Dear SDDUG:
It's that time of year again where camp is looming shortly in January. Here's an update of our current state of affairs:
VENUE: biggest change this year is that we've lost our benefactor to Hall of Champions, Rich Cherry who is tackling a whole new endeavor with Museums on the Web. We've enjoyed many years of his generosity in underwriting the costs of the venue. So thanks so much Rich for helping our user's group grow and strengthen. With that in mind, with the help of Doug Rowe, we've been able to get dates and venue arranged through UCSD. This is still tentative but it is looking quite good at this point. This will make the venue costs for this year from HOC ($20k) to about $6500.
WEBSITE: Current impediment is getting the old site ready to accept 2013 registrations. Thanks to Andy Root, we were the first camp to use COD7. The downside is that we have an early beta site that needs some love and attention. Sage is sponsoring the first sprint this coming Sunday to get registration and sponsorship ready so we can formally announce camp. Everyone is welcome to join in. We're probably going to do a Google hangout and Sprint chatroom.
KEYNOTE: Ezra Gildesgame is a notable Drupaler, you can read more about him on his D.O. profile. Currently he works with all the distributions for both Acquia and the community at large and is driving the conversation and strategy around distribution growth and adoption. We may have a Distribution Summit again or we may just do sprints.
SPRINTS: The sprints we ran last year were great favorites. The sprints that BADcamp ran for a full week were great (Thanks to our friends at C3 for the big sprint push). We have Joel Farris, one of SDDUG's founders and organizer who is pushing the rest of Drupal.org onto D7. If that work is still going on, we will help him with cleanup and final push. Zakiya Khabir is investigating a TWIG sprint for D8 and we've asked Angie Byron to come down again but she's having a baby so family matters may prevent that! Congrats to Angie!!!
SESSIONS: As soon as the site is open for registration and sponsorship, we'll work on the session functionality on the site; we didn't have all the parts working last year so we couldn't do voting and other typical camp things.
PLANNING MEETINGS: We encourage everyone to participate in planning and working on SANDcamp. It's actually one of the most popular camps in the country because of our organization, location and timing. While the Drupal shops are migrating around less and focusing more on external marketing, we still have the opportunity to attract them and have high-quality sessions from notable Drupalers. Please email diana@sagetree.net if you would like to be on the SANDcamp basecamp project.
STAYING IN TOUCH: Sage Tree has created an SDDUG meetup.com page which is a great way to attract new members and keep our meetings current and visible. Join us to get automated reminders about meetings and planning sessions.
That's all for now, thanks everyone.
Susan
Comments
venue costs
Just to be clear, the Hall of Champions never actually charged us $20k. That's the real value of that venue though, it's a very professional event space.
SANDCamp 2012 paid the Hoc around $2k in total for venue and wireless. The same three days in 2013 would be closer to $16k. Even though this year is only 2 days and they're willing to negotiate some, their new focus is on sports-related causes, and not technology.
UCSD will provide much more room, and better service since we're a full-paying customer. And there is way more food available, meaning we won't have to plan lunch this year, one of the most expensive costs for a camp.