GLADCamp

Today is our official call for barn raising applications at this year's GLADCamp, the Greater Los Angeles Drupal Camp!

On March 9, 2014, we'll be building a website from scratch to include much needed functionality, design, and other work required by a local 501c3 non-profit organization.

This event is "Drupal for Good in action" and is a teach-and-learn opportunity for our local Drupal community and is a win-win-win for everyone.

What's a Barn Raising?

From Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barn_raising

• A "barn raising" describes a collective action of a community, in which a barn for one of the members is built or rebuilt collectively by members of the community.
• Barn raising was particularly common in 18th- and 19th-century rural North America. A barn was a necessary structure for any farmer, for example for storage of cereals and hay and keeping of animals. Yet a barn was also a large and costly structure, the assembly of which required more labor than a typical family could provide.
• Barn raising addressed the need by enlisting members of the community, unpaid, to assist in the building of their neighbors' barns. Because each member was entitled to recruit others for help, the favor would eventually return to each participant.

Just replace the word "barn" in the description above with "website" and you'll see that we've adapted this "barn raising" model for the digital world.

Training day at GLADCamp 2014, this year's Greater Los Angeles Drupal Camp, is on March 7th, 2014. We have room at our conference venue for 3 simultaneous trainings and are starting our call for trainings! Everyone is welcome to apply:

   https://gladcamp.org/2014/training

Space is limited and priority is given to experienced Drupal trainers and training companies. Don't let that discourage you, though. If you're a newcomer to the Drupal training scene and want to offer something no one has offered before, we'd love to hear from you!

Hi everybody,

Lee Vodra and I (two of the founders of Droplabs, a Drupal-friendly coworking space in Los Angeles, and creators of the Coders with a Cause program) will be presenting on barn raisings and "Drupal for Good" in action at the Non-Profit Drupal Summit at GLADCamp next month.

This year's GLADCamp conference will feature the first Extreme Drupal Games! This event will run throughout the conference, beginning on Friday, March 7th and ending when winners are announced at the closing of the conference on Sunday, March 9th.

We have a sponsor who will be donating 6 identical VMs (distro and stack TBD) for us to use during the conference. I've asked that each VM have a minimum of 2 cores and 4GB of RAM, but exact specs are still being worked out. These VMs are hosted at 1 Wilshire in Downtown Los Angeles, so there will be extremely low latency.

The plan right now is for up to 6 teams to compete over the course of the weekend, tuning both the stack and the Drupal application to get the best possible performance in the allotted time. The team with the fastest Drupal site at the end of the conference will be declared the winner.

Now that we have a date and time, the question is how we're going to load test and judge the teams. What are the rules? Do we test for both anonymous and logged in users? Will contestants be permitted to rip out pieces of the stack and install completely different ones? How about the use of premade scripts? Do we allow commercial software, or go 100% free and open source?

Hey, guys. Some good news: James over at Sensis is going to be submitting a UX presentation from his team through the site. He'll be doing this through the training contact form, which I told him would be fine, since that's the only way he can do this for now. So just wanted to let you all know to expect it.

So as some of us already are starting to feel in their bones, GLADCamp 2014 is fast approaching, so it has fallen onto me to organize as much of us as can be assembled for an organizational meeting. Stewart and Oliver, I hope I can see you there at the very least.

So right now, I figure it might make sense to coordinate schedules to meet up within the next two weeks. What does, say, next Sunday or Monday look like for everybody, the 19th-20th look like for everybody? Let me know that asap so we can get something dialed in that will work for everybody.