With less than three weeks to go until our second DrupalCamp in Brighton - a.k.a. BADCampUK - we desperately need more session submissions as there's only 3, with over 20 attendees signed up.
"Organise earlier!" I hear you say. Well, yes, that's the plan, but things as they are this is how it is. I created this second camp as I want to align our camp with the yearly Brighton Digital Festival (http://2012.brightondigitalfestival.co.uk/) so that it raises the profile within the digital community at large and not just the Drupalers.
Last year the community wasn't really ready for a DrupalCamp yet so I devised a "Drupal Discovery Day" where we did a "Hello Drupal!" session in the morning attended by 40 people, and a business-focused afternoon of sessions topped off with a panel discussion about the benefits of adopting Drupal. It was a really great event, and paved the way for our first BADCampUK which we held back in April 2012.
We had over 80 people turn up on the Saturday out of 120 registered - may not sound much compared to the US events, but for us it was a phenomenal turn-out!
I learned much from the last one, mostly that as we're so close to London (an hour by train), most came down for the Saturday and didn't stay for the evening party, so we're focusing on lunch instead of the evening activities which will generally be the hardcore Drupalers.
I've done a call-out to the Brighton & London groups (there's a London camp being organised for 2013 which is fab!) and I'm planning on emailing and/or calling each one of the Drupal shops/people I know in Brighton to encourage them to submit a session.
I've also been doing more work on the DrupalBAM Branding & Marketing group at http://groups.drupal.org/marketing-drupal - just creating more quick links for people so they don't have to go find stuff and can easily access the functionality they need. I need to create more of the taxonomy terms within each of the projects which cover individual areas (e.g. "Competitive Research" is a term within "Research"). I'm just going to keep working on it and talking to the people who've been working on google docs until now to get them to use the drupal.org system. Because we now have it on the system it opens it up to the rest of the community and not just those in the committee whom I've been working with for the last few months.
I'm also network pruning - I kind of accidentally grew up a big network of business contacts after redundancy back in the dotcom days when I ended up being known as "the Open Source guy" as I kept helping people find out more about free software they could use. Since then my network has been growing and is mostly Drupal-focused but many Drupal people don't use the g.d.o platform for discussions - they're over on LinkedIn or elsewhere and disengaged from the main community - now it's time to start fostering those relationships and start bringing them in to help out with things like our marketing and branding efforts. It's going to take time, but now we have a path and a little easier entry point it's becoming more attractive for them to get involved (or what is known as "contributing", but I don't like using that word, sounds like way too much effort ;).
So guess I'd better get on with it eh!