Drupal Brighton Drinks - BADCamp debrief + BADCampUKIII planning kick-off meeting

3rd Monday is the usual Drupal Drinks meetup @ The Eagle, North Laine, Brighton.

This month we'll be debriefing BADCamp which I've just been to in Berkeley, California. We of course nicked their brand in order to kick off our Brighton events... and for a reason - BADCamp is AWESOME!!!

At our last meeting kindly hosted by miggle, we worked out a date around May, before DrupalCon Portland (May 20-24) so those doing a talk in Portland could use it as practice, and it fits nicely in with other UK camps, and is roughly half-way between DrupalCon Europes.

What I learned from BADCamp is:

• DrupalSummits before the main camp weekend - these were fab - they had many, we can do a few - business, mobile, etc.
• free Drupal training - it is so important we keep the balance between paid and free events in Europe/UK. I believe we should spear-head free events in the UK, and free training will boost the Drupal skills and help the Drupal "talent shortage". The buildadmodule mentored training, the only room I saw, was PACKED with people, we could do similar
• the camp itself had multiple tracks and 8 sessions on at any one time. I usually go to BoFs at DrupalCons but the BoFs here were the sessions, they were fantastic!
• sprints before and after the event - Drupal doesn't get built by magical unicorns and ponies, we need space to get together and work together, what amazed me most about BADCamp was how the whole event stretched over more than a week. I'll bring along my lanyard and you can see.
• atmosphere - BADCamp is an awesome atmosphere. By focusing on the community and the free-ness, you get the "real" Drupal people turning up. I don't know the figures, but it felt like there were about 1,200+ people there out of 1,600+ registered. Always going to happen with a free event but there is more to it than an entrance fee.

The first BADCamp had 150 registered, we had 120 registered and 80 turn up. BADCamp is 6 years old now and 1,600+ registrations. We are in year ONE, we have it all to come yet!

Things I did notice is the business summit had 160+ registrations but only about 40 turned up in the morning, double that in the afternoon. Also the product summit started off great but soon turned very techie - we must separate, or at least allow for separation, of these. Edit - to clarify, the other more technical summits from what I hear were packed - I think the take-aways here are we are just venturing into some areas like the business and products and by supporting summits more with videoing, marketing, diversifying (I heard Sydney has Content Strategy and others to appeal to wider localised audience).

So, if we're going to pull off something like this we're going to need multiple locations - places suitable for business summits, places suitable for training, and places for the camp itself.

I think we could do it, if we start planning and organising right now, so that's why I'm calling this meeting - anyone else interested do please come along or at least post on the group thanks, I'll see you there!

With the number of venues in Brighton, from the Lighthouse to theskiff, the university, etc. we should be able to pull something like this off, but it won't happen unless we start organising now - in fact we're already quite late for next May, but let's give it a go and set the plan ready for an even bigger, better one the next year!

Please register your interest so I don't think I'm the only crazy one, muchos gracias ;)