to organise, but I can put anyone who is interested in organizing this in touch with the LCA folk. I can also lend you a giant 3m Drupal banner for the stall.

I expect this would involve fielding questions from Drupal-curious linux and OS-savvy folk. This goes an awful long way towards helping promote Drupal in NZ and Australia.

DrupalSouth registrations opened this week, register now! There are already almost 30 registered attendees. Capacity is limited to 100 and we are expecting to sell out, so get in quick!

I'm currently focussing my efforts on getting more sponsorship so that we can lower the registration fee. So far I've got a bit from Chris / xurizaemon / Giant Robot, and most likely a lot from another potential sponsor. Nothing else yet, but I sent a lot of email this week and people might still be considering and responding. I still have more people to get in touch with on my list, and will also follow up with phone calls to the likely candidates.

In the meantime however, people are getting antsy about sessions, speakers and programme. Here's a braindump;

We're really excited to announce that Mac's Brewery Bar & Restaurant will be the location of DrupalSouth Wellington 2010. The Brewery bar is right on Wellington central city's waterfront, between Te Papa and the Wellington Convention Centre. Yes, that means it's less than 300 metres from Linux.conf.au Wellington 2010 which is the week leading up to DrupalSouth!

We're also excited to announce the website for the event at Wellington2010.DrupalSouth.net.nz where announcements will be made and where you will be able to register in the near future. Subscribe to the RSS feed to get the latest news.

We now have three sponsors; $1000 from .nz, $500 from Catalyst IT, $200+services from Egressive.

.nz will pay sponsorship dollars to the venue directly, though our contact there (Jay Daley) is at a conference this week, so it won't happen till next week. I'll wait till that is paid and received before announcing venue. Projectors are $175 per day, but we can bring our own (Should we ask Catalyst IT? Others?)

DrupalSouth Wellington will be on Saturday and Sunday 23-24 January 2010 – just after LCA. Note that these are not the dates announced earlier this week on Twitter and a few other places (We were were missing some information we thought we had).

The venue is in central Wellington and is amazing! It is just a few hundred metres from Linux.conf.au and the Wellington Convention Center. Keep listening for the announcement sometime in the next two weeks – as soon as contracts are signed and deposits are paid.

Our sponsors have partnered with us to help make DrupalSouth the biggest Drupal event ever in NZ. They are;

• .nz – who bring you great .nz domains like *.geek.nz
• Catalyst IT – Specialists in Open Source Technologies
• Egressive – Drupal development, Linux support and hosting

We still have space for plenty more sponsorship – please get in touch if you want to be a part of NZ's greatest Drupal event.

We've confirmed attendance of our featured and keynote speakers from overseas;

• Angela Byron (webchick), Drupal 7 core maintainer
• Emma Jane Hogbin, (emmajane), co-author of Front End Drupal, uber-documenter & Drupal evangelist
• Addisun Berry, (add1sun), Drupal documentation lead
• Liz Henry (lizhenry), Blogher.com developer – the largest community for women bloggers, built on Drupal since 2006

Great news!

• .nz Registry Services (Jay Daley) sponsored $1000 + gst
• Egressive committed to $200 (with minor provisions) and ongoing logistics and hosting support
• I booked Mac's Brewery Bar Function Room for January 16 & 17 – the weekend before LCA
• I confirmed funds available from last DrupalSouth; $440
• I have a new plan to gather more sponsorship
• Chris and Dan have committed to working on updating the website
• Brenda and Josh are following up with Catalyst
• Signify responded "no" to sponsorship. Thanks for trying Kirill

I realized that Surveygizmo.com was doing something really funky with the date preferences data and I had misinterpreted the survey results. I got the raw numbers (attached) and processed them with a custom PHP script (attached);


In 1st place there were;
14 votes for Just Before
13 votes for Week After
In 2nd place there were;
14 votes for Just After

We've collectively done a fair bit of research on venues and it seems that there are 3 broad categories of venues to choose from;