Posts by theme: community

Filmmaker John Waters began his career as an "underground success", making films that mainstream wouldn't touch because they were too controversial, raunchy, or just plain weird. After several underground successes, however, he started to get noticed outside of underground and indie circles and move into the mainstream, where he had even more commercial success.

Many of his fans derided him for the move, claiming he was "caving into the man" or betraying his underground roots by adapting his style for wider audiences. In an interview for his 1998 film Pecker, Waters made the comment (sadly I do not have the direct quote handy) that the problem with being an underground success is that you then, by definition, cannot stay underground. And yes, that means you sometimes have to change things.

Why do I bring this up? Because Drupal has long since ceased being an underground success and is now a major mainstream open source player... and it's time that the community acted like it.

Drupalcamp is coming to Chicago December 12 and 13! After attracting a sellout crowd last year, this year’s Drupalcamp has been expanded, and will be held at the Hotel Orrington in downtown Evanston, located just steps from Northwestern University and only a couple of blocks from the Davis Street CTA and Metra stations. Two dozen pre-scheduled sessions will be held on Saturday, along with BoFs, hands-on training, and other “unconference” activities on both Saturday and Sunday. The camp is being put on by the Chicago Drupal community and the Chicago Drupal Meetup Group, with generous assistance from the event's sponsors, who include Palantir.

The site for the camp was built by Palantir using the Drupalcamp L.A. 2009 codebase as a starting point. The site's Chitown theme was designed by our own Steve Fisher, and has already been released back to the community (it's just a dev release right now, but as always, patches are welcome!). The theme incorporates the Chicago Druplicon logo designed by David Hwang, one of the Field Museum's Drupal gurus.

Register now, and once your registration has been paid and confirmed, don't forget to submit a session proposal - we'll only be accepting them through November 13, at which point we'll be asking registered attendees to cast votes for their favorites before announcing the full schedule by November 25. And of course, it's not too late to get in on the sponsorship action - we've got a variety of packages at all price points, allowing you to get your name in front of several hundred Drupalers and support the community (any profits from the event will go to benefit the Drupal Association).

We're looking at this as a warm-up event for Drupalcon Chicago 2011; we might not have won the Olympics, but Drupal's the next best thing!