DCAPO's activities, status and goals

Cary asked me to put together a summary of DCAPO's activities, goals and status for the Drupal Association board report. I thought this would also make a suitable opportunity to recognize and celebrate our successes and work to date. Here is what I sent him. (Sorry that I didn't open this up for collaboration. I would have liked to, but time didn't permit it.)

The DrupalCon Asia-Pacific Organisers group is the first attempt to bridge the gap between the Drupal communities of Asia-Pacific. The group has researched the Drupal communities in Asia-Pacific in several ways;

• members in g.d.o groups, of locale-specific drupal communities (e.g. Drupal.jp, Drupal.in.th and others) and by Drupal.org profiles
• Google search results about Drupal by language and by country
• Past, future and regular Drupal events in the Asia-Pacific (and Drupal presence at other events)

DCAPO quickly recognized that there are many large but segmented Drupal communities in Asia-Pacific and that the diverse range of languages, economies, cultures and religions in Asia-Pacific presents significant barriers between these communities.

DCAPO set a goal to connect better with more Drupal communities in the region, and achieved this with an announcement and invitation to get involved. DCAPO distributed it widely across groups.drupal.org, translated it to Japanese, Thai and Hindi, posted to relevant mailing lists and republished on other Drupal community websites and blogs.

About a third of DCAPO group's 112 members joined the DCAPO group after the announcement. There are more members of the DCAPO group than the North American, European or Latin-American counterparts.

Nevertheless, several large Drupal communities have had relatively little involvement in DCAPO. DCAPO is trying to involve these Drupal communities more, in particularly Japan, Indonesia, China, Thailand, Malaysia, Philippines. The most significant barrier to connect better with these communities appears to be language.

DCAPO acknowledges that the extremely wide range of cultural, lingual, economic and geographic differences will present significant barriers for many potential attendees of a DrupalCon in Asia-Pacific. These would be much more significant than for DrupalCons in other parts of the world.

DCAPO thinks that a suitable goal for the first DrupalCon Asia-Pacific would be for an event with around 500-1000 attendees, even though a well-targeted event that is accessible to the concentrations of Drupal communities could be much larger. It might be possible for such an event to occur in 2010, though 2011 seems more realistic at this time.

Many suggestions for locations have been made, but no useful research has been done on locations yet. Likely candidates include Singapore, Taiwan, Kolkata, Hong Kong, Bangkok, Sydney, Melbourne.

Other goals of DCAPO are to encourage and promote larger Drupal events at the national level and be more transparent about the group's structure and process.