DrupalCampNYC9 Session Grid

It's a fun place. Start forming your bocce teams now!

I want to thank the organizers of this event, Robbie, Forest, Ezra, Eric, Tom, Orbgasm, Winston, and dozens of others who helped out in so many different ways, such as by sponsoring to the tune of hundreds of dollars or carrying food from one building to another for the awesome opportunity it provided for me to fill in numerous gaps in my Drupal store of knowledge. Overall, I think we have much to be proud of our local regional Drupal community.

In recent years, the Drupal Camp has been about the only event that has lured me to travel all the way from my bucolic blue ranch house in River Edge, NJ to Brooklyn -- even though I am a native Brooklyner.

Having said that, and I mean every word of it, I would be remiss in my obligations if I were not to share some thoughts about how to improve the planning for the next Drupal camp.

Overall, I think the unconference philosophy, at least the way I understand it, is the right philosophy for our community to embrace. Ultimately it is up to each of us as individuals to fill a breach or at least ask for help when we see a deficiency in how an event is being organized. It is not enough to just "let the organizers handle it". The unconference philosophy underscores how important it is for those of us who benefit from Drupal should give back to Drupal. The freedom to be disorganized, however, doesn't mean that planning ahead is necessarily a bad thing.

I don't know if there is a checklist of some sort that gets passed from one DrupalCampNYC to the next, but here are some thoughts about what should be on it.

There should be a very high priority on completing the task of setting up the sessions schedule within the scheduled time for doing so. This may mean that we really need an hour and a half instead of just one hour for doing this. What happened yesterday was that a few workshops were completed before the sessions grid was finally set up. Quite possibly a number of people were not able to find the sessions of their primary choice during this period because of this. The scheduling hour did not focus on scheduling. I thought the welcome speech by the Brooklyn PolyTech representative took too much time. I thought the exercise involving the self-designation by attendees as to whether they were a newbie or dream in code took too much time. Name badges can be pre-printed with names, organizational affiliation and checkboxes for newbie, midling, code dreamer, or whatever. Attendees can be shown a list of sessions that have taken place in previous camps and be asked to add new session ideas as well as indicate their desire to be the main presenter, a co-presenter (or just be present for the session) for topics identified on the list, at the time that attendees register. By not having a list of previous session topics, we were perilously close to not having any workshop on Theming yesterday. These ideas do not preclude the use of post-it notes, or getting immediate audience feedback on community interests, which are invaluable tools for slotting session topics into time frames.

One statement made yesterday that merits discussion is the statement that "We are not here to make political statements". If would be nice it were just that easy. Last Thursday I had the privilege of convening an Android Study Group at Cognizant Technologies offices in Teaneck, NJ. About half of the ten or so participants unavoidably self-identified as women. A majority unavoidably self-identified as a member of an ethnic or racial minority group. I unavoidably self-identified as a person with a disability. If this picture were to be juxtaposed with a picture of the DrupalCamp attendees when they were all in the auditorium, it would be quite a political statement, in my opinion (yes, I acknowledge that the Teaneck sample size is, statistically speaking, insignificant). We need to make a different political statement at the next camp. We can do this by encouraging people, well in advance of the next camp, to participate in a diversity committee that would work closely with camp organizers in matters of outreach and camp planning. If we had had such a committee this time around, we might have been able to avoid the unfortunate snafu where advance registration times were in conflict with the religious observances of some adherents. For me, personally, the idea of an after-camp party at a bar nearly a mile away with steps in front of it was not a good one. Actually, it was a huge slap in my face. As a civil rights lawyer in my former career I've been involved in a number of lawsuits against public establishments that refuse to put a ramp in front of their one step or two step main entrances. FloydNY is wrong to do what they are doing and DrupalCampNYC9 is wrong to do any business with them. You have taken sides in this civil rights issue and you should be on my side on this one. So much for not making political statements. My personal thanks go to Tom Sherlock, Randall and several other people whose names I do not know who were willing to carry my heavy scooter up and down the steps, so I could join in the party. But I can't help but think: what if one of them, in an overeagerness to help me, had injured a back or gotten hurt some other way? What if I were not able to temporarily get out of my scooter and I had been injured while being carried? Thankfully, no one was injured last night. What if Tom and Randall had not noticed me as I was approaching FloydNY? I would have turned around and gone home. It would have been just another incident on top of hundreds where I would have been denied a Drupal career jobs/networking opportunity solely because of discrimination on the basis of disability.

Make no mistake about it. The Drupal community shares in a mix of cultural values, some of which advance and some of which diminish our common humanity. Each of us needs to personally acknowledge responsibility for this. One of the reasons why I do Ubuntu evangelizing is because the Ubuntu community actively acknowledges and embraces the values of our common humanity. Our Drupal community should do the same.

Some may scoff at the idea of having another "committee" with a high-sounding moral tone. Don't scoff at this one. I have been involved in committees that have been very effective in helping to achieve goals of diversity. With the proper support from all of our Drupal community members, a diversity committee can be very effective, with benefits redounding to all.

Ciao for now,

Kipp

Hi Kipp,

Thank you so much for your feedback. As one of the camp organizers, this kind of feedback is really helpful, particularly since we'll be working to put on another one a little later in the year. Rich Baldwin and team are working on a survey that I hope you and others will fill out - it will be sent out shortly. Also, I'm assigned to help coordinate information on a sunset review (yes, Robbie, an autopsy! ;-) ) of what went well, what didn't go so well, and how to improve the camps as well as the efficiency of putting them on.

With respect to the start of the camp, in essence we arguably got through the session picking within the hour (ish) -- however we waited 10 minutes to start for two reasons. First, we had a slated intro from the people at Poly on the graduate program and he was a bit late. Also, we were still corralling people into the auditorium at 11:05, so that cost us. thus, we didn't start until 10:10.

Let me add that the really cool idea Eric had for self-selecting by interests and experience took us some time. It was the first time we did it and I think we have ideas on how to optimize that and actually leverage the experience - however, we did lose a bit of time there too.

That along with actually getting people over to the other building cost us time.

Now with respect to the online session grid - that was a really tough situation. I was actually personally typing the schedule into an HTML page that was preformatted, so it was time consuming since I started it at like 11:10 when we all agreed on the schedule. Plus, people were still moving things around on the board - Honestly, I was working at breakneck pace with eric, Robbie, and a few other people just helping QA/proof the sessions on the page, and we didn't get done with that until 11:35am.

I think what we'll probably do is type the sessions in as they're suggested then just move them around on a form rather than have to type them in between HTML tags, which was unwieldy. I promise we'll tackle this before the next camp, since we'll be able to get the sessions up more quickly.

With respect to making sure that we as a community achieve goals of diversity, while I do think we were attentive to this during our volunteer discussions (dietary, dates of posting the camp were not in conflict with religious observance, etc) I'd like to see us endeavor toward the ideal as you cite above. I think one way to help with this will be to get more organizers to help out, since there were a small set of people that did a good deal of the work. For instance - and I take 100% responsibility for this - the selection of the after-party was done after me calling around venues throughout the area that could accommodate our size party, within the 1 mile maximum radius, and at a cost point that the sponsors were able to afford. As it turned out, only Floyd could accommodate us - although the other venues that were in consideration were not much closer. Had I known that they had no ramp and that this would be an issue, I certainly would not have recommended this venue if it meant you or anyone felt that you were being unfairly prejudiced against. This was my ignorance and I regret this, although if you recall I did make every attempt to clear the path for you to come through the bar, get a table, then bring you your drink and tell friends where you were.

So I don't agree this should be done as a separate committee, but I DO agree that we need to be more sensitive to the diverse needs of our community, and I am a staunch believer, both in these kinds of events as well as in my career, that we need standards and templates to document how any events are to be planned and conducted so that we don't miss important details now or in the future. Personally I'll be helping to work on these in the coming weeks, and your comments will be carefully included.

Thank you for coming and for your participation, Kipp, and I hope you'll come to an even better Drupalcamp later this year! -J

I attended Forest Mars' session on the GIT theory. It was an amazing session that taught me a lot and helped to clear up some of the confusion I had on the topic. I would like to personally thank all the members of the community involved with the organizing and planning. Your willingness to help newbies learn the ins and outs of Drupal is inspiring. I know it takes a ton of patience and it is very well appreciated.

Thanks!