DrupalConParis2009 - community building

Hosting meetups, camps, and virtual classes: building the community that builds Drupal

Benjamin Melançon — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 00:24:11 +0000

Drupal has a fantastic tradition of involving newcomers, from all sorts of backgrounds, in the project. From IRC help and banter to mentored/sponsored projects to a vibrant local meetup scene, "the community" this helps build is a major reason people stay with Drupal and how it keeps getting more awesomer.

Speaker bio:

Copresenters to come; nominating yourself is welcome! Benjamin Melançon does Drupal development with Agaric, which builds powerful web sites for people who do things. Sharing code, ideas, and helping connect everyone and everything goes well with his personal goals of the economic justice, genuine liberty, and collective organizing for all sorts of progress.

Co presenters:

stella

ceardach

amye

Susan MacPhee

Drupal for Good meet-up

José San Martin — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 21:28:45 +0000

A meeting to discuss an share experiences on progressive, citizenish, good and socially conscious Drupal initiatives.

Across its history, Drupal has shown itself as an important ally for good initiatives - grassroots political campaigns, big big big public international organizations, efforts to preserve minority languages, government efforts, NGOs, community organizing, - well, name it.

Speaker bio:

I'm not the speaker, just the one who's calling the meeting! (anyway: José San Martin is Brazilian Drupal shop owner, linguist and a Drupal for Good'er. He will also be talking about "Drupal for minority languages and indigenous communities in Brazil")

Filling the Gap - Bringing Drupal to the Design Community

jasonreed — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 02:01:40 +0000

This session will be co-presented by myself and Mark Boulton. What will we cover?

Why (as a developer) should I care? (What's in it for me?)
Trying to underline the broader scope of the Drupal community- Drupal is used by plenty of people who don't contribute, don't follow along- how do we as a community address their needs and concerns? Not just designers, either, but designers' clients too (end users).

Why is the design community important? What value is there in addressing their needs?

Speaker bio:

I'm Jason Reed, and I'm senior designer at Acquia. I've been designing and developing web sites since 1998, and have been a part of projects for many exceptional companies during those years, including Apple, Intel, and others.

Drupal for minority languages and indigenous communities in Brazil

José San Martin — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 18:55:19 +0000

When a small community is under pressure of a larger dominant culture, what can they do? Language has always been a major element for building a society's identity and it is not different for indigenous peoples in Brazil. If a language have less space and less space in its speakers' lives, it will shrink and may become endangered. To avoid it, one must seek all available resources to strengthen minority languages and give them more room to grow.

Speaker bio:

José San Martin is a Drupal developer (since 4.6) and founder of Chuva Inc., a Brazilian Drupal shop that loves open source and tries to keep a somewhat progressive thinking. In a parallel life, he is also a linguist and researches on syntax (hey, it's real Science!). As a social/political activist wannabe, he's been helping the efforts to deliver Drupal for indigenous communities since last year and thinks this one of the many ways Drupal can change the world.

Adventures in Drupal-Flavored Community Building

istos — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 09:20:10 +0000

Creating an online community website is a weird and wonderful process that calls for both technological and sociological tools and design patterns in order to provide a structure within which your community members can interact and your community can thrive.

We will look at:

What different types of communities can exist
How different communities call for different tools
Why it doesn't always make sense to throw in every single tool and the kitchen sink and let them figure it out

Speaker bio:

Ronald Ashri runs a web development company in Sicily, Italy and has been working with Drupal for the past four years - during that time all the websites handled by the company have been turned into Drupal websites. His particular interests lie in community websites and the variety of ways in which Drupal can be used to support online communities. Before moving to Sicily, Ronald was a research fellow at the University of Southampton working on agent-based systems, semantic web technologies, and issues of trust and reputation. He has authored and co-authored several papers and books on these subjects. Ronald holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Southampton and a BSc in Computer Systems Engineering from the University of Warwick.