DrupalCamp Johannesburg

Due to the bad exchange rate, and the general distrust of international outsourcing local clients are completely unwilling to pay people overseas to do any development, and the lack of (quality?) Drupal developers
makes the Drupal industry here stillborn.

I have several friends who are now doing freelance development, who areeither interested in, or have started doing Drupal development here in South Africa. All of these people I introduced / got interested in doing Drupal, and most of them just need a short introduction to get them up to speed.

So in the interest of getting my friends into the fold and improving the community, I have decided I want to run a short primer course on Drupal, for people who already know php / web development.

At first I was planning to do it in an unofficial nature, but I realised that it would make more sense to actually build some courseware / tutorial documentation out of this process, and it would make teaching the subject far easier too.

I have contacted my friend who is an RHCE /ICDL trainer, and has written courseware for several other courses. He has agreed to help me / us write the courseware and format the course well.

I have also got the use of a training lab to teach the course in. And although I only have about 4 people interested in doing the course, I would consider going up to a max of 8 people.

What I would like to do, is build some courseware to put on Drupal.org, and coordinate with other people who would be interested in doing drupal training / putting together a primer course to train up their own developers.

The tentative dates I have scheduled for the course is 19 to 23 June 2006, or 22 to 26 June 2006. I think that's more than enough time to get the necessary documentation together. A lot of this will be presenting the information already in the handbook in a structured manner, with exercises and the like.

Remember, the goal is not to mint new programmers. The turning people who already know PHP / XHTML / CSS into Drupal developers.

Does anyone have any input on this ? What should we be teaching people getting into drupal?