The Highlights
General
- Decided the venue early, so all the preparation around it fell in place.
- Having a Dedicated Marketing team/ Social Media team amped up the exposure of the event.
- Encouraged a decent-sized team of volunteers with seamless and quick communication in WhatsApp groups(We had 30!).
- Dedicated Photography/Videography team.
Localization
- The speaker selection was done strategically from the south to foster the growth of the Drupal Community in the Southern states.
- Adopted the local Cuisine and Cultural events[unique to the city/state where the venue is].
Socially conscious initiatives
- Booths for selling products from Non-profits [Aarthi Home, KPCT Foundation].
- Eco-friendly disposable plates and cups for serving food.
- Cloth tote bags for giveaways.
- Power speaker - a speech to combat any social issue initiated by the speaker.
- Recruiting women from HerSecondInnings.
Lessons from our experience
- To close and decide the sessions by 1 month.
- Following a proper schedule for the session.
- Speaker's time to be stringent.
- Making SNS active 1 month before the event.
- Local weather consideration.
- Pushing the starting time of the camp a bit later in the morning.
- Cards or display showing the remaining time left for the speaker and to the audience indicating the duration of the session.
- Opting for fewer sessions (1 day for sessions and other day are for - Contribution, Acquia Certification exams, and Code Sprint).
- End the second-day activity post Lunch.
- To ask people to upload the ppt along with the session title during session submission to make it easier to review and select the people for presentation.
- Reuse the same theme from the Drupal Camp Chennai Website to make the live site go public quicker. Also, to make the site available as a Distribution on drupal.org to make it reusable for all India related camps(Our suggestion).
- Get the speaker’s Twitter, LinkedIn or any SNS handles of choice to help with tagging. [Whichever the Presenter prefers to disclose]
Plans Drawn from the DIA meeting at Drupal Camp Chennai
- To make the momentum running, Prasad will announce the initiative that revolves on the topic of Quality Code contribution to Drupal 9 and make every third Saturday a Code Sprint day - starting from Jan 25 as 1st Contribution Day.
- Pick up initiatives that could put DIA in light doing something different and impactful.
- Organization to make one people to exclusively contribute to the Drupal Community.
- Encourage Individuals to pledge 8hrs a month for contributions and help DIA achieve one of the top spots for Quality Code contributions.
- Theme everything around Drupal 9 Quality contributions for the upcoming camp with the tagline "Proud Makers of Drupal 9".
- To get the list of Companies and the People who they're sponsoring for this initiative.
- Amplify the efforts from Drupal Camp Chennai to be the Makers of Drupal9.