Dear Drupalists: 30 DAYS 'TIL CAMP! Please use this copy to share information about SandCamp. We'll be posting a shorter press release style as well. Some places to post this information includes your website, email to your clients, send to your Linkedin contacts, post to other d.o groups, and post on bulletin boards at work. This promises to be an exciting camp with 350 in attendance. We have amazing sponsors including many nationally recognized Drupal firms along with Kieran Lal as our keynote speaker. Very likely your clients can benefit from our professional Drupal basics training this year too. And three nights of parties, how can it be any better than that?
SandCamp 2011 (www.SandCamp.org) is now open for registration and sponsorship. Our San Diego Drupal User's Camp will be held on Saturday, January 8 and Sunday, January 9 from 9am – 5pm at the Hall of Champions Museum in Balboa Park. Our mission and purpose is twofold: (1) to introduce new developers and industries to Drupal and (2) strengthen the Drupal knowledge base within our geographic region.
The 4th annual SandCamp is an attendeed-riven, completely volunteer initiative modeled after the open, participatory nature of Drupal. We hope to hold one of the larger camps in the world with 400+ guests.
The schedule will involve high-quality breakout sessions, an attention-grabbing keynote from Kieran Lal, a coder’s lounge, sponsor booths, and an executive boardroom for special Birds of Feather (BoF) type gatherings. Want more? OK, when we are done we are going to have a social event from 5:30-8:00 PM Saturday after the session. For hardcore socializers, an 8:00 PM+ event will be announced.
To appeal to a broad audience, we are offering four tracks this year:
(1) Drupal for Beginners
(2) Design, Theming, and Usability
(3) Advanced Development and Performance and
(4) Drupal for Business and Services.
If you are new to Drupal we definitely want you to come – in fact, during registration we have carved out space and time for a “Drupal Installfest” before the sessions start at 8:30 am each morning.
For those new to Drupal, this year's Drupal Basics will be professionally delivered by Chapter Three and Exaltation of Larks. This all-day training will previous session to create a more seamless introduction to Drupal. This introductory workshop will touch upon almost many aspects of the core Drupal framework, teach best practices for building Drupal sites and how to add, edit, and moderate content. The course includes how to create user accounts and understand Drupal's permission system. After learning how to set-up menus, and position blocks on a page, create-human readable URLS, and categorize content using Drupal's taxonomy system, the reward is a completed Drupal site, which looks and functions a lot like many sites you'll see on the web today. This will be covered by a separate fee to be on the website soon.
This year’s venue is again at the generosity of the Balboa Park Online Collaborative who have been crucial to the growth and development of our San Diego Drupal community. We thank them for a year of meeting space, an incredible venue for our camps and ongoing support of Drupal with their own projects and contributions back to Drupal.org. To show our appreciation, we will have a code sprint on Sunday to further their massive Drupal initiative.
This year’s event will cost a modest $10 for an all-day conference badge and will include gourmet, organic, fair-trade coffee and light snacks. For an extra $40 ($50 total), you can become an individual sponsor and we will provide you with an official t-shirt and recognition on the DCA website. Of course, we have our Silver, Gold and Platinum sponsors as well. There's also an honor-based no-charge ticket for students and those who truly can't afford to attend any other way.
Want to join in the fun? We need you to "badge" your website with a link, volunteer, sponsor or submit a session. The ability to submit sessions is now open. This year we will be vetting and rehearsing our sessions to boost quality. We hope to have a handful to push out for Drupalcon and then adopt the best of these to promote as Lynda.com tutorials. We already have several strong sessions proposed by Achieve, Digitaria and many other companies so don't delay.
Finally, here is the best piece of advice we can give you – REGISTER NOW. Due to venue constraints, we are capping attendance at 450. Since we are promoting four months in advance of the event, we will very likely sell out. Last year we registered almost 300 campers in just a month.
Thank you to all the volunteers on the planning group. Special thanks to Andrew Root, Susan Rust, Kathy Hayashi, Christoph Weber, BPOC, Achieve, and Digitaria for their early help and support. Although we have much more to do, the biggest hurdle is behind us. See you all in January!
Your SandCamp Planning Team
www.SandCamp.org
DrupalSanDiego