May 9, 2009
Drupal Media Camp Switzerland took place this week-end, less than a year after the idea of a Swiss DrupalCamp was introduced at a Drupal user group meeting in Zurich. This event was full of good presentations, exciting moments and networking opportunities, and I believe it was very successful in increasing the adoption of the Drupal CMS on the Swiss market. It was particularly interesting to have the Swiss-german Radio DRS and the news publisher Edipresse provide yet another example showing that Drupal can support large amounts of traffic and also generated some great conversation on various topics surrounding high-traffic websites.
Having followed the development of the Camp's planning and organzation, I think it's interesting to see where the resistance was one year ago and to compare it with what actually happened. The main arguments against organizing such an event were:
- There are not enough people interested in Drupal around here.
- No company cares about sponsoring Drupal.
- The effort to organize such an event is not really worth it.
Looking at how the event went, it seems that most of these points have been shown not to be problematic:
- Attendance reached over 140 people on Friday and 100 on Saturday, with people coming from as far as Finland and Serbia.
- The event had 14 sponsors ranging from individual developers and development shops to media organizations that make a heavy use of Drupal.
- Seeing how much work the organizers have put into this event, they must have realized that they eventually benefit from it. Amongst the people who were there from the beginning, Miro Dietiker, Christophe Galli and Prodosh Banerjee really got involved and stuck to it to make this DrupalCamp happen. Big thanks to them and to all the other volunteers!
Having been on a different continent for the past few months, I didn't participate in the organization of the event, but it's been great to see an idea develop and get realized with such quality. The wireless even worked all the time!