Pacific Northwest Drupal Summit 2011

Assuming Portland is next up, we should get started with planning sooner rather than later.

It would also be a good idea to make sure that we either rolled the DrupalCamp PDX planning into this, or schedule these two events far enough apart so they aren't in conflict.

Maybe a discussion for the next DUG?

I'd suggest, for your own sanity, to just combine the two events for 2011, if anything maybe just do a one day event that is uber local. That is what we did in seattle last year, and we plan on doing a one day event on October 23rd this year that is really just for local folks to get together and hack on things.

For those who are going to make up the organizing committee, don't hesitate to ask us in seattle, and I am sure in vancouver, will be happy to help transfer knowledge and experience.

Great to hear some PDX folks already interested in helping organize next year! Like Gregory said, if you need any info or advice from the Vancouver/Seattle organizers, just let us know - once we have some contact email addresses, we can share out some GDocs that have budget, sponsorship, email templates and other info.

I'm also in to help. With the support, brains, and data of the Vancouver and Seattle folks and what we learned with putting on DCPDX09 I think we're in a good place to begin getting ready to host the Summit... and I wholeheartedly agree that we should skip having a DrupalCamp next year and focus on the Summit (after all, we've got Brewpal :D).

Perhaps we can spend a few minutes on this at the next UG meeting?

The 260 was a limit from the venue selected. I think we could shoot for more if we wanted to. Does anyone know about the website? Does that get reused from year-to-year?

I think that 250 is a good size in that it is not overwhelming, and you can have high quality interactions with many people. When you get larger, having those interactions becomes harder, other logistics also become more difficult -- like room size, and venue size.

in seattle we actually had less than 200, more like 160 IIR (based on the donut order).

The Portland Art Museum might work for an event in the 300ish range, perhaps some OSBridge volunteers could give us some insight on how well it did or did not do from an organizers POV?

I would like to see a larger summit if possible. I think with a larger summit it would be possible to do more outreach, raise awareness and be more inclusive. Ultimately it would be great to use the summit to raise the profile of Drupal as a the CMS of choice.

Do you guys think it would be possble/good to have a 300, 400 or even 500 person target?

I'd also like to see a larger summit. 300-400 sounds like a good target.

I and several of us at OpenSourcery are looking forward to helping out.

How about PSU for a venue? They're central, on the streetcar, heavy users of Drupal, and have a lot of (potentially free/low-cost) space to meet.

Also, I'm very interested in seeing the Summit reach out to a broader group of Drupal users. What do people think about running a newbie/user track for all the content managers out there?

As Gregory noted above, the PNW Summit was founded as a regional event for people who use Drupal. While this has led to a growing conference outreach has not been a driving force behind this particular event. We do think that outreach is important. To this end we have provided trainings preceding the Summit each year that allow for newbs to come and learn about Drupal. In Seattle this has become a very popular event, see the Drupal Clinic g.d.o and event site. This model has enjoyed great success and I would suggest something similar for 2011.

It might provide some context to visit the original event node. I think that with the Summit comes an expectation based on the previous conference years that there will be a particular focus. This expectation is felt not only by attendees but also by sponsors - many of whom are excited about being a part of the Summit as it continues.

I believe the debrief we did in Vancouver along with the accompanying documentation will be brought to the next PDX Drupal User Group where I think it will lead to a great conversation.

I am super excited to see so many people committing to being a part of keeping this fun event moving forward and look forward to seeing the Portland community put its personal stamp on the PNW Summit!

Jennifer Hodgdon did an excellent job of designing classes for Drupal beginners in Seattle for 2009 and 2010. Benefit to having the beginner class before the 2009 Summit was the beginners who attended the Summit came understanding the basics already and they were not side tracked from the main topics.

Here are the beginner clinic resources:
2010:
http://poplarclass.com/ Seattle Drupal Clinic 2010 class curriculum
http://poplarclass.com/before-workshop Student preparation for the clinic
http://poplarclass.com/lessons lessons learned
http://groups.google.com/group/sdc-2010-plan Planning for the 2010 clinic
http://seattledrupalclinic2010.eventbrite.com/ registration $25+fee
Jennifer had students create Drupal accounts on WebEnabled.com so they would be using a standard and reliable platform.
2009:
http://poplarclass.com/home-2009 Seattle Drupal Clinic 2009 class curriculum
http://groups.google.com/group/seattle-drupal-clinic-planning Planning for the 2009 clinic
http://seattledrupalclinic.eventbrite.com/ registration free
Jennifer hosted the student web sites on her account - she switched to Webenabled in 2010

Thoughts: Separating the beginner classes from the 2009 summit worked well for local attendees. Separation does not work well for out-of-towners who won't get beginner classes at the Summit. Therefore, it behoves local Drupal groups (Vancouver, Seattle, Portland) to provide beginner support and outreach independent of the Summit.

-- John Walling

p.s.
Ideally, each Drupal group would provide an annual Drupal Beginner Clinic locally a few weeks prior to the Summits held in each of the 3 cities. That approach would take the burden of training newbies off the Summit planners and prepare beginners attending the Summit and benefit beginners who don't plan to attend the Summits. Using Jennifer's work as a template, it could be shared and enhanced between the 3 cities to streamline the process of training beginners.

As another Drupal shop in Portland, I'd like to throw our company's hat in the ring. We have enough staff (9 people) that we can commit multiple people and some financial resources as well. I want to be careful of stepping on people's toes, but we're in it for the long haul.

I also agree 100% that we should to reach out to non-community members. Specifically i'd love to gget business decision makers and designers more exposed to Drupal. Regarding both of these groups I think we could easily attract them IF there are tracks to support their interests. I think this would be good for Drupal, any newbies that attend and for our community.

Joaquin

Echoing what Jared and Gregory said, the Summit is not just a bigger regional DrupalCamp. Nor is it a smaller DrupalCon. It's a unique event that is geared towards people already tapped into the Drupal Community and working with/creating Drupal.

Having this focus allows us to really up the ante as far as community/contribution (eg. taking down the D7 criticals count by 5 over the course of the weekend) and as far as what kind of level of knowledge sharing is going on (eg. the nuances of Drupal Security, Aegir configuration, and Drupal business best practices among many other high level topics) - things that would not be the same within the context of a more general camp.

I am a huge proponent of bringing new people into the community and supporting and mentoring them, but like Seattle did last year, in a parallel event (be it a Camp or a Drupal Clinic). There just wasn't enough wo/man-power in Vancouver this year to run that concurrently with the Summit. But it is definitely a need that can be filled locally by other events, and does not benefit comparably by being regionalized.

The Summit is conceptually geared towards bringing together the leading Drupal developers/themers/managers/designers/etc. from the region and enabling us to cultivate both our shared knowledge base, as well as contribute back to the greater Drupal community. It's because of this that there were comments like "the PNW is really a hub of awesome Drupalling" and that very active contributors were willing to travel long distances to attend.

To reiterate - I am all for supporting beginners (and do a TON of it personally as part of my Drupal Docs work), but it doesn't mean that it must be integrated into the Summit. We've developed a very unique model for a regional conference (the most comparable event IMO would currently be the European DrupalCons, which are much smaller and more developer focused, but of course expensive to attend), and I think it's really important to keep focused on the needs that it is filling that really can't be filled elsewhere.

I played a small part in organizing the first summit in Seattle, and I just got back from the second one in Vancouver.
I have been doing Drupal since 2006, and I cannot overstate how exciting it was to be amongst so many people who know far MORE then I do.

Outreach is critical, but it is mostly effective as a local activity.
You will not have many people traveling from Seattle or Vancouver to learn what a node is.
Organize local events for teaching beginners,.
Then reward yourselves by putting on, and coming to, and speaking at, the summit!

The unique nature of the event is that is is a forum for discussing the things that keep Drupal growing technically.
You will learn about code/themeing/business all from people who are doing it, and who know how to answer the questions you have.
Diluting this with tracks for beginners will keep you from being able to attend the advanced sessions (you will be talking about how to add cck fields).

The summit as currently constituted was designed to be in each city once every three years.
Do something for you local community when the summit is in Seattle and Vancouver.
Next year, do something for yourself :-)

I support Seattle and Vancouver in wanting to maintain their intended focus from the two very successful summits they've organized when sharing the venue with Portland.

I've heard feedback after every camp, summit, and con that more outreach needs to be done, but I've seen little initiative toward making it happen. This is not to say I know what all folks have tried to organize, only that I've not seen newbie outreach or business outreach events come through the Portland user group.

I'd love to see folks interesting in working with the previous Summit hosts, ones who are interested in maintaining the spirit and intentions of Summit organizers, start working toward Portland as the host city in 2011.

I'd also love to see folks interested in outreach events continue their discussion independently. There's quite a bit of diversity in ideas for outreach alone that bear clarification.

Several of the people who talk to me about outreach don't attend user group meetings (Brewpal or Presentation Wednesday) because the focus is so developer-oriented, so they may not be in the minds of regular user-group attendees as potential resources or organizers. I'd be willing to act as liaison between the user group and anyone wanting to put together outreach events. I'm pretty sure several of us would like to support such an effort, even if we're not prepared to craft the overall event vision or step in to make it happen.

I believe if the heavy lifting of organizing and logistics are bottom-lined by committed volunteers (with some very basic coordination of dates and places) that the Portland community is large enough, committed enough, and enthusiastic enough to support two events. If no one steps up for outreach events, then we'll know I'm wrong.

The Summit seems like a clear "go" and something that is appropriately defined only within the vision of the larger regional community.

The Pacific Northwest Drupal Summit is what it is, focused and wildly successful! Anyone passionately interested in creating an equally focused and wildly successful experience for newbies, something to prepare them for a Summit, please bring your ideas and plans here: http://groups.drupal.org/node/98309