DrupalSouth is the New Zealand Drupal Event for 2008. DrupalSouth will bring NZ's Drupal community together for the first nation-wide Drupal event and the first ever Drupal camp in NZ.
DrupalSouth runs for two days in the first weekend of November, starting at 9:30 am on Saturday 1st November and concluding at 6 pm on Sunday 2nd November 2008. The morning of each day will be filled with presentations, while the afternoons will be open to less formal talks, discussions, demonstrations, tutorials and hacking.
Many of the speakers are well-established Drupal and Open-Source community contributers like Dan "dman", Brenda "Shiny" Wallace, Bevan Rudge and Marek Kuziel (Open ID, Python, Postgres). Others have won NZOSS awards for their contributions to Open Source, like Joshua Campbell and Dave Lane.
The awesome line up of presenters will present on a variety of topics, such as How Drupal stacks up in enterprise, OpenID and Drupal and Google Maps in Drupal, to name just a few.
DrupalSouth presents a great opportunity for attendees to learn new and interesting Drupal skills, techniques and resources, network face to face with industry leaders and Drupal professionals, companies and users, engage new clients, employees and contractors, discover how others are using Drupal or promote their own company or services.
DrupalSouth is great value at $50 NZD and includes catered lunch on both Sunday and Saturday and drinks on Saturday night. You can register for DrupalSouth at DrupalSouth.net.nz/conference.
DrupalSouth is sponsored by these great Drupal companies from New Zealand and abroad Signify, Catalyst IT, CivicActions, Egressive, Encode and Evolved Development.
DrupalSouth is organised by a collection of individual Drupal professionals in the Christchurch Drupal community, primarily; Jonathan Hunt of Hunt Design and Egressive, Gold of Evolved Development and Bevan Rudge of CivicActions.
Find out more about DrupalSouth at DrupalSouth.net.nz.
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We, the organisers, are aware that DrupalCamp Sydney is just two weeks earlier, and that it would have been nice not to have 2 Drupal mini-conferences so soon to each other in this part of the globe. However, when we found out about DrupalCamp Sydney we had already been planning DrupalSouth for a couple of months, paid for the venue, accepted registrations, payments and sponsors' funds, and had been promoting DrupalSouth for a number of weeks on Planet Drupal, groups.drupal.org and elsewhere.
Given the geographical distance and cost of travel, we don't expect it to be likely that attendees choose NOT to attend either event in favour of the other. However if you have the luxury of needing to make such a decision, here are a few differentiating points to help you decide;
- DrupalSouth is for 2 whole days; DrupalCamp Sydney is one day.
- DrupalCamp Sydney is a free; DrupalSouth registration costs $50 NZD.
- DrupalSouth registration includes drinks on Saturday night two lunches. (Any profit will be donated to the Drupal Association and/or held in trust for future NZ Drupal events.)
- DrupalSouth registration is limited to 50 persons, 28 people have registered (19 have paid) at time of writing; DrupalCamp Sydney is limited to 45 persons, 37 have signed up, at time of writing.
- DrupalSouth is hosted in a bar/function center in downtown Christchurch; DrupalCamp Sydney is hosted at Sydney University.
- DrupalSouth is targeted at bringing the NZ Drupal Community together for the first time; Although anyone is welcome!
- DrupalSouth has a logo and a website! ;)