This is the form of event Alan and I would like to organise in Galway in April. This event has been announced! see http://groups.drupal.org/node/18452
Drupal site building competition
On Saturday 4th and Sunday 5th of April 2009 in Galway, 2 groups of Drupal developers will work on building 2 real working Drupal sites for 2 good causes. They will have 24 hours to complete their website. We are calling organizations, charities and NGOs from Ireland to submit their site proposal. Any organisation can register as long as they are non for profit and do not have a Drupal site already running. (A few static HTML pages is the limit for being accepted).
2 organisations will be chosen from the submissions and announced in advance. They will have to be serious, reliable and able to come to Galway on the day of the event. They will need to have the content for their site ready (text, logo, images...). Free templates are available on the web (oswd). A rough template and workflow of the site is also required. The organisation will need to have someone in charge of maintaining the site up to date (adding events, blogging etc...) and this person will need to be present on the day of the event in order to be trained (only requires basic computer skills).
The weekend will be a mix of DrupalCamp and Drupal site building challenge.
Saturday 10am - 4:30pm: DrupalCamp where people present whatever they like. There will be at least 2 tracks: newbie and advanced.
Saturday 4.30pm: Preparation to the challenge: the audience will be split in 2 teams. (One team per site). A team leader will be designated in advance and will have taken care of a few things prior to the event:
- get in touch with the organisation they will be dealing with
- make sure the scale, complexity and features of their project are feasible in one day
- prepare the hosting for their site (the organisation will have a working site by the end of the weekend).
- make sure everything is ready for the day of the competition
Each team leader will have a good Drupal knowledge, good communication skills and be able to organise people.
Other roles will be assigned within the teams on the day off: designers, site builders, themers, developers, trainers etc. Each team will be composed of at least 10 members, advanced Drupal developers mixed with newbies. One goal of the challenge is to bring newbies up to speed with site building in a comfortable and fun environment where they can learn from the more advanced users based on a real world website. They might provide non-drupal skills e.g. webdesign and usability.
Saturday 5pm onwards: The challenge starts! Each team will meet their respective "client" who will explain what he envisions to have on his site, followed by some initial discussion within the team and planning for the next day.
Sunday 5pm: End of the challenge. Each team will have 15 mins to present the site they built. A panel of 3 judges will then decide which team wins (prize to be decided...). The panel will be composed of:
- 1 member from the organising comity
- 1 member from a non profit (not involved in any of the 2 organisations participating in the challenge)
- 1 member from the Irish web community
The event will be inspired by http://www.fullcodepress.com/rules/
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A 2 day event of this nature will make the trip to Galway worth it. Please leave a comment to express your feedback on this. We'd like to gauge how many people from this group would be interested by this event.
We plan to use this event to make press releases and publicity around Drupal in Ireland. Anybody with some contacts or skills in this is welcome to contact us. This event will target not only the Drupalers but also web designers, web programmers, civil servants, public and private organisations...
We are trying to get a date for this event fixed as early as possible (possibly April 4th) so that we can distribute the promotion of the event. Contact Alan or myself if you want to help and promote the event in your university, workplace or other networks. Sponsors are also welcome. I have already booked the venue for the event, but any other sponsorship will be welcome (food, web hosting, printing, materials...).
Comments and suggestions at http://groups.drupal.org/node/17022