DrupalSouth

The Wellington meetup in October was a success with a range of people with Drupal interest attending. We had 18 in total and the mix was about 10 developers, 5 account manager/or project manager and a few content / Drupal Users.

Some of the sites being developed in Drupal were of very high standard and this showed with the presentations. In addition to this each project presented some of the difficulties faced such as migration, integrating with other systems and modules to use in implementation.

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.

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

DrupalSouth organisers are almost ready to book a venue and announce dates for DrupalSouth Wellington 2010. However we need to pay a deposit in order to confirm the venue and hence dates. Thus we are now accepting sponsors for DrupalSouth.

DrupalSouth Wellington will be close to LCA Wellington in January 2010. If you think you might attend LCA and/or a NZ Drupal camp in January, please take this one-minute survey to help us better determine suitable dates and other details.

Thanks!
Bevan/

Linux Conference Australasia (aka LCA, linux.conf.au) will be in Wellington 18-23 January 2010 – 6 and a half months from now. This presents opportunities for the NZ Drupal community to;

1. Promote Drupal in the wider FLOSS community (which is good for business)
2. Run a DrupalCamp/Conference; which allows attendees to combine expenses if attending LCA, and organizers to share venue, admin, financial and other resources with LCA.
3. Just hang out and drink & talk Drupal! Or perhaps (talk) and (drink drupal)!? :)

It is expected there will be of the order of 600-700 attendees ar LCA.

Is it time to start thinking about or planning DrupalSouth 2? What do you think? Would you be keen to attend? Help organise? Sponsor? Speak? Where?